If the comment quality has eroded, is that because the standards are too lax (in which adding a new rule will theoretically fix it), or is it because of an Eternal September-type issue? If it's an Eternal September issue, then you have an enforcement problem: the upvote/downvote system is democratic, so the community would be unable to police itself against the new rule. The obvious solution would be to have people "more equal" than others, but then there's a possibility of groupthink forming and/or resentment against perceived "censorship." These are classic problems of Internet forum governance.
With all due respect to pg, one data point against the idea that it's just the standards being too lax is that this article was posted on Hacker News in the first place. The Hacker News guidelines state that most stories about politics are off-topic unless they are evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. I've never read tech news sites where the H1-B debate wasn't going on (I've been reading since 2001 or so), and based on the mountains of H1-B rhetoric I've read online, the arguments raised in the article are not new.
Strict moderation has managed to make a few subreddits decent to read, and I don't see much resentment there. Usually it's greatly appreciated. It wouldn't work if all subreddits were that way though, I could easily see some sort of resentment building up in that case.
Self-policing, in comparison, will always lead to eternal september above some threshold of user churn. That said, HN has weathered growth reasonably well. If nothing else, the median level of discourse on HN has not gotten much worse than it was years ago. But the mean level of discourse has probably gone down. Just my impressions, I have nothing to back this up of course.
If I had to point to a flaw in pg's argument is that the bay area is running into scaling limits in terms of housing and other things, and no way it could support the 19fold expansion of the programmer population in the bay that pg advocates.
If pg wants to grow his business, he can wait for the west coast democrats and republicans to scale up his town or he can make yco a global brand you may find in Idaho or Nigeria.
With all due respect to pg, one data point against the idea that it's just the standards being too lax is that this article was posted on Hacker News in the first place. The Hacker News guidelines state that most stories about politics are off-topic unless they are evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. I've never read tech news sites where the H1-B debate wasn't going on (I've been reading since 2001 or so), and based on the mountains of H1-B rhetoric I've read online, the arguments raised in the article are not new.