In essence, I think what makes HN work is having had a very good "seed" of users and high quality contributions at the very start. Every new user is then peer p

In essence, I think what makes HN work is having had a very good "seed" of users and high quality contributions at the very start. Every new user is then peer pressured to only submit/post content of equal quality and will be punished if they don't (by being ignored/downvoted). But also good moderation. I am yet to come across a web community that works and doesn't have good moderation.