Have you actually ever browsed the secret “active” page where you can see what people are actually voting for without the mods putting their thumbs on the scale? It’s constantly filled with dead posts because someone said something that was vaguely unflattering towards Israel, venture capital, capitalism in general, the United States or Apple. Literally happens dozens of times every single day.
I had never really looked at the /lists page, which one is the one that you were thinking is secret actives page, best or probably active?
It's hardly secret—it's on the /lists page which is referenced in the footer of every page on HN.
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
(copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366656)