[ericd]

The mods here do an exceptional job, but it was also like that before there were active moderators (though it was a much smaller site). I think it's largely the culture here that keeps it civil - commenters that aren't civil get trained to do better by swiftly being sent to the bottom of the comments in an unreadable shade of gray.

[dang]

There were active moderators from day 1. The set was mostly {pg}, but few people have any idea how active he was.

[ericd]

Oh, I didn't realize he spent much time moderating. I figured most of his time on HN was spent on improving the systems like voting ring detection.