[viklove]

It's not that hard to notice, there's just no official documentation or explanation of what these mechanics are and that's the extent of how "secret" it is. I think if you search dang's comment history he mentions it a few times, and obviously if you look for anecdotes you'll find plenty of users on this platform that have been rate limited, and deprioritized on other ways to have their opinions filtered out of the conversation.

Selective moderation is also a big problem on this platform. Rules only apply to certain groups of people, basically at dang's discretion.

The biggest problem with this platform is that there is no moderation log. The mod team works in an opaque manner, making it hard to prove or disprove the claims I was making. If we could just see a list of all comments dang had deleted, and the true vote count of each comment, we could all see exactly what the mod team was doing and be confident in its fairness.

That's obviously not the case though, and HN keeps this information from us to protect their image.