[baranul]

This is basically admitting to gross manipulation and even censorship by "we're optimizing for", "we try to elevate", and "we try to demote things", which looks to be based on personal or corporate biases and tastes.

Hacker News can only be "figured out", relative to what looks like the biases and financial interests of ownership and its staff, where they do the "pushing" (elevating) and "demoting". This "state of curiosity" being referred to, appears to include wanting readers to blindly accept what is fed to them, and ignore or not question strange inconsistencies.

Newcomers and outsiders would usually be expecting transparency, honesty, and impartiality. Their confusion, can be when they notice the difference in moderation based on adhering to a clear and obvious standard versus the hidden, strange, inexplicable, or unequal treatment.

[dang]

HN has always been a curated site [1]. That's all that "we try to elevate X and demote Y" means. The frontpage is produced by a combination of community, software, and moderation [2]. All three are necessary - without any one of these, the site would be a completely different place.

Despite how dark and sinister you've made everything sound, you've mostly just rephrased what I wrote, with a lot of pejoratives. In that sense, you're right—there isn't much disagreement here. You just think we're wrong and bad to run HN the way we do, and that's fine.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...