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Two months ago I was worried that with the Obama surge things would break apart and collapse and become generic as a site like Reddit's become. To my surprise, it's managed to hold together incredibly well. And I love it: this is absolutely the best community I know of on the Internet.

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"it" didn't magically hold together. that was the work of the editors! if you read the site with showdead turned on in your profile, you'll see that a record number of users and submissions are getting killed.

just to be clear, that's not me screaming censorship. it's rare for me to see a dead comment or submission that i wouldn't have killed myself, if i had the power to do it.

Yep! I flag a lot of stuff in the new section. I'm just always surprised to see how effective that is at pruning the site.

Besides the excellent moderation, another huge contributor is that instead of being a generic medium for posting articles and discussion, like slashdot, HN is founded on pg, in a sense. His ethos is the site's ethos.

yes - but without the cult-like persona following that often arises in situations like these.

Which both he and us probably thinks is good.

without the cult-like persona following

To be fair, maybe a little cult-like persona following...

Are you trying to get excommunicated?

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