Dang is going to have 65,535 karma points soon

Add “transparency” logging for all users.

From then on, whenever a user takes an action on the site (posting, commenting, voting, flagging, etc.) they are prompted to provide an explanation as to how their action contributes to the community. All actions and their transparency notes are stored in this log.

Make it so that it can be skipped, but where applicable the action is delayed, marked with a sigil, and down-weighted.

Help me understand how this would make things better.

It's Jira for forums

I chose to make this comment to say, in the nicest possible way, that I do not understand what the parent comment's author intends to accomplish with this idea. I hope I have said enough about my comment to convince everyone that making it was worthwhile, and not motivated by personal animus or sarcasm. I also hope that everyone reading it will like it enough to vote me some more karma, which I will not abuse, but simply glow a little brighter from. Thanks for reading my explanation of my comment, and I hope you agree that I helped make HN a better place.

In my perfect world, it would prompt people to reflect on their contributions before actually submitting them.

Ideally this would be a moment to think about whether the contributions meet the guidelines or otherwise move discussion forward.

Edit: to be perfectly clear, I’m asking people to justify their contributions.

I appreciate the intention but unfortunately I don't think that's realistic. It would just lead to a plethora of extremely low quality "explanations".