Metafilter was the absolute worst social experience of my life. When I joined, it was common for individuals who did not fit in for some reason to be routinely ganged up on by other people. Mods would ask the person being ganged up on to stop posting, then let other people continue to make personal attacks against the person who had been asked to leave the conversation, who could now not defend themselves. If they did come back into the conversation to defend themselves, they were "behaving badly" for disobeying mod instruction (but the people attacking them were never told they were behaving badly).
As someone who was openly homeless at the time that I was gifted a Metafilter membership (by someone on HN), I ended up on the receiving end of that on Metafilter. At some point, I stopped participating.
It is clear to me that both Hacker News and Metafilter have a high percentage of well educated, well heeled members. In fact, there is significant overlap between the membership of Hacker News and of Metafilter. Some active users of both sites have the same handle on both sites.
I fairly often see remarks on HN by well-to-do people that strike me as sort of clueless wrt how the other half lives. But I have not been openly, actively and repeatedly ganged up on and continuously harassed here the way I was on Metafilter.
Given the similarities of the populations and the actual overlap of membership, in recent months I have been forced to conclude that the difference in culture is due to a difference in moderation. So, you do good work and should be proud of that.