I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action

PostgreSQL is a good example, it fantastic documentation and runs on mostly volunteer work the documentation is on par (IMHO better) to say Oracle/ MSSQL/ DB2 documentation which have paid professional writers behind it for example

Quality is more a function of editorial oversight rather than nature of contributions itself.

SO and wikipedia has both been effective partly because of stricter review process ( reason their brands are trusted) and also have been criticized for it, getting the balance right is not easy.

Sub-reddits are good way to study this, there are ones which emphasize on participation over quality and vice versa, i.e. optimize for the reader or the writer.

There are no perfect solution, and communities must keep changing, early on contributions are more important i.e. quantity, as the site and brand grows large quality is more important (SO and wiki both went through this lifecycle).

MDN has very different starting point - strong brand and content quality but no contributing community. They will have to come with something that fits their unique needs.

In this particular case it looks like we see common sense as pointing in opposite directions, but such differences are inevitable any time that interpretation and judgment calls are involved, which is certainly true of moderation. Beyond that, it's hard to answer general statements about HN moderation when they don't include specific links. You might well be talking about comments that we simply didn't see (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24161292). There are many other possibilities too.

Usually when I hear generalizations about HN moderation on political/ideological issues, they're being made by strong adherents to one ideological position who perceive the moderators as being secretly against their position. That's problematic because there are intense cognitive biases conditioning such perceptions, such as the one where people are more likely to notice cases they dislike than the ones they agree with, and to weight them much more heavily (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). If you consider that phenomenon, you'll notice that it guarantees that unbiased moderation will always be experienced as biased by passionate perceivers, regardless of which position they adhere to. This is a double bind situation for the moderators, and it makes such complaints difficult to respond to except by pointing out that the other side feels exactly the same way.

I don't mean to say that that's the case with your perceptions, just that it's hard to discuss these things without concrete cases to look at. Based on your comment, my guess is that we would agree on egregious cases (and those certainly get moderated here, except when we don't see them), but would perhaps draw the lines differently on borderline cases, like the GP. That too is inevitable when one is trying to moderate a community that has countless different perspectives—it's impossible to satisfy everyone, or even to satisfy anyone completely. But there's a choice here too: we want HN to be different from the places on the internet that are dominated by the online callout/shaming culture (not because the callouts are always wrong, but because of the systemic effect on the community when they become the default). For that, I think the plausibility guideline is the right medicine. It basically leads to scolding/banning for egregious cases, forgiveness for borderline cases, and open-mindedness in unclear ones (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073607).

Of course this opens another bag of problems of how to decide on which projects to finance how much or unwanted govermental influence on the projects. But I would still say it is a realistic alternative to corporate sponsors and patreon style funding.