Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand the theory—surely publishing more data would reassure everyone and help settle things—but this is based on an assumption which in my experience is false: that these dynamics are rational. I don't think that's how they work at all, so I don't have faith that earnestly publishing a moderation log would improve things. On the contrary, I find it easier to imagine it making things worse. Why? Because there w…
Reading through the linked comment (and it's linked algolia feed) I'll add that public mod actions are less aimed at the making interactions with small and loud subset who will never engage rationally themselves any better and more aimed at helping the rest of the community easily ignore said subset. If the typical rational user will have seen many posts about YC critical news not related to celebrity gossip they wil…
I agree with you that the important thing is not to satisfy the litigious sort of internet user—the ones who take every explanation as fodder for fresh objections. It would be nice, of course, if they would take yes for an answer! and on rare occasions I've managed to pull it off, but it's hard, and ultimately too high a bar.
The important thing to satisfy the "rest of the community", as you put it. But the rest of the community seems to me already satisfied. Adding a new system like a moderation log wouldn't add to their satisfaction and might even diminish it.
I don't mean this in a complacent way! It has not always been the case that the "rest of the community" was more or less satisfied, and it took years to figure out how to get there. But we did figure it out (more or less), and the approach has been stable for a long time now. It boils down to this: we answer questions when people ask them, take their concerns seriously, and acknowledge and correct mistakes when we screw up. Because we do so much of this (I spend the bulk of my time doing it, many days), regular users eventually see repeated cases of it, and this lets them know that if they ever have a concern, a question, or just a curiosity, they can get an answer too.
This turned out to be by far the biggest factor in getting the HN system (community + mods + software) to be more self-regulating. What was lacking before that (mainly because pg didn't have time) was responsive, interactive moderation. It's important to understand that this is not a technical solution (like a moderation log). What makes things work better is human interaction, there's no substitute for that, and we're already doing quite a lot of it.