Not at all. It's rather the community that makes it a reasonable discussion space. Most people here understand that this is not Reddit and that proper answers are needed when you interact with other members. Of course moderation is useful and necessary in certain cases, but it's certainly far from being the key factor here.
Enough HN members are happy to feed the trolls (even if unwittingly) and encourage more without removing them.
The community helps... but someone needs to be doing some policing to limit the effect of the bad actors or the community starts to get pissed off/wander off/degrade into pettiness.
But that was almost a decade ago. The mindset of the tech community has gotten far more political (not a bad thing, but a natural consequence of "software eating the world"), and it's really hard to imagine that HN would have turned out like it is today through self-policing alone.
Even if we assume HN were to collectively agree on taking a hard stance against anything political in nature (which still seems to be the case sometimes, given that the mods have to occasionally step in and manually de-flag and protect threads), that would've likely turned off a number of current HN users who see HN as a great place to discuss tech's greater implications and role in society.
Nowadays the mod system remains but the community has moved on and although the stories are good, there is no intellectual discussion.
A similar thing happened to OSNews. Another news aggregator I used to visit a lot.
in many discussion forums... that are not HN. There is only one HN, so you can't make comparison with other communities out there.
Downvoting, flagging works even when the mods are not around. I am pretty sure that a comment flagged too many times is greyed out and almost invisible (and that happens without mods).
Again, if we are to believe there are only 2 full time moderators on HN for the amount of comments going every single minute, it's virtually impossible to rely on mods alone for proper discussions: simple maths.
I run a group of 20,000+ people, and if I didn't set the tone on what the group is about, regularly, the value of it would drop to nothing.
I love my community. But I absolutely recognize the role I play in keeping it a nice place to visit.
It's easy when a community is small. The more prominent the community gets, the more it tempts people who enjoy stirring things up.
In the end I'm not sure if any moderation scheme can prevent that, to be honest. There will always be people who consider it a challenge to see what they can get away with, either by trying to stay just under the moderators' radar or by returning every time they're banned. Provocation makes people defensive, and then their own replies turn harsh, contributing to a negative perception of the community.
I do hope that this community avoids it as long as possible. I've discovered it only recently and am enjoying it. But past experience suggests that it, too, will one day degrade.
Unless you're presenting yourself and your own comment history as an example of the problem... in which case, the opportunity is always there to try a bit harder.
It isn't, because unless you've been lurking for years or have an alt account, you're just being an elitist poser. People have been complaining about HN "turning into Reddit" for so long that it used to be listed in the guidelines as a common, semi-noob delusion.
>Why do so many of your comments in your post history denigrate women and minorities?
Point them out to me, please. I'm usually defending women and minorities here, and often getting downvoted for the effort.