Pretty impressive that HN has mostly maintained the level of quality it set out to, especially with 350,000 users per day. I'm always relieved that there is a place on the Internet I can go where 90% of the comments on the page aren't "me too thanks".

Moderation does a dang good job

Those numbers surprised me to, but I don't think they should have. I rarely meet anyone in software that doesn't know at least know about HN, if not actively read it. In fact, my sister's boyfriend is in tech even though she isn't. When I met him for the first time, my sister felt a little left out because we immediately got into a deep discussion about an article we read on here. We live across the country from each other, but reading hacker news is almost expected for both of us.

I would love to see how many of those are lurkers. I've been reading hacker news for almost 3 years now but made my very first comment less than a month ago (fat thumb logged out on my iPhone and couldn't remember my password so this is account #2).

I have over 8 years of daily Reddit use with 0 comments made as well. Just a personality thing.

Now I can see where the Hacker News Hug of Death comes from. That's enough people that even a subset might kill a small server. More than I thought, too.

I am sure there are many more lurkers than active participants

This is true of pretty much any Internet community, so not that surprising.

I think it's especially true here though due to HN's crowd sourced quality control. The rules are largely adhered to by the user base as well, and it's not just an agree/disagree button.

For sure, with 6,000 comments and 350,000 daily users.