It’s not heavily moderated. This is the usual link dang/tomhow give when they explain why their moderation is necessarily inconsistent:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This is not a criticism of their moderation style, this is simply reporting how they describe it.

> it's one of the most pleasurable places on public internet to be

I think we have different definitions of pleasure.

This is a relatively dry place for any kind of conversation other than hyper logic conversation devoid of empathy or humour.

On certain tech topics, it can be very informative. On anything where there is a conflict between the topic and how the base makes money, there's a lot of down voting and sad rhetoric. As a result, you rarely get to discuss the harms of AI or certain oligarchs, e.g. musk, zuck, bezos, Russia, Israel.

This is a place mostly for reinforcing your own beliefs, rather than finding new ones, unless it's around a very mild topic.

Try to criticize the US' war machine as it relates to the US' tech industry, for example. You will incur the wrath of a thousand HN fascists.

Compare the actual human rights records of the Western sphere (war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights at massive scale) with those of the nations we are being taught are inferior: same effect.

Or for any of us who were around for the Snowden/Assange chapter of HN, who supported the effort to expose the US' heinous crimes - there are still massive sections of western culture who are fundamentalist in their superiority. You can find them in the downvoted and dead-flagged comments section.

Not really, because a generic observation cannot be expressed specifically. So that's a weird question to begin with.

It is true that this is heavily moderated and that this is one of the more pleasant spaces, but it is also precisely the moderation style that is being weaponized.

As I said, the toxicity gets hidden in layers and layers of jargon, misdirection and plausible deniability. It gets a veneer of civilty applied, which, somewhat surprisingly, makes it hit even harder, because fighting back is a lot harder, as there is nothing immediately visible to fight back against. It just stings.

It's not just attacking but simultaneously gaslighting. Which has been what the whole internet has been doing since everything became twitter fwiw.

What I said is also not to be understood as "HN bad", because if I would feel that way, I would not be commenting here.