You ask on HN, one of the highest quality sites I've ever visited in any age of the Internet.
IRC is still alive and well among pretty much the same audience as always. I'm not sure it's fair to compare that with the others.
But if they ever include other topics, they risk becoming more mainstream and noisy. Even within adjacent fields (like the various Stacks) it gets pretty bad.
Maybe the trick is to stay within a single small sphere then and not become a general purpose discussion site? And to have a low enough volume of submissions where good moderation is still possible? (Thank you dang and HN staff)
I wonder if it is more to do with the community itself. HN users tend to have very intelligent discussions on pretty much anything, and discourages shitty, unnuanced, one-line takes. This, coupled with a healthy moderation system, makes it hard for the lower quality discussion to break in and override the good stuff.
A good example of the generalization problem you discuss is reddit.
You have to unsubscribe from all the defaults and find the small, niche, communities about specific topics. If not, it's the same stuff, reposted, over and over, across different subs and/or social sites.
My experience here is that it's pretty good for things outside of tech (at least better than the average internet) but definitely not great.
A vaping discussion brought up glycerin used was safe and the same thing used in smoke machines and someone else brought up a study showing that smoke machines are an occasional safety issue. Nowhere near every discussion goes that well but stick around and you’ll see in-depth discussion.
Go to a public health website by comparison and you’ll see warnings without context and a possibility positive spin compared to smoking. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/index.html I suspect most people get basically nothing from looking at it.
As someone with domain expertise here, I wholeheartedly disagree. HN is very bad at percolating accurate information about topics outside its wheelhouse, like clinical medicine, public health, or the natural sciences. It is also, simultaneously, extremely prone to overestimating its own collective competency at understanding technical knowledge outside its domain. In tandem, those two make for a rather dangerous combination.
Anytime I see a post about a topic within my area of specialty, I know to expect articulate, lengthy, and completely misguided or inaccurate comments dominating the discussion. It's enough of a problem that trying to wade in and correct them is a losing battle; I rarely even bother these days.
It's kind of funny that XKCD #793[0] is written about physicists, because the effect is way worse with software engineers.
Sometimes I try and engage, but honestly, mostly I think it's not worth it. Otherwise you end up doing this with your life: https://xkcd.com/386/
And to hold up discussions about MS as an example of 'extremely' low quality discussion is, ah, interesting. Do you have any recent examples of such discussions?
relative to what? reddit?
also there's a trade off between entropy and "quality". too much "quality" and everyone gets bored and goes somewhere more entertaining
