It really was not. 'dang and 'sctb have done yeoman's work in establishing a tone for what's acceptable--and they have put a lot of thought into things; I occasionally email hn@ycombinator.com with a "hey is this actually cool?" and while I don't always agree with their conclusions I'm always struck by how well-considered the results are.
I don't know if the site was better, but let's say it was; it was also smaller. The same tactics don't keep working as a forum grows, so your argument is actually for letting it destroy itself, be garbage-collected by the big VM in the sky, and get replaced by newer forums which spring up, thrive for a while, and become scorched earth in turn. That's the cycle of life on the internet, but the idea of HN has always been to try to stave that fate off for longer. In 2013-14, the last year before we started moderating the site in the current style, the system was under so much pressure that there were signs of it being about to break—and in fact it did break, because the person who created it couldn't take it any more. It was an awful experience.
I definitely want to find ways to become less visible if possible. I don't much enjoy writing tedious and stupefying moderation comments, getting swarmed by wasps, accused of every bigotry, and reliving the same thing the next day. To be visible in such a role is to be the receptacle for a lot of people's anger about completely unrelated things, and you cannot expect them to treat you with scruples. That's only a tiny minority of the community, of course, but the community is large enough that it's still a lot of people—more, say, than one knows personally in life. On the plus side, one gains appreciation for Samuel Beckett as a spiritual teacher.
