[Yhippa]

It's the quality of the users that makes this work. If people care and downvote things that aren't germane to the discussion at hand that helps a lot with pruning. Otherwise low-quality content hangs around.

Also I see some very high quality and insightful comments on this site that I don't see elsewhere. I think twice about posting things that don't add to the discussion.

The only other place I saw high quality discussion like this was Slashdot with their excellent moderation system. Unfortunately the people who hung around there in the mid 2000's turned me off. Generally open source zealots hung out there and you didn't see many dissenting opinions.

Dissenting opinions are my favorite thing that help me deal with my personal biases and HN encourages it.

I think the minute average users like me stop caring about the site then the quality will go down.