Monks walk away from pretty much everything, and have been doing so for a long time now. They continue living. Does the result of that qualify as either better or worse than what you have now?
A reddit user was kind enough to spontaneously donate 40 dollar (in btc) to me despite the fact that I didn't solicit donations. It's also been a pretty productive endeavor for learning about front end development, listening to feedback and giving users what they're asking for, learning to use cloudflare/gcp, and now learning to optimize glsl shaders to enable a fancier renderer while still getting reasonable performance on cheap hardware.
I feel like I often learn a lot about one random topic or another when I research so I can accurately correct someone who is being wrong on the internet. The above is an interesting example because there was a concrete deliverable at the end of the process, but I don't feel the fact that I learned from the process is particularly unique.
I also learn a lot of new stuff.
I certainly spend some amount of time on HN replying to things I shouldn't bother with, but the majority of my time on HN is filled with learning new things and hearing interesting perspectives on those things. I consider it a net positive in my life, and over the years I've gotten better at avoiding the negative parts.
A large well formed community can survive a portion of its users with negative comments and posts, but I doubt you can build a community on the back of those users. Instead that negative group poisons the the platform for a more mainstream crowd. People won't join a plateform if the first thing they are exposed to supports extremist views.
That's not the case with the alternatives, most tend to go really hard on one side of the extremism scale (right: voat, left: raddle).
Yes it hosts /r/the_donald or whatever but reddit as a whole is very left-leaning.
Edit: Hey ya'll instead of downvoting me how about providing some evidence of widespread right-leaning thoughts that aren't isolated to individual subreddits and shamed throughout the rest of reddit? Spoiler: You can't
It's pointless trying to be a "respectable" right wing intellectual because you have to spend all your time running around justifying the completely incoherent things that Trump is talking about.
Chicago school economics? You can have a discussion with that, and leave it civil. That doesn't work with the_donald.
