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I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as

I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. I think on HN, editor transparency is less important than story Quality. Reddit and Digg were built explicitly around some democratic idea of deciding what stories should be displayed on the front page. While both have their problems living up to this, it is their stated objective. Hacker News has a different objective. It's goal is to be interesting to Hackers. I really could care less about democracy and I think others would agree. Submissions and voting are just a means to the "hacker interesting" end.

potatolicious 18y ago
Absolutely agreed - and this goes for the voting system as well. I don't necessarily care about up-modding a submission or comment; I do so to try and help out and keep discussions clean and at least somewhat intelligent. If there was some intelligent way to filter submissions or comments without user input, then I wouldn't mourn the loss of "democracy" in the system at all. Oh, and from the post - snarky comments and memes are definitely becoming a problem on HN. They add nothing to a discussion, are not insightful in any way, and do not express anything except the author's ability to regurgitate old jokes. They need to stop.