The average person has no idea what 90% of the headlines on HN are even referring to, giving it a degree of self-moderation.

And the average person also doesn't know the website exists. You have a few layers of public knowledge:

Twitter, Facebook, etc - everyone knows them.

Reddit, Discord

HN, presumably other domain-specific forums, IRC

Fediverse (though less so as of late), lobste.rs, presumably many that I don't know about!

>And the average person also doesn't know the website exists.

Taking the larger number of people outside of the US that only use mobile devices and only use apps like FB, WhatsApp, or others I'm not familiar with, I'd go so far as saying that the average person doesn't know websites exist. If it's not present to them via an app, could they find an actual website (or at least would they even attempt to)?

How do I get an invite to lobste.rs

HN has a lot more powerful and strict moderation than Usenet ever had.

HN has shadowbanning, sockpuppets, etc... all the goodies that have been privately demonstrated to work, and work well; and most of those work even better when combined with a pretense of 'not having that here'

That is disgusting.

IMO the key adavantage HN/Reddit has over Usenet is the upvoting/downvoting, which is a clever form of self-moderation. Doesn't work in all cases but the less useful comments and posts never rise to the top.