Communities have some commonality, something shared, something that unites them and then because of that encourages some decency standards. People that live i

Communities have some commonality, something shared, something that unites them and then because of that encourages some decency standards. People that live in the same space, people that have the same hobbies, people that work in software related businesses and startups in the case of HN. So you could build a community out of something and then have a general news discussion, that seems possible. Generally though, the vast vast majority of commenters have nothing original to add and they simply create noise. Perhaps those few nuggets of gold are worth the effort, it's hard to say, at least with HN we all have that common bond and then the actual topics tend to be related to it. Go scan the comments on a couple random foxnews.com articles and a couple random msnbc.com articles and tell me, if the article on foxnews is about the president or a non-white, I will bet you a nickle that you'll see a racist comment in the first batch or two. That's what you'd be working with..