In any group of people where the cost of joining is minimal and the freedom reins are loose, you will see behavioural changes mutate in ways resembling Golding's "Lord of the Flies". The big problem with HN is the founder assumption that we (users) will be a) civil b) willing, positive contributors and c) thoughtful. Maintaining this requires some means of natural selection. At first it was probably a combination of being curious, an early adopter and nerd-like. Some (quick & possibly stupid) ideas:
- intellectual paywall: add a penalty of a kind that selects readers/contributors
- classifier: run a classifier that categorises users by type and apply rules (behaviour modifier)
- change focus of HN to News with sub hacker focus (radical focus change)
- add a real minimal paywall sending $ to something like EFF or other hacker friendly charity (penalise by currency - bad)
- stop HN altogether (deny)
- wipe the slate clean & build a new HN like community but with http://perlmonk.org like progression of privs by tasks (enforced discipline) at start of user creation.