It's going to be very interesting to see what happens when HN continue to grow. I don't know how big HN is right now, and I don't know where the breaking points for an online community are, but growth does mean change. I remember some years ago I'd go to slashdot to read the comments...
This is and has been a fantastic site (I'm personally fairly recently a registered user, before that I was just reading), and I hope it will continue to be. But I do also know that if it continues to grow, it will mean there will have to be changes (more people = more trolls, etc). Dealing with change is always hard, I hope the spirit of HN will remain.
EDIT: actually meant to be a follow-up to jacquesm's post. It appears I failed :-/
It's the curse of the Eternal September. The only forums I've seen that managed to grow large while still keeping the posts on topic are ones with strong moderation that don't hesitate to quickly ban trolls, rather than just relying on the community to downvote them.
This is and has been a fantastic site (I'm personally fairly recently a registered user, before that I was just reading), and I hope it will continue to be. But I do also know that if it continues to grow, it will mean there will have to be changes (more people = more trolls, etc). Dealing with change is always hard, I hope the spirit of HN will remain.
EDIT: actually meant to be a follow-up to jacquesm's post. It appears I failed :-/