Comment by dredmorbius

HN, as with virtually all user-generated content sites, leverages both member actions and automation heavily.

Annually HN sees about 150k active users, 400k stories, and 4m comments:

<https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective> (2021 retrespective by Whaly.io).

It has one public-facing moderator (and apparently a few others who don't post publicly on the site). HN's own mods see very little of the total site content. Automation and member votes, flags, and vouches, as well as emails to the mods, are what keep HN humming. Not perfectly, but quite frankly one of the better-run online discussion sites, and one whose quality has remained remarkably steady over nearly 20 years.

If you see something you think isn't right (bad content not flagged, good content flagged, whatever, email the mods, and they'll take a look. I do this a lot myself, usually with positive results.