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> HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)

And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.

Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.

Agreed. And HN has something I associate with it specifically: the back-and-forth argument, maintaining consistency in positions and reasoning, looking like two people taking. But, upon inspection, many people are involved. That, I think, is an example of the de-emphasis on identity.

This is indeed a very common thing I notice on HN. And yet, also quite weird when you think about it.

Thanks for verbalizing it. I didn't notice how remarkable this was before you said it.

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