dang certainly does a great job moderating HN, but I'll venture to say it would still have a far more open-minded and intellectually curious vibe than Next Door

dang certainly does a great job moderating HN, but I'll venture to say it would still have a far more open-minded and intellectually curious vibe than Next Door even if it were left unmoderated. I think the problem with Next Door is that traits like these (which HN tends to aggregate) are rare in the general population. To get the vibe you want, you'd probably need to curate to the point that you'd be blocking like 70% of people or more. And that has its own issues, since it would then feel like some kind of closed elitist club—which also definitely wasn't the atmosphere in the internet's early days.