The active page (along with a couple others) are shown on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists (the 'Lists' link in the footer)

The active page (along with a couple others) are shown on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists (the 'Lists' link in the footer). There's a few more odd pages like newpoll that aren't linked to in any obvious place. I don't really see any of it as secrecy, as that implies actively and intentionally hiding, to me it seems more like not going out of the way to show/tell people. The Guidelines and FAQs go into it a bit IIRC, and dang has written comments on it as well. I'd describe it more as unintuitive than secretive. It seems like the same reasoning behind keeping HN minimalistic and not webapp 2.0 bloatware. It might chase some people away but it also keeps an eternal september at bay. Also the front page is not vetted by moderators (if it was they'd be doing a terrible job as dupes and blatant linkbait are common), but there's code in place to mitigate flamewars and such. If you want to see what stories and comments are actually getting killed (by users, not the mods) you can enable showdead in your profile, which imo should be enabled by default but I can understand why it's not. Generally if you see a story drop off the front page quickly, it's getting comments a lot quicker than it's getting votes. I do think mods will occasionally remove the penalty for this on stories that triggered the flamewar protection without there being a flamewar. Additionally some domains and topics are penalized, and there seem to be filtered words that will auto kill your comment. Try leaving a comment with (Im sorry, gotta avoid it somehow) m@$tur b@t3 in it. But again that's all automated, just unintuitive.