But the fact that flags and bans are necessary means the incivility still exists, so those problems haven't really been solved. And votes create as many problems as they solve, because with them you get people posting for votes, complaints about vote fairness, etc.

> I don't know why one would downplay attacking the remaining issue this way, especially since technical solutions are vastly more replicable and scalable.

I don't believe the effect of these solutions scale with them. If they were, Twitter would be a bastion of civil discourse, because there's little that HN does in that regard that Reddit doesn't also do at a much greater scale.