[throwawayacc4]

>HN is much more heavily moderated than those websites.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Reddit is orders of magnitude more heavily moderated than HN. Your average run of the mill subreddit has more moderators than the entirety of HN.

>Which is a good thing, it's why conversations here tend to be of a higher quality.

I think the conversations here are higher because of the userbase, not dang's moderation. The site doesn't lend itself to the toxic userbase that reddit and tumblr has.

>I don't think the HN style of moderation would scale to places like Reddit even if they wanted it.

There are subreddits with more scale than HN, with more moderation. Scale is definitely not an issue.

[abruzzi]

Don’t forget that HN is also self moderated through upvotes/downvotes (I’ve never used Reddit, does it have similar?). This does two things IMO—first, low quality posts become less and less readable which reduces incentive to make inflammatory posts, but second it also imposes self moderation (except for users that resort to throwaway accounts) since losing too many karma points removes some of your ability to participate on the site.

[ilyt]

> but second it also imposes self moderation (except for users that resort to throwaway accounts) since losing too many karma points removes some of your ability to participate on the site.

Uh, absolutely not the case. All you need to do is to not post bullshit all the time to be in positive on karma.

It's even worse on reddit (if you want closest approximate it would be like HN instance-per topic(subreddit)) where karma is global so you could get karma on one subreddit and lose on another and be net positive even easier.

the up/down vote thing mostly works but in bigger communities it quickly turns from "quality/garbage comment" to "I agree/I disagree" button

[throwawayacc4]

Yes! Reddit has this exact same feature.