I am not in academia so I cannot say, but I have observed plenty of controversy from the outside and have seen other commenters in HN express their disillusionment on academic debate.

Regardless I’m not proposing that HN or analogous platforms should be 4chan.

It’s good to aspire to orderly and rigorous debate, but I don’t think that hyper-regulation is good either. We humans are messy, and there’s good things about that, too. It’s a matter of degree.