Comment by dang

Yes, HN is a moderated/curated site and always has been. Here's 10 years' worth of me explaining that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default.

It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.