I've noticed my twitter feed is better on average than my HN feed these days. For a brief moment I considered that the quality here is going down or that there it is going up (imagine! lol).

Then I realized it's all about my abiltiy to filter there.

There is a somewhat small but vocal and obvious contingency of HN posters who are just repeatedly arguing in bad faith or making low effort comments.

They are also often found discussing almost exclusively political topics and have very little to offer in terms of technical expertise.

I think my experience would be massively improved by being able to filter them out.

I see filtering as a kind of distributed community vote, and eventually if the majority of the community starts to filter out certain members, the net effect is like a distributed shadow ban. Those people won't be engaged with and will probably leave for somewhere they can get reactions.

I'm guessing this goes against HN culture and won't be accepted, but I thought it was worth discussing, because my ability to filter has left me with a pretty delightful experience on an app otherwise not known for them, so imagine what it could do here on HN.