Toooootally worth it. /s
I hope that people have learned a simple fact: megacommunities can't be effectively moderated, a place like HN probably represents the upper end of how many active users a site can tolerate and still be worth visiting. A place like Reddit is more or less just an open sewer by comparison, and it's hard to imagine a way to change that at scale.
Small communities share aims and tastes, individuals can stand out and be dealt with if needed, and an affordable amount of human moderation can handle spam and bad actors. Twitter, FB, Reddit and all of those giants are too big to work, and that's why they're full of such miserable people shouting at each other.
HN is an exception, not just because of extremely good moderation, small size, text only, clear rules and strong encouragement of assuming good faith. There is no clear way to translate it to other communities.
e.g Quora when it was very small was a very good website to visit. The more it grew the more it became useless to the point that I don't find anything on it worth visiting right now.
To take the Reddit example a sub like r/Labrats is self-contained and self-sustaining in the same way! There are only so many people with the life experiences in labs, wet or dry, and so many people who will get the humor and struggles of those communities. By contrast a sub like r/Worldnews is so vague and broad that it attracts tens of millions of people to talk about just about anything at all.
Quora falls into that latter category, "Ask me anything" in essence. I'm essentially calling for a return to niches based on limited shared interests or circumstances, because they come with their own ability to restrict growth and filter out "clots".
Probably. Even that is too distracting for me. I prefer email.