Just guessed another two undocumented endpoints "deadcomments" and "deadstories", these take you to a special admin login page if you're logged out, or say "Unknown." if logged in:
Thank you dang, I very much appreciate you taking the time to explain.
I was going to suggest maybe the public API could have a "showdead" flag too but I guess that too easily enables the problem you're trying to prevent? As in an enterprising app developer could turn the "showdead" tap to "yes" with every request and then the waste gushes out once more.