Comment by jll29

I'm not entirely sure it's about content (while HN is certainly tech-focused, politics, health, philosophy all come up with regularity) or even content moderation, although they both certainly play a part (particularly the moderation around here. Thanks, staff!)

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.

The car headlight forums seem to expose the weakness of small web though, in that a lot of the forums that show up in search are "sponsored" by one or two major brands and any open discussion or validation of off-brand solutions, AliExpress parts, etc are quickly shunned or banned.

Yes. That's the small web.

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.

When economics has come up I've been curious and asked my brother about some of the stuff in the more upvoted comments (he has his PhD in economics with a focus on labor specifically) his reaction has always been something like "that doesn't match my understanding of that" or "I think their analysis is a bit oversimplified".

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.

IMO HN actually scores quite highly in terms of health/politics and so forth content because the both mainstream and fringe ideas get both shown and pushback.

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.

I disagree. Even politics spurs intelligent, nuanced discussion here on HN.

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?

It's almost like its a systemic failure that is artificially created so that people wont think critically... hmmm