If it wasn't for the quality control, I wouldn't be here...The internet is littered with poorly maintained communities, but HN isn't one of them, by design.
Quality control and ruthless modding are certainly required - Kuro5hin is a great example of such a community which turned quickly into a hellhole when spammers and insincere trolls took over.
However I've seen plenty of hellbanned people on HN who had a completely innocuous comment history - no insults or bad behaviour - just one day their comments started being hidden. Such an extreme punishment should be reserved for spammers and people who use gross insults in arguments IMO, not imposed automatically as it appears to be.
There are many other more effective ways to police a community, including just commenting when you think something is out of line, which I think serve HN better and are also part of its quality control.
[EDIT there are even some hellbanned people in this discussion]
Given the number of HN users, that may work now but invite-only communities really only reenforce a community. It's difficult for outsiders to get in.
One such example is https://lobste.rs/ -- An invite-only version of HN. It currently suffers from not having enough discourse. One reason may be the small community size.
Don't we all know bad players though who misbehave every so often, so even invite only would work for so long (and that assumes there would be enough interesting content in the first place to keep people coming back.
Quality control and ruthless modding are certainly required - Kuro5hin is a great example of such a community which turned quickly into a hellhole when spammers and insincere trolls took over.
However I've seen plenty of hellbanned people on HN who had a completely innocuous comment history - no insults or bad behaviour - just one day their comments started being hidden. Such an extreme punishment should be reserved for spammers and people who use gross insults in arguments IMO, not imposed automatically as it appears to be.
There are many other more effective ways to police a community, including just commenting when you think something is out of line, which I think serve HN better and are also part of its quality control.
[EDIT there are even some hellbanned people in this discussion]