Hacker news is near the optimum of what a site of this size and type can do. By type I mean the slashdot/digg/reddit social news format. Pg got a lot of things right to shore up the format. ui geared towards a certain community, strong focus on community, seeded with essay readers, slow scaling, quasi-non-profit so quality remains almost top priority. Its just that the format of squeezing the subjective realities of more and more people into an objective 'top intellectually interesting articles right now' list cannot scale civilly when everyone is subtly pulling in their own direction just that little bit. The tension adds up. Maybe limiting max number of users (one joins as on leaves) would do it but that is extremely drastic and probably defeats the point of hn.