Plus scale is a huge factor. Automated moderation can have its problems. Human moderation is expensive and hard to keep consistent if there are large teams of individuals that can't coordinate on everything. HN's size and its lack of desire for profit allow for a very small human moderation team that leads to consistency because it is always the same people making the decisions.
Free Speech does mean what you describe it not as. But there is no legal body to punish you for violating the principle. It is similar to 'primum non nocere', translated roughly to 'do no harm', extremely common in medicine and something you may see alongside the 'Hippocratic Oath'. You can be in violation of that principle or the oath at any time, some people even get fired for violating either as a pretext to malpractice. Some even argue that it is quite impossible to abide by this principle, and yet, it is something many people take on as responsibility everyday all across the globe.
I won't argue about websites and their rules, they have their own set of principles and violate plenty of others, sometimes they even violate their own principles. But Free Speech is not just the law and interactions one may have with their government.
The twitter retweet constantly amplifies and the tweets are centered around an account vs a post.
Reddit should behave similarly but I think subreddit topics stick longer.
Of course, that also soft-forces everyone to move on. Once a thread is a day or two old, you can still reply, but the person you've replied to will probably not read it.
This drastically increases time between messages on a topic, lets people cool off, and lets a topic naturally die down.
This may be a lot easier in places where there's an explicit point to discussion beyond the discussion itself - StackOverflow is another non-Reddit example. It's easier to tell people their behavior is unconstructive when it's clearly not contributing to the goal. HN's thing may just be to declare a particular type of conversation to be the goal.
It's controversial, but if the average IQ was 120 rather than 100, I doubt you'd have 1/10th as many issues on massively popular social media; most of the moderation issues would go away.
No pictures and no avatars.
I wonder how much bad behavior is weeded out by the interface itself ?
A lot, I suspect …
This is essentially moderation rule #0. it is unwritten, enforced before violation can occur, and generates zero complaints because it filters complainers out of the user pool from the start.
If you've just arrived on the site, have been given a random name and someone says you're wrong, what do you care? You're not attached to that account at all, it's not "you", it's just a random account on a random website.
I thought that was an interesting point on 4chan (and probably other sites before them), that your identity was set per thread (iirc they only later introduced the ability to have permanent accounts). That removes the possibility of you becoming attached to the random name.
Once you’re confident that you can’t be wrong, you’re not going to care about the topic anymore. There is good reason why we don’t sit around talking about how 1+1=2 all day.