There appears to be at least one news web site, with 100MM+ monthly visits, that could not appear in the HN submissions. It's very clearly not a spam site. Obviously I don't know that, but it appears that it may be on the spam list. How would we know if this serves community well?
You can just say "Fox News", no need to be less than transparent about it. As far as why that site is considered to be contrary to the basic tenets of "intellectualism" and "curiosity"... well...
I think Breitbart might be what is referenced here. And this may or may not be the best decision for the quality of HN, but I think it would (and should) raise an eyebrow and bring up concerns about bias if there's a pattern about which media outlets get 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.
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.
