[MrVandemar]

Well, I think there's a higher barrier to participation than, say, reddit, and clear rules discouraging flippant or other low-value contributions, so you're shaving off the bottom 10-20% (guestimate) of worthless posts with that alone. Meaning the average is higher.

And then I speculate there is a high percentage of people here of at least minnium tertiary education (or equivalent), and furthermore people who are engaged and relentlessly self-educate. That's a literate bunch of people with strong skills in generating and critiquing ideas and philosophies in an arena where there is more "signal" and less "noise".

It'd be interesting to see the demographic breakdown of HN actually.

[sshine]

There is a critical mass effect: If the average reader of my comment is smart, I don’t get away with ventilating my anger; it’ll just get pointed out and downvoted. So I might as well behave.

And there is a no-duplicate culture: If I have a point that I want to make, and someone always expressed it in a comment, I just upvote.

20% of my comments are discarded with the interrupt handler in my brain going “Wait, is someone wrong on the internet?” Hitting Ctrl+W just discards the message. It’s a feature for letting go.