Actually, yes, I am. I firmly believe, for better or worse, that the more popular a site becomes, the more interests it has to cater to. Somebody else posted in the thread that the three options for a community to stay true to its roots is to either exclude newcomers, aggressively moderate newcomers, or succumb to newcomers.
Allowing everybody an equal share participation on the moderation capabilities panders to the latter. If everybody can moderate out, and the site continues to grow, then I think it's only a matter of time before the harder-to-understand articles are filtered out in favor of more easily digestible pieces that appeal to a broader majority.
I think the main difference between here and the notion of subredditing is that effectively, HN IS a subreddit, targeted at Hackers. I'm obviously not the say-all authority, but I suspect that splintering it further is not only unnecessary, but runs contrary to the concept of a focused community.
In fact, that there are subreddits that work so well (again in my opinion) speaks primarily to the fact that subreddits aren't very easy to find or discover.
As for the people who are just learning? I honestly don't know how to handle that. Though HN has worked really well with a diverse group of experts. There are lawyers, doctors and professionals of all sorts that are able to contribute to the areas they are knowledgeable in -- the trick is in somehow enforcing the restraint for them to not comment on things they know little about, or at least to not comment unintelligibly. The more aware of the community ideal everybody is, the more easy that becomes; but the more diluted the population grows to be, the harder that becomes to enforce.
Like I said, I don't know all the answers, and I certainly don't mean to impugn anywhere else in favor of HN - Reddit has plenty of perks, I'm sure, but it is the rare community that is able to subsist through popularity. The closest that I can think of to have lasted is kuro5hin, and they certainly had their own communal warts as well.
However, we are talking about how the scale of HN is getting to the point where people are complaining about S/N ratios and as you say:
>exclude newcomers, aggressively moderate newcomers, or succumb to newcomers.
I think this is shortsighted, elitist or both. First, you/whomever posted this has clearly left out a better option; ADAPT to newcomers/scaling.
While I agree that HN may have been like a subreddit, with a target audience, HN is growing, entrpreneurship is growing, the startup ecosystem in the valley is growing, our knowledge base is growing.
Eschewing newcomers and growth is to operate in fear of progress.
Taking the spill-over and iterating what HN is to accommodate is not to "lose its cred" so to speak...
Further, I am not advocating a straight adoption of reddit, but I do feel that HN can learn a lot from how they enable the community.
I had written a bunch of suggestions in my first reply, but deleted them, but I was suggesting some options along the lines of:
Validate SMEs in given areas and give them high-level moderation/influence.
Post a clear HN-etiquette that delineates posting format/commenting format that the stie wants.
Earn further features/user abilities through karma - such as allow SMEs/high karma users to only create HN-subs.
There are a lot of things we can do, but to cry in the corner over newcomers is never a winning solution.
I'm not suggesting that we do, obviously. However, newcomers have the disadvantage of not knowing the history, the ethics, the goals/ideals. They only know what it was like 'when they joined'. When I joined, I was corrected a few times for missteps I made. The growth rate makes that less and less feasible. It isn't that I hold a grudge to new people, they are just disadvantaged when it comes to the communal etiquette standards.