> How do you determine that people are knowledgeable and are going to help you grow? How do you verify they’re “knowledgeable”?
How do we do this with tech topics? We rely on our expert knowledge to evaluate the claims of others. If someone is seriously asking this question about political discussion on HN that means they're not at the point where they're ready to have political discussions that are anything more than just saying "hey did you read that mainstream news article?" "yeah".
If you know even a modicum of politics or political theory it's almost trivial to prove, disprove, or add color to what's being said in these threads. If you want a really simple way to do this hop onto one of the big prediction markets like Polymarket or Kalshi. You can probably disprove a solid 15% of top-ranked commenters just by doing that.
If you want to use more brainpower, hop over to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and read one of their long articles. In particular they have a great set of articles on US policy thinking around China right now. It's pretty saddening to read HN commentary on China and compare it to CEIP's readings.
The conclusion I've come to on this site is that the incentives around participating on a public internet site, like HN, Reddit, Facebook, etc are such that they attract a crowd of people who are more interested in talking than listening or understanding. There's a subset of them who really enjoy debating but without being grounded in fact or consequence from misprediction it turns largely into verbal sparring games. There's also little difference between these sites because from what I can tell it's the same set of people attracted to all of the same sites.