Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

Summary

UPDATE (February 4, 2024): This is the discussion about this project on HN: here. Please specifically read @dang's comment regarding the core assumption of this project: here. On a personal note, the number of Stories removed yesterday (Saturday, February 3, 2024) was the lowest ever recorded by the service. This includes 2 duplicate Stories. As a side note, in the list always check whether a Story is a duplicate or not: this is a very reasonable reason for removal and unfortunately I have no way of automatically determining it in the service! Introduction The purpose of this project is to try to understand the type and scale of the moderation of the Hacker News Front Page. NOTE: I love Hacker News. I try to read it every day. In the case of OnnxStream (here for example), 95% of the comments were helpful and intelligent. I also understand that moderating a site with huge traffic and where users are basically anonymous must be a very difficult task. Returning to the purpose of this project, from what I have been able to see, the "public" (i.e. observable from the outside) moderation of the Front Page consists of two main tools: modification of the title of a Story (voluntarily or involuntarily influencing its growth in terms of rank) or directly its removal. Regarding the first type of moderation, an excellent site is already available that tracks changes to Story titles. Here instead I will focus on the second type. For the reasons explained in the "Why?" section below, I have developed a small application that logs all the Stories that are removed from the Front Page, for personal use. I later discovered that there is no tool/website that provides this type of information and I decided to make it public here. It was a difficult decision but my rationale is: is it better to have more transparency or less transparency? If you know of a tool/website similar to this, please let me know: I will archive this repo or set it to private. A possible very positive outcome for...