You ask on HN, one of the highest quality sites I've ever visited in any age of the Internet.
IRC is still alive and well among pretty much the same audience as always. I'm not sure it's fair to compare that with the others.
But if they ever include other topics, they risk becoming more mainstream and noisy. Even within adjacent fields (like the various Stacks) it gets pretty bad.
Maybe the trick is to stay within a single small sphere then and not become a general purpose discussion site? And to have a low enough volume of submissions where good moderation is still possible? (Thank you dang and HN staff)
A good example of the generalization problem you discuss is reddit.
You have to unsubscribe from all the defaults and find the small, niche, communities about specific topics. If not, it's the same stuff, reposted, over and over, across different subs and/or social sites.
I wonder if it is more to do with the community itself. HN users tend to have very intelligent discussions on pretty much anything, and discourages shitty, unnuanced, one-line takes. This, coupled with a healthy moderation system, makes it hard for the lower quality discussion to break in and override the good stuff.
And to hold up discussions about MS as an example of 'extremely' low quality discussion is, ah, interesting. Do you have any recent examples of such discussions?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41499957
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41408124
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41335757
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41327379
None of which fit your description of “neckbeardy tropes about their products being garbage spyware, switch to Linux, they're stealing your data, the OS is trash”.
And it isn’t just me, because if you look at those comments, I was talking to other people who weren’t invoking those “neckbeardy tropes” either
relative to what? reddit?
also there's a trade off between entropy and "quality". too much "quality" and everyone gets bored and goes somewhere more entertaining
I also don't care if people leave because HN isn't 'entertaining' enough. I don't come here for that, and I don't expect the community members that make this place what it is to either.
A vaping discussion brought up glycerin used was safe and the same thing used in smoke machines and someone else brought up a study showing that smoke machines are an occasional safety issue. Nowhere near every discussion goes that well but stick around and you’ll see in-depth discussion.
Go to a public health website by comparison and you’ll see warnings without context and a possibility positive spin compared to smoking. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/index.html I suspect most people get basically nothing from looking at it.
As someone with domain expertise here, I wholeheartedly disagree. HN is very bad at percolating accurate information about topics outside its wheelhouse, like clinical medicine, public health, or the natural sciences. It is also, simultaneously, extremely prone to overestimating its own collective competency at understanding technical knowledge outside its domain. In tandem, those two make for a rather dangerous combination.
Anytime I see a post about a topic within my area of specialty, I know to expect articulate, lengthy, and completely misguided or inaccurate comments dominating the discussion. It's enough of a problem that trying to wade in and correct them is a losing battle; I rarely even bother these days.
It's kind of funny that XKCD #793[0] is written about physicists, because the effect is way worse with software engineers.
I’ve worked on the government side of this stuff and find it disheartening.
Sometimes I try and engage, but honestly, mostly I think it's not worth it. Otherwise you end up doing this with your life: https://xkcd.com/386/
After doing some healthcare work I ended up understanding that some topics are not well known even by the professionals dedicating their whole lives to that because there are big gaps in the human knowledge on the topics.
I agree that people that think they can reason in two minutes about anything are a problem, but it's not a healthcare only issue (same happens for politics, economics, environment, etc.)
Engineers have the luck to work in the field where many things have a clear, known explanation (although, try to make an estimation about how long a team will implement a feature, and everybody will come up with something else).
And yes, this is true for many other areas of discussion at HN. It's just that it is most obvious to me in the area that my wife specializes in, because I pick up enough via osmosis from her to know when other people don't even have my limited level of understanding.
1: Or at least were 15 years ago when my wife told me about it- the argument might have been largely concluded and she just never updated me since I don't keep up with the medical literature the way she does.
2: Two decades ago there was a huge push for the "human genome project" under the basis that this would be "reading the blueprints for human life" and that would give us all of these medical breakthroughs. Basically none of those breakthroughs happened because we've spent the past 20 years learning all of the different ways that it is NOT a blueprint and that cells do things very differently from human engineers.
The benefits for understanding more about genomes are growing (ex: list of adverse effects based on genotype https://go.drugbank.com/pharmaco/genomics) but the field is/(was) so chaotic (just one example: there was not one standard about how to count: https://tidyomics.com/blog/2018/12/09/2018-12-09-the-devil-0...) and so lacking data that it will take many years to reap the benefits (ex: one of the largest study UK Bio bank gave access to researchers only in 2017 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Biobank)
My experience here is that it's pretty good for things outside of tech (at least better than the average internet) but definitely not great.