Making changes that reduce the need for moderation are even better.
If you were to ask yourself: how much more could we be doing with a big community of people who are mostly highly educated and technical?
Is forums in the form we've had them since 1990 the optimal medium for a community?
I don't think anyone would say yes and yet I don't see any effort on behalf of the people who run this place to experiment and do anything remotely interesting.
The moderators on here do an admirable job but it ultimately feels to me like they're cops who are being asked to arrest people for smoking a joint. The solution to better policing is less policing, more community via better laws, the solution to better moderation is less moderation, more community, via better use of technology.
For a place that talks about new, this place feels exactly like what I had 20+ years ago elsewhere.
That should generate a few million.
Then hire somebody with a proven track record to oversee proposals for additions to existing HackerNews.
In other words, get money, then crowdsource ideas, then pay people to implement ideas with most votes, then provide beta tests, then provide HackerNews add-ons for a small fee that would cover the expenses. Run it as a non-profit.
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Has this been tried before? Is this the first time you hear of such a proposal?
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I'll throw in two more ideas - make any action taken by a moderator public, with blanked out content that is flagrantly illegal (links to child pornography)
Make it possible to dispute any moderator action for a fee, in other words move from a dictatorship to a democracy.
HackerNews need not be a dictatorship where what moderators think is good, is what's going to be enforced upon the rest.
There can be thousands of HackerNews that are filtered, sorted and moderated differently, based on people's preferences. This would be trivially made possible by asking people who'd be interested in such a service, to pay a small monthly fee.
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Trivial change - please make it possible to block specific users based on name/how long they've been registered on site for X-number of days. For example if I see someone routinely making comments I am not interested in, who does it benefit for me to continue reading their input? It only causes tension, it's like having to live with people you are fundamentally opposed to with no recourse other than leaving (no longer reading the comments section)
I predict this feature alone would decrease tensions among regular readers significantly, making your job easier.