It's not about people consistently bringing their A-game to HN because it's higher tier - most of its users are not far from their teenage counterparts.
A very small minority of experts will weigh in on one topic, and because their audience is a few hundred people instead of a few tens of thousands, a discussion can actually form.
Experts exist on every public forum in the world. Whether they are heard or not makes the difference. It's quantity that's the detrimental factor.
To be honest the worst takes in here I've seen have been from long standing industry professionals.
I would agree with you if you stopped at internet. By the time reddit and twitter came around, we'd already seen the trend of where things were going. they just took the knob and turned them to 11
back in the day, reddit was really like that, then digg collapsed after getting redesigned and then reddit started to dilute. that's when r/truereddit and later r/truetruereddit happened. but this is history by this point!
truly there's something about "internet scale" that is still boggling our collective mind/culture to this day
to me, this is precisely why the echo chamber style places are the most popular. people just don't want to go some place to have their views challenged. the internet echo chambers are just internet scale versions of everyday life though. people hang out with like minded people. they prefer to live, shop, assemble with like minded people. it is the rare person that ventures of to areas that differ.
the internet is just trying to homogenize itself, or the users are making it that way whether intentionally or not
There is a point of critical mass that turns the community very toxic, I can pinpoint when exactly, but my guess is when you can't properly moderate everything anymore. The bigger the community the heavier the moderation.
"That which is the common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care..." is not a universal law, and it is easy to think of counterexamples. Without listing these, here are some axes that can govern which side of well-cared-for resources in the commons may end up:
- the extent to which people hold cooperation to be an important ingredient, versus dispensable - the extent to which people are able to trust others, versus not - the extent to which a commonly held resource is considered as much a personal resource, as a common one, versus purely common and otherwise inconsequential - the extent to which people are able to value the importance (and impact) of small, consistent actions versus grand(iose) ones - the extent to which people are willing to learn from mistakes and change, versus the extent to which people feel entrenched and defensive
Most of these come down to education, culture, and type of previous interactions with other humans.