I don't agree with that. I think often hours in, the top comments often get more offensive here. Not less. The garbage floating to the bottom is not my experience here.

> In general, the HN system (tech+mods+community) rewards thoughtful content and penalizes shallow nonsense

I don't see this happening on HN. The shallow nonsense isn't the problem, it's the hateful opinions and "carefully reasoned, smart sounding" racism that is the problem. Calling it shallow nonsense makes it sound like no big deal or low effort hate posts. But that's not what I'm talking about.

People say the worst things here but they use a large vocabulary and so it seems to get a pass. The hate here is very similar to the hate I see elsewhere and often it is much much worse here than on Twitter, in my personal experience.