There is a lot of unique content in Chinese already, and the number will grow substantially in the upcoming years. It includes scientific and not-scientific content. So I wouldn't call learning Mandarin a "waste of time".
Chinese is rife with misinformation, alternative facts, sophistry and pure garbage, any thing scientific is either translated to English already or tranlated from English and other languages.
>and not-scientific content.
It's OK if you major in Asian studies or something, for an average guy the overall quality of Chinese content is just not worth you time. Not to mention modern Chinese only existed little more than a century.
I repeat what I said, I oppose spending too much time (more than dabbling) on Chinese by any average person or student, Chinese is a very messy language, for the people worth your time talking to they most likely already know basic English.
I like being able to talk to random other people speaking English as a foreign language. It's useful. It sure would be nice if English speakers would pick up some phrases or a basic understanding in a language of their choosing.
Also, languages aren't equal. Translating poetry is an art and most likely lossy. Emotions don't work the same across languages. I can tell my (ironically: Chinese) gf "I love you", but while that is true it is merely a crappy word by word translation of "Ich liebe dich". The latter is the sensation I feel, the former me describing as a 3rd party observer what's going on. Half-assed.
Don't learn Chinese because you read online articles claiming you should, don't stop learning Chinese because online articles call it useless and maybe do try to know more than one language..
Sorry, but you can't post slurs to Hacker News and we ban accounts that do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Sometimes people do this when they're of that background themselves and have some criticisms to make, so to speak, of the home team. That may be fine in person but it's not fine here. It has an overwhelmingly provocative effect whether you mean it that way or not.)