It is interesting that so few people contribute so much; the community feels bigger than it is. But I think it is mostly "the regulars" and the occasional random commenter. I wonder what Reddit is like.
BTW, it's weird that Google does not have a "fork this document" feature. I don't want to request write access; I just want to play with a copy for myself. (Actually, I just want to sort things.)
In communities like /r/funny, however, there are enormous masses. Some names stand out more—I wonder if my alias there does—but that's more subjective and less of a closed-off community.
I've been a long time member of /., first as a lurker, then finally posting a bit and getting more involved, but I only know the names there when I see them, not recalling them by heart like you do.
On HN it's fairly easy to recognize on sight a few hundred or so, and to be able to recall several 10's at least, but it feels more like a 'hackers village' than a city.
Right now I figure about 7500 active users on HN, but, again, my measuring methods are somewhat approximate so take that with a huge lump of salt.
If it grew to 'city scale' (say 50K+ active members) that feeling would completely change, most of the posts would be from members that you would not recognize.
It has occurred to me that it is very well possible that PGs strategy is based on keeping HN manageable, and to ruthlessly prune that which does not belong in the hedge is a pretty good way of achieving that.
Over time the quality should go up, not down if you keep at it consistently. Hard to tell if that's happening though, not sure what kind of metric you'd have to come up with to discount for the growth of the site vs the quality of the comments.
That's a pretty subjective issue.
P-Dub was easy to notice because for a few months, every time he posted five people would reply to him telling him to do his homework. And karmanaut was similar, because his replies got such insane upvotes compared to other people. His legend was self-propagating.
S2S2S2S2S2, on the other hand, was one of the founders of SuicideWatch. Last year I made a handful of calls to local police stations when people who threatened to kill themselves were in my area. I'm still impressed that three people were able to have such a positive and widespread influence.
HN has its shortcomings but lack of avatars isn't one of them.
The quality of the postings here is of a way above average level compared with that on other sites that offer a way to discuss links related to programming and surprisingly wide area to the left and right of that.
Avatars are for people that don't want to read, the usernames are more than descriptive enough, and offer everything from mechanical fishes to Daniel B Markhams, so no lack of expressivity there.
The only people that would use avatars (I think) would be those that are normally found in troll territory.
I think that HN really rewards the time you put in to it, by loading up HN with more bells and whistles the quality is not going to go up.
Less = More.
That said, I agree that avatars are not a good idea. I like them on a lot of sites, and I like the idea of HN as a community, but it really is supposed to be all about the words. Let's keep using words.
This site appeals to the same kind of person who can appreciate the utility and straight forwardness of a command line. Conversely, I like to think the site will not appeal to those who might look at a command line and break out into a cold sweat.