I would guess that you don't have showdead turned on and/or haven't been to any of the rather, uh, energetic culture wars threads that the moderation team used to allow over the past few years. It's not that there aren't commenters inclined to behave badly on HN, it's that either they've learned to restrain themselves as the cost of continuing to participate in HN or have been rendered invisible by user flagging or moderators.

Yeah but there's always assholes. Anonymity or not.

What defines a community is how it deals with them and as such as steers the sentiment of the entire community. The "they learned to restrain themselves" is exactly what should happen.

And I doubt getting banned is much of a deterrent. After all one can sign up without even as much as an email address. I know many people throw away accounts daily. Imagine doing that on Facebook or X. It would really go off the rails.

Yet the community here is still very pleasant.

>[HN] is one of the most friendly online environments I know.

Um....wow! Are you and I on the same site? There's a lot of ways I'd describe HN, "friendly" isn't one of them.

Genuine meanness and cruelty is WAY more common here than friendliness and there's an overall tone of reactionism, cynicalism, and negativity for the sake of it. People here are very cocky and confident talking about things they don't know anything about.