Horrified is a bit strong, but you have a point. There's a few themes that are strongly popular or unpopular by some type of community consensus. In those cases, it doesn't seem to matter what you have to say as minds are already made up.

Another interesting effect I experienced is regarding expert credibility.

When I found this place, I was impressed. I figured the world's top engineers are posting. I see them writing about very advanced topics I know little about. Comments are well written, and combined this creates trust.

But there's been incidents. I'm the type of person that has an extremely deep level of knowledge in about 2 or 3 very niche topics that frankly normally nobody cares about. I know that sounds pretentious, but for the sake of argument, let's accept it for now.

By chance, very infrequently, an article and discussion may be about those extremely niche topics. And now things are falling apart. As before, seemingly insightful professional-level comments are written. The problem is, 70% of them are wrong. I'm not talking "different opinion", I mean factually wrong, that's not how this works, and you seem to have no idea what you're talking about.

I imagine to the outsider not in the niche reading along: interesting expert discussion. Just as I was reading about all those topics I know little about.

This raises the obvious question: when I read impressive comments regarding topics I know little about, how many are actually trustworthy and accurate expertise versus how many are just well written made up nonsense?

This question hits me hard because it kind of forces you to become skeptical and cynical by default, which I don't want to be.