[davidw]

> I haven't seen any evidence that people here are somehow more sophisticated or something than people on reddit.

Many of us also have reddit accounts. What's really different is the culture:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People want this to be a civil, interesting, and mostly serious site about hacking and startups.

[andrewljohnson]

These guidelines have little to do with it, though the editors probably do. The main thing that distinguishes Reddit, Digg, and HN is pure volume.

If HN had the same traffic Digg did, you better believe that the average intelligence would go down, and you'd need a heck of a lot more editors to keep the content on target.

[davidw]

Well, the guidelines sum up some of the culture, and you're right that it wouldn't be possible to transmit that if too many people showed up at once. However, it is a real thing. There aren't many editors here, and the idea is to keep the volume down by only posting things that interest a limited segment of the population.