A developer named vitoplantamura created a public GitHub repository to monitor stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page in real time. Using the HN API, the service compares top stories each minute to log disappearances. The project aims to provide transparency into moderation, a process users rarely see directly.

The motivation came from personal experience. A friend's stories about OnnxStream were either retitled or removed shortly after hitting the front page, effectively killing their visibility. After emailing moderator @dang, the developer was told user flags—potentially for LLM-related fatigue—could be the cause, prompting the creation of this tracking tool.

The tracker assumes a story can't drop from the top 30 to beyond 90 in one minute without removal, and it excludes stories in the second-chance pool. While duplicates are a valid removal reason, the system can't automatically detect them. The project highlights the opaque nature of HN's front-page curation and its impact on content discovery.