Hm, it certainly looks a lot like "improve the quality of the threads" == suppress industry critique.
Most people who see a moderation decision they dislike leap straight to the idea that the moderators secretly hold $VIEW, ignoring (or not noticing) all the moderation decisions going the opposite way. In reality, we just don't care— I don't have words to describe how profoundly we don't care about commenter opinions. All that was sandblasted out of my brain years ago. The weariness that arises at the thought of caring about commenter opinions is enough to make me want to lie on the floor for a week.
The only thing I care about is trying to prevent this place from plunging to the bottom of the internet barrel, and that only because it's my job. That's the true answer, by the way, to all the accusations of $BIAS that people fire from all directions every day: existential weariness has destroyed the ability to care. It turns out that's a decent proxy for neutrality. Not perfect, of course, but enough as a first pass filter.
If you were being consistent about this, by the way, you'd be censoring the banal security and bug sanctimony that dominates every thread on that topic. A buffer overrun? Good heavens! An unsalted pw hash? Fetch my inhaler!
I'm sure you're right that there are tropes of reaction in particular areas that deserve to get moderated by the same principles (of avoiding repetition etc.) and I don't doubt that you see some of them more clearly than I do. If you want to help with that, you could let us know when you see them, particularly when they're sitting at the top of a thread, choking out more interesting discussion. Downweighting those is probably the single biggest thing we can do to help discussion quality.
I wouldn't use the word "negative" - that covers way too many things. We're not trying to exclude negativity. We're trying to prevent certain common forms of it from dominating. I don't think it's so hard to understand why—this place would cease to be interesting if they did dominate. Thoughtful critique is always welcome, and we don't label that "predictable" because it isn't.
Re "industry cheerleading in this community is wildly untethered" - such perceptions are conditioned by the passions of the perceiver. If you had opposite passions, you'd have opposite perceptions. The data set has more than enough data points to satisfy all of these. That is by far the most consistent phenomenon I've observed on HN; nothing else comes close.
Reading your words "The weariness that arises at the thought of caring about commenter opinions" got me thinking about how the unique experience (even if perhaps not specially positive) that a moderator has to go through can influence his view of the world. I hope this equilibrium that you seem to have reached makes you happy, I can imagine how moderating can be an ungrateful job.
This is just a commenter opinion, though, so feel free to not care about it :-)
I'm fine and didn't mean the comment to sound complainy. The reason I put it that way is that the alternative (going on about how little I care what people post) would have sounded like a putdown, which would be worse.
It's just hard to communicate this phenomenon—the desensitizing effect of sheer quantity on the brain—in a way that captures what it feels like. Having the inside of one's brain sandblasted is the closest I've gotten so far. Imagine that your fingertips were sandblasted for years - they'd get pretty desensitized. Well, that's the reaction I have to commenter opinions.
Note: I'm not saying that makes me/us unbiased; bias has many forms, and "I am not biased" would be a dumb thing to say in any case, since it is often unconscious. I am, though, saying that commenters who rush to "you just disagree with my opinions!" as an explanation for moderator action do not know what they're talking about—not in the putdown sense, but quite literally.