My sense is that such a moderation log would lead to an order-of-magnitude explosion of litigious meta discussion, which is last thing we we need or want.

If that's right, then it's worse than that, because then metaness would consume a lot more resources than it already does, starving the rest of the site of other things we need to work on. That would be a vicious feedback loop; I'd rather look for virtuous ones.

HN moderation is far more transparent than it was before Dan took over (when 'pg moderated, things like subjective shadow bans really were a norm), and more transparent than it was when he started --- I hesitate to explain how, for fear of fulfilling Dan's prophecy, but one simple, not-fraught example would be the expansion of the guidelines.

I perceive no corresponding change in the amount of meta threads about mis-moderation; noodling debates based on random accusations are still evergreen here.

If I were involved in moderating HN (thank Christ I'm not), I'd conclude that substantive process-level changes aimed at quelling these kinds of debates probably aren't a productive goal.

HN is quite a lot larger than anything I've personally moderated. There are scaling issues involved.