[huwshimi]

One of the great things about HN is how organic it is in nature. HN is loosely about startups and hacking, but really it's about what people in the startup/hacking world find interesting.

HN is self moderating (or rather community moderated). If people don't like certain posts they won't vote for them. If HN starts banning websites because some people don't like them then it takes the power away from the community and then you are on a slippery slope of moderated content and a world of approval conflicts and power struggles.

You or I might not agree with every post on HN but we have the power to not vote, or if you've contributed enough to downvote.

Of course there are always exceptions. Spam and illegal content are examples of this. But then we have the ability to flag those posts.

A moderated HN is one I would not use.

[Terretta]

I see this argument emerge on every "community" site after it crosses a threshold, and consider it disingenuous.

If a small self moderating community of stamp collectors posted a few articles of interest to letter writers, word spread, and letter writers joined the community at a ratio of 10:1 till only letter writing articles hit the front page, the only thing this argument would prove is that the one making it is probably a letter writer.

You're right though, if stamp collectors don't like the letter writing articles, they don't have to vote for them. Doesn't matter much--their stamp collecting community is "organic" and "community moderated".

[3pt14159]

I very much agree with you, but the threshold to downvote must be pretty damn high if I haven't reached it. That needs to be lowered. If you have greater than 2k in karma and an average karma score greater than two you belong here. Tech Crunch has some great articles but they also pump out first-to-rumor ones at an alarming pace. If more of us could downvote it wouldn't be a problem.

[jacoblyles]

>" If people don't like certain posts they won't vote for them."

That's an excellent recipe for the Lowest Common Denominator. Welcome to the internet, where it is September all the time.

[petercooper]

This isn't a mass market site. The lowest common denominator on Hacker News should be orders of magnitude above the mean. If you think a cabal of top users should curate the content, that's cool, but that's a different idea to be discussed.

[tptacek]

HN is already moderated (subtly), and there are indeed sites that cannot be linked to from here.