>there's no "power user" bullshit going on
Sometimes it's possible to notice that moderation is pretty heavy. For example, during recent "Satoshi identity discovered" debacle after brief period it was conspicuously absent from HN. I.e. I estimated that on any given day I would see one or two posts on the topic on the front page, but it wasn't the case. So my theory is that this topic was heavily moderated.
You may be correct, but I doubt it's due to moderators abusing their power. HN has an automated moderation system that is pretty arbitrary. It applies pretty heavy penalties to articles that have too many comments, or posts with certain keywords (like "nsa" and possibly "bitcoin".) Plus there is a regular spam filter that might be less than perfect, and I don't think the posts it filters are shown '[dead]'.
