I think I stumbled upon SN in 2022 and made my comment a few months later then came back a few months later in 2023

What helps is creating a 'bio' or profile... I was surprised by the welcome reception or orientation

You are right, it is difficult for a new user to break through

Bell_curve

I don't think we can quite extrapolate the SN to the Reddit experience just yet. But I'd say SN is about as active as a mid tier subreddit, yet we're operating just fine using sats as the moderator

Although new users on SN don't get explicitly blocked, I do observe them having a hard time getting engagement. But that's partly coz we've been inundated with bots and it's hard to tell who's a genuine new user and who's a bot

A response to SolomonSatoshi: I don't think Stacker News is about v4v

Scoresby

I don't think we can quite extrapolate the SN to the Reddit experience just yet. But I'd say SN is about as active as a mid tier subreddit, yet we're operating just fine using sats as the moderator 

Although new users on SN don't get explicitly blocked, I do observe them having a hard time getting engagement. But that's partly coz we've been inundated with bots and it's hard to tell who's a genuine new user and who's a bot