But the HN team is no different from a set of good subreddit admins. As an example of a bigger "good" one, askhistorians is insanely stringent on deleting posts from non-experts. You get insanely detailed recollections of historical events, its lovely to read most of the time.

A subreddit is as good as its moderators are at managing it. In almost all ways, HN is just one of the subreddits I frequent.

>The deal breaker is usually lazy modding.

This is pretty much it. There are some important cases I could point out to this as well. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn/comments/1z9fco/atte...

This particular subreddits mods wanted to get more subscribers (their reason being they were almost at 30k subscribers). They made an advertisement of sorts and put it in another, larger, mainstream subreddit. They prepared for it. And all the new content and comments were heavily moderated. The regulars also helped the moderators with reports for those comments against the rules.

Another good example of heavy moderating is http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience . They don't tolerate any crap. Jokes, anecdotes, or off-topic posts are quickly reported, downvoted, and deleted. Most questions are labeled to the pertinent field. They are also a default subreddit.