It's a shame that in closing the door to the pernicious "meta nitpicking", whatever that is, the possibility for constructive analysis of how HN's algorithms shape and mould the behaviour of its dedicated community has also been removed.
Everything is tradeoffs. Time spent educating outsiders who may or may not be useful can be spent doing other things, like work that moves the ball forward.
Someone once did an analysis on HN posts and their ranking relative to the time they were posted and votes. And they found posts with certain keywords were heavily penalized and sort of soft banned from the site. IIRC it included stuff like "NSA" and "HN" and posts from certain sites like reddit and youtube (but I could be remembering.)
Having the full list of banned keywords, or even acknowledging there is a list, could cause drama. And it's easily evaded if people know about it, like when reddit banned "Tesla" posts got through by misspelling it "Telsa".
There's also other stuff like a controversy filter, that detects articles with more comments than votes and penalizes them. I try to avoid commenting in articles that are getting close to the limit to avoid triggering it.
Security by obscurity is precisely defined as security that relies on the algorithm/implementation itself being private to be able to function. Key material being private does not qualify for this. The alternative is that security through obscurity becomes such an all-encompassing term as to become meaningless
It would be easier if they had a injectable function to handle moderation / anti gaming etc. Release the code publicly with a stub function, then run the real one in prod.
Hacker News deviates from the original Arc code, though. Unfortunately, because YCombinator wants to protect their secret sauce, they're not likely to release anything interesting.
It's not like the tech behind Hacker News is what gives it its value. It's because it's associated with Y Combinator. Not sure why they aren't willing to release it.
Because, for some stupid reason, having your startup or blog post appear on the Hacker News frontpage is a Really Big Deal, and the staff don't want anyone peeking at their algorithms to find ways to game the system. Which means the really interesting problems they have to solve like voting ring detection, spam detection, etc. are the ones they don't want anyone to see their solutions to.
Also (personal theory of mine) maybe the code doesn't have the degree of abstraction or separation of concerns necessary to allow open sourcing without also exposing YC business concerns or parts they want to keep secret.
The closest thing to a source repo is this from many years ago: https://github.com/wting/hackernews