>HN is much more heavily moderated than those websites.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Reddit is orders of magnitude more heavily moderated than HN. Your average run of the mill subreddit has more moderators than the entirety of HN.
>Which is a good thing, it's why conversations here tend to be of a higher quality.
I think the conversations here are higher because of the userbase, not dang's moderation. The site doesn't lend itself to the toxic userbase that reddit and tumblr has.
>I don't think the HN style of moderation would scale to places like Reddit even if they wanted it.
There are subreddits with more scale than HN, with more moderation. Scale is definitely not an issue.
Relative to other large social media sites (reddit, Tumblr, Twitter pre-Elon, etc.) HN is a bastion of free speech. Reddit being possibly the least free of them all.
Unfortunately the Mastodon instance that Oxide decided on is flooded with leftist activists and SJW types. One of the rules is a leftist shibboleth, "no colonialism".
That rule makes no sense in the context of a social media site.
>I personally think therapy is great and will help gun owners protect themselves from the greatest threat they face, which is their mental health!
"I personally think therapy (shooting targets) is great and will help gun owners protect themselves from the greatest threat they face, which is their mental health (greatest threat all Americans face)!"
Imagine posting exactly what a pro-gun target shooter would post and think it's snark. Congrats, you just played yourself again. Thanks for agreeing.
Gun owners don't need more guns, they need therapy!
(This post is hilarious since gun owners frequently call shooting "therapy". Many gun owners would unironically say/type this exact same comment. Congrats, you played yourself.)
An aspect that no one here has mentioned but absolutely is a major reason:
Tech teams are littered with chronically online SJWs. When something as innocuous as an email about Domain Driven Design [0] can quickly go off the rails and be derided as misogynistic, it's tough to communicate. Executives are not used to dealing with groups that have such thin skin. You constantly have to walk on eggshells around tech teams, and even then something/anything may still trigger them.