I think there's a real disconnect between HN and Metafilter. Metafilter is about making good posts. There are tens of thousands of active members and only a f

I think there's a real disconnect between HN and Metafilter. Metafilter is about making good posts. There are tens of thousands of active members and only a few dozen posts per day because you are supposed to make good posts. The motto is "best of the web" and it is a serious motto. By design (I think?) HN is not about making good posts; it's exactly the opposite. It's about posting whatever link you happen to stumble across. The hope is that maybe the good posts will rise to the top via voting, and that comments will add value to bad posts. This is a really different idea! I'm not personally convinced that it's possible to get a high volume of visible good posts using this idea in an open general-interest community, because no matter what you do, there will always be more people ready to vote for popularized, lurid, and flamebait posts than good posts. I think that distinction has much more of an effect on content than moderation. (Although if you've decided that you only want good posts, you probably need moderation to enforce your decision.)