We've been doing experiments for many years with the intention of extending moderation abilities to broader segments of the community. Some of these experiments end up getting dropped, while others end up as official features on the site.

For example, it used to be that only moderators could unkill a [dead] post and restore it to full visibility. Then we started an experiment in letting non-moderators do that, and this turned into the 'vouch' feature which allows most HN users above a certain karma threshold to have a say in which posts get unkilled. That was the biggest success to date - it has made a big difference both in thread quality (many interesting comments become visible) and community happiness (there's less resentment about posts being dead than there used to be).

That was a great outcome, and we're always thinking about more possibilities for such things. The current experiment is very much in the same spirit. Personally I would love to find ways to extend these things to everyone (most likely above a certain karma threshold) but it's not often obvious how to do that.

Another example is the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which gives submissions a random placement on HN's front page.