Funny you mention that. When I left Digg, I started participating in Reddit because it was far more civil at the time. Thinking about interactions in the last several years across several sub-reddits, it's long suffered from the same problems that wrecked Digg and as a result I've not participated in that community in quite some time.

Hacker News has been pretty rigid with its community standards and though there's (legitimate) complaints about the rigidity, the trade-off encoutered from a "downvote because I disagree" vs "downvote because comment is hostile" is well within my tolerances here.

> the site approaches a point where about 90% of everything is crap.

90% of human interactions are crap ;) Pre-Internet people lived in isolated bubbles and the mess we have now is just a demonstration what happens when too many people from one bubble start interacting with another.