[zblevins]

That’s a rather reductionist and slightly disparaging point of view. Moderation has its place I never said it didn’t, but do you really think that moderation is the only thing keeping this place from being 4chan? I think you have one deeply entrenched opinion and are ignoring that these are very different platforms.

[sanderjd]

HN is heavily moderated through a number of mechanisms: explicit community guidelines, community moderation (through voting), and active automated and manual moderation.

I think all of this working in conjunction is why it has remained a pretty great community for almost two decades. And I think that's a really impressive feat. I don't think it was accomplished via "a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base".

Indeed, I think HN has gotten better over time, even somewhat so in absolute terms, but very starkly relative to the deterioration of everything else. For example, back in the day, when twitter was first getting big in tech, a lot of people felt that it was a healthier place to discuss those topics than HN. I was never completely convinced of that, and have always been more active here than on twitter, but it was at least a very reasonable thing to think for awhile, IMO. But now I think it would be pretty crazy to think that twitter is healthier than HN. Similarly with similar communities on reddit.

I dunno, maybe there are some healthier spaces on mastodon or blue sky or threads or something now, but at least to me, HN has maintained a fairly stable fairly decent level of discourse for a very long time, and I don't think it is a result of luck or magic, but rather of hard and tireless work moderating the community.

[zblevins]

Yea, I’ve become more aware of this since yesterday. I also think I should have provided way more context to what I was saying. I believe I came off as being against moderation but I’m not, I do think there is something unique about the user base just from the quality of content I see compared to other spaces, but I digress. I appreciate your thoughts and it gave me something to think about.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, and I probably should have figured out a more tactful way to make the point I was making. I wanted it to be more like a "you're one of today's lucky 10,000!"[0] to point out that I think you've been swimming in water without knowing it[1], but I think it ended up just being condescending.

0: https://xkcd.com/1053/

1: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ (kind of blog spam, but this is the only place I found that has the full transcript, the audio, and other useful links)

[zblevins]

I thought that’s what the reference was. I think it all worked out in the end.