I respectfully disagree, but that's because I'm in a couple of communities that are very, very cleverly moderated and have very rigid curation guidelines that t

I respectfully disagree, but that's because I'm in a couple of communities that are very, very cleverly moderated and have very rigid curation guidelines that the mods are careful about. You still get people trying to shout at each other, but they usually do so from a distance, and not within the community. I'm perfectly happy with that. HN has moderation (flags/upvotes etc.) but a much less rigid set of curation guidelines (see "Six Degrees of Hacker News"). This results in a much wider set of "well I think HN should be X", and therefore more meta-arguments about the different Xs rather than staying on topic, whatever "topic" means to each individual.