Good systems are designed to work by taking into account human weaknesses. The current HN system doesn't do this.
What about the experience of using this site would be improved by that transparency? Compare those pros to the known cons and make a case.
Also, we are talking about spam list here. What would basic tenets of "intellectualism" and "curiosity" have to do with spam?
1) It should go without saying that there is nothing that prevents anybody from falsely labeling a group they don't like as "spam" even if they were not actually spamming.
2) Even if "spam" from a particular organization exists, it doesn't necessarily imply that they were the ones doing the spamming. Even in the pre-AI era it would be pretty trivial for even 1 dedicated person with too much time on their hands to try and create a bunch of fake accounts on a site and spam a particular domain in order to try and get it blocked.
But forget hot-button politics for a second and lets talk about commerce. Big money makes people do dumb things. YCombinator as we all know dabbles in a lot of big businesses. How do we know that somebody here is not putting their thumb on the scale of discourse and harming their competitors? Transparency here would be great to more fully trust that the businesses that do or don't get attention here aren't getting it through bad practices.
- I'd know what not to post and not waste my time using that source if I want to share content here.
- If it's breaking news I can find an alternative source, and if it was removed than I can argue I used an alternative source because the primary source is banned.
- If a major site is banned, peer review can at least start a dialouge to understand why that site is banned. It may not result in a change but a site that seeks to "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" should also be willing to indulge in the curiosity of how the site is run.
If we stopped doing things in fear of bad actors, the internet would have long shut down.
This argument doesn't make sense in this context. Publicly providing which domains are blocked wouldn't give a bad actor any useful information that they can't already figure out by trying to submit their links.
The area where this kind of argument makes a little sense is in terms of complicated algorithms. For instance, there's an argument for not disclosing the exact formula that Google uses to rank sites because everybody will try and game that specific system and then the algorithm because less useful.
But simply knowing which sites are blocked doesn't reveal any info that bad actors don't know, and serves the public interest by allowing people to know if censorship or moderation mistakes are happening.
I'm not personally concerned about dang, but if you want a social media platform that has its own judiciary you could try Facebook or Threads.