Very good comment. Most sites have a karma/points system which is not robust against dilution of intelligent comments. E.g., if the Digg-crowd started infiltrating Hacker News, then I doubt the karma system would be able to stop this.

I think HN has much more active curation (moderation) than Reddit has ever had.

Based upon the fact that hn uses the same system for comments as reddit (only up down voting) and we know how well that worked out there really is no question that once the number of users goes up hn will resemble reddit of today, but the owners wont care because they will have a ton of users and we wont care because we will be somewhere else.

concerns about hn quality going down have been here from day one. it has not degraded substantially in the over two years i've been here, and i don't think it will for awhile.

reddit's goal was to get a lot of users. it's being run as a business. hn's goal is to foster high-quality links and conversation. pg doesn't care how many users the site has, and he's not trying to monetize it.

it's not the karma and voting systems that are being used to maintain quality here. it's the editors. they are serious as a heart attack about curbing bad behavior. certainly not something you can say about reddit.

I also agree with this notion. Also notice the absence of spam here... In addition to human editing by the admins, active users on HN here really care about the quality on the site.

It's as if sites like Digg, Reddit, & Slashdot have set some sort of a precedent, and people now have a better sense of what to avoid, moderate, etc.