HN has always been a tense standoff between a few cliques, the first two being the ostensibly intended audience;

* competent and curious engineers

* entrepreneurs, who live on a continuum where one end is...

* ...hucksters and snake-oil purveyors, of which there are plenty, and

* (because this is the Internet) conspiracy theorists and other such loons

and recently

* political provocateurs

You can make a thread work (for that group of people) if it self-selects who reads it. Unfortunately, AI is catnip to all five of these groups, so the average thread quality is exceptionally low – it serves all five groups badly.

Whether some of these people _should_ be served well is a separate question.

same thing that is happening everywhere. cognitive effort is getting unbalanced, it used to be necessary to put effort in on write, and on read.

now, it is hard to tell who put effort in at all. read or write.

would you consider your own response to be optimistic or high effort?

Snark has always been part of this website.

I think pointing out BS is an important part of a useful forum.

^ How to spot a sucker