I would say it is sort of the online community equivalent of a healthy big city, not a healthy small town. As such, it's not reasonable to expect the same sense of community here as you would with a smaller social group.

Last I heard, HN gets about 5 million unique visitors a month. The human brain can cope effectively with a community of around 150 members.

For a time, I was the lead mod for The TAG Project. Prior to my arrival, the founder had done some good internal research on her group of online communities (a set of email lists) and found that 20 percent of members were regular and active, another 10 percent posted once or occasionally and the rest were lurkers.

This seems to be roughly true for other communities I have participated in elsewhere.

If you do the math, that means you will have about 150 active members posting regularly when you get to about 750 members. In my experience, once you get to about 750 or 800 members, you start seeing splinter groups form and you start getting new things budding out of that.

Other small email lists began to spin off of one of those email lists once it got big enough.

So if you want a strong sense of community, you are talking about a small town atmosphere where you have about 150 active members and some number of lurkers.

I have passingly thought that the leader board of HN should maybe be 150 names long instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community -- to help foster that same pattern of "there are 150 people whom we all know and can follow all the relationships and so forth" that you get with a smaller online community. But I don't feel strongly about it and I don't see any point in making it some hill to die on, so I think I have mentioned it in comments maybe once or twice before for some reason and that's it.*

Big cities rely on formality and such to account for the fact that we don't all know each other well etc. HN does a better job than most communities of actually applying the rules fairly even-handedly and not just playing favorites for certain insiders.

There are some really corrupt communities that pretend they are nice places, but the rules are applied by the mods completely differently for "insiders" versus "outsiders" and it's very toxic. No, they probably won't help you assimilate either.

This is not true here. The mods don't have to personally like you to give you a fair shake if you will make an effort to reform your bad habits and actually play by the rules.

I think HN is a healthy space, but no longer has a strong sense of community like it did when I first joined. But I was always an outsider looking in who never really got to benefit from that strong sense of community (in fact, it arguably did me a lot of harm).

I stuck around because it had those big city formality things already going on and was kind of the least worst option for my needs and purposes. It had virtues that helped me make it work for me in spite of humans being human and certain problems (like sexism) being rampant and inescapable across the globe.

* Edit: I run my mouth a lot. It's probably more than twice in the last decade, but I certainly don't harp on it.