[ethbr1]

At scale, the long term community civility balance point is likely dominated by the average user's willingness to change their behavior as a result of peer feedback.

The HN userbase, feedback tools, karma-level-locked tools, and new users' personalities seem to create decent outcomes.

Which is to say, if someone acts like an asshat, folks let them know (either through downvotes, flags, or replies), and they modify their behavior to be closer to the community norm.

That said, I'm aware I don't see a lot of the most egregious stuff the Good Ship Dang torpedoes. Or what I expect are non-zero repeat trolls.

And honestly, the fact is that outside of very nerdy street cred, there's little incentive to actively manage discourse for commercial purposes on HN.*

* Outside of, you know, cloudflare tailscale rust (any other crawler alarms I can trip)