There are lots of specific things one could mention - moderation, text focus, down voting, etc, but I think unfortunately the big differentiator is that (as far as I know) HN doesn't make money.

Rather, the way HN makes money (helping YC founders advertise and hire) are aligned with the interests of the community.

Downvoting, which on the surface seems less civil, leads to more civil discussions. Just my opinion of course...

Happy Holidays! I second the gratitude for all the work by dang and the rest of the HN team. Well done and thank you!

I was almost tempted to downvote this. But I disagree with you, so I won't.

I think the fact that the primary topics here are niche and therefore self selecting plays a big role - vs. open platforms (Reddit) that are not only much larger but low effort discovery wise. For me car forums still have that sense of community that is here as well, albeit a completely different topic and a vestige of the 00s design-wise.

On HN there's the process of shadowbanning entire users accounts.

By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.

Since I was a teenager, in the vBulletin v3+ forums era, I've wanted to develop an access control / rate limiting system where moderators would be responsible for categorizing posts depending on the contents of the submitted posts and the user who created them.

When an account has an established history, we nearly always tell them we're banning them and why:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

We only use shadowbanning when an account is new and shows signs of spamming, trolling, or serial abuse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.

That's why we added the vouching feature many years ago: so users can identify and restore the valuable comments made by banned accounts. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.

There’s no shortage of constructive/valuable content by people who don’t also regularly spam or troll, they likely stick around _because_ the low-value commenters get shadowbanned.

> By losing the noisy/spamming/trolling posters entirely, we might also lose their constructive/valuable content too.

That's why showdead is great! (The checkbox in your profile to unhide flagged and other 'killed' posts.) Not clear on if it unhides IP banned posters though. And I would like to try a forum that let you toggle it by category (IIUC Slashdot has post categories, though it peaked before my time and I don't know if they're used for that).

I regularly "report" behaving shadowbanned people. If someone has gone a while only saying productive things, the system unbans them.

On the other hand, I'm surprised how profilic certain people are. They get absolutely no feedback, but will go around trolling people several times a day.

We have to unban accounts manually, though users of course can still vouch for their comments in the meantime, which is basically a per-post unban mechanism.

If anyone notices an account that is banned that shouldn't be banned, they're welcome to let us know at [email protected]. We don't want anyone to be banned if they've fixed whatever the original issue was and are abiding by the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

I think the biggest thing is size. HN is "big" but also the size of a large subreddit in terms of users.

All quality internet communities I've ever seen start with strong moderation. Everything else is secondary.