Consider the impact on HN if every time someone asked an opinion question or recommendation for resources, the people pointed here. Hundreds of posts a day fall into this bucket... would HN be able to moderate it? Would people stop looking there when the top 30 were within the past 30 minutes and all by green names?

I used to be active on another part of the SE network... and we could easily get overwhelmed when people on SO tried to be helpful and point people with questions that weren't quite right for SO in our direction. Without that person being active on our site too, they often failed to realize that it wasn't a good question there either... and we'd have to try to explain that they were misdirected and no, we're not being elitist but the question needs to be closed here too. For a small site, we could easily get half of daily questions being from "helpful" misdirections. ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://codereview.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5777/ )

I believe that HN really wants people in the ask question who want to be on HN... not just the 'herp derp oh look a textbox' syndrome ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... ). This goes for other online communities too. Trying to be too helpful does all of them a disservice. Consider the advice from ESR in ask questions the smart way: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#forum

> Choose your forum carefully

> cross-post to too many different newsgroups

> Hackers blow off questions that are inappropriately targeted in order to try to protect their communications channels from being drowned in irrelevance. You don't want this to happen to you.

> The first step, therefore, is to find the right forum. Again, Google and other Web-searching methods are your friend. Use them to find the project webpage most closely associated with the hardware or software giving you difficulties. Usually it will have links to a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list, and to project mailing lists and their archives. These mailing lists are the final places to go for help, if your own efforts (including reading those FAQs you found) do not find you a solution. The project page may also describe a bug-reporting procedure, or have a link to one; if so, follow it.

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To the "It's too big" - yes it is. I believe that that is really at the core of the problem. The avenues where I go for help now tend to be small to the point where on some of them I know every single person by first (real) name.

Having a small enough stream where I can read the entire day's stuff that interests me easily along with being in an environment where the "we are professionals, don't be a jerk" is enough of a moderation pressure that it isn't even an issue.

I believe that a variation on activity pub ( https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ ) is the right way to go in the long term, with small sites that moderate and the ability to programmatically screen posts. Not sure how... but something in that nature. And if some other site keeps pushing your site crap, blacklist it and stop accepting it. And to an extent, I'd even be willing to pay for it (for someone else to keep the quality standards that I want).