HN generates emotional friction[1], is filled with shallow but clever sounding dismissals[2] and is filled with low quality discussions on high quality articles[3].
[1]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/787775131682758657
[1]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/787775131682758657
I'd put your citations of tweets clearly expressing personal opinion as devaluing the conversation.
I typically find highly rated comments on HN as useful in adding new information or perspective to an article or discussion.
The only major issue I have with the comments on HN is that early ones get a lot more upvotes, causing later--but just as valid--points of view to be lost.
Maybe a dynamic system that randomly shows an order weighted on upvotes in the past X minutes. That’d give fresh comments a chance to compete.
[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees
Above all though, I learn things here all the time. There's some really knowlegeable people here and the range of topics that gets covered is more diverse than you might think.
I can't remember exactly when, a few weeks ago at least, i remember seeing an article about brewing tea or something on here and there was an extremely in depth discussion on the subtlties of tea and effects of brewing. There was some chemistry thrown in there and some oddly specific knowledge. It was great. I don't think i've ever learned so much from a discussion on tea before.
Also, just some of the personal anectodes and life stories i've read here really blow me away sometimes.
I've browsed a lot of different sites, the community of people here seem to be unlike most other sites, even similar ones.
There's a fairly high level of snobbishness and disconnect from some oddly ordinary aspects of life...and honestly sometimes I worry this site is full of sociopaths....
But, it's a pretty cool community of people that reminds me of the days of the old internet in ways that a lot of other sites don't. I never really feel like I'm wasting time even reading comments here, because the amount of accumulated knowledge and experience just seems to be a lot higher than pretty much anywhere else I browse regularly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654982
It seems familiar. That was the most recent I could find. I'm honestly not too sure. That discussion's pretty good too if it's mot the same one. There were a few articles about tea that came up in my search.
rofl