[gucci-on-fleek]

Part of the magic of HN is that it's open to everyone, and everyone is treated equally. I'm not aware of anywhere else on the internet where a farmer from a poor country, a college student, and a CEO of a billion-dollar company can have a meaningful conversation, and I think that it would be a real shame to lose that.

I agree that the bot accounts are annoying and getting worse, but I don't think that making it more difficult to create an account is a good solution here.

[MostlyFragile]

I don’t think ‘difficulty getting an account’ == ‘mutual respect’. I think you can make the hoops tougher without sacrificing the culture. Though I’m not sure how best that would happen.

[joshribakoff]

No the magic was the community’s ability to weed out garbage so we can have meaningful conversations. Garbage is garbage no matter who wrote it.

[randyrand]

definitely. signal to noise on HN has always been incredibly higher than most other platforms.

[Worf]

Given how most forums, news forums where I live for example, are full of absolutely low-effort insults, troll posts, obvious propaganda or just well-intentioned idiots, I can't imagine the trash the mods here must encounter all the time. HN is very popular so it likely attracts a lot more shitposts than we see with showdead.

Yet, it's possible to create a new account and get un-shadow-banned after a few hours. Dunno if this speaks volumes about how great HN's mods are or if it just means that other forums a really lacking in moderation for one reason or another (like "we have shitposts but it drives up engagement").

The trouble is that HN is centralized, like most forums. So what if it stops working the way it does now? There are likely many forums like HN with good algorithms and mods, but we won't all move to the same one, we'll scatter around. There isn't even a competing HN; lobsters is for narrower subjects, reddit is trash, what else is there?

[tempodox]

“Was” is the operative word here. Us humans have no chance in hell against the deluge of generated slop.

[bttfuchsia]

I love seeing HNers ignore Reddit like there’s something special about HN. It’s an in group and out group like everywhere else folks. We’ve gone through this before with Digg as well just at a larger scale.

[gucci-on-fleek]

HN is different from other platforms in two key ways: the moderators here are paid and work full-time on the site, and there's only a single community here, without any subforums or similar. I can't think of any other platforms with both of these in common.

HN is also different from Reddit/Digg because it only allows text and links, but this is the same as Usenet and most old-school forums. And then there are some intangible cultural differences, but every platform thinks that they're special, so there's nothing really unique here.