[SoftTalker]

I'm a bit confused, you say that "HN is aggressively moderated" and in the next paragraph seem to imply that they don't do enough?

If anyone wants to get a taste what an unmoderated HN would look like, check out /new and see how much garbage is submitted.

[nospice]

I'm saying it's aggressively moderated in some respects (off-topic content, politics, etc), but it's not moderated to root out a certain breed of snarky, I'm-smarter-than-you negativity. Many other forums police that second part and are doing just fine. This includes forums dedicated to technical hobbies.

In fact, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics are pretty uniquely toxic and we keep rationalizing it.

I remember working on a technical blog post for my company, trying to anticipate many of the possible HN rebukes and proactively address them as much as we could. And I remember having a conversation with a PR person who was genuinely taken aback by the hostility we've come to expect in our industry.