> us idling around chewing the cud on this isn't really hurting anything Or... maybe it _is_ hurting? Junk may displace quality. An HN page filled with low-q

> us idling around chewing the cud on this isn't really hurting anything Or... maybe it _is_ hurting? Junk may displace quality. An HN page filled with low-quality comments may discourage people with expertise from contributing. "Eternal September" and "Someone on the internet is wrong!" being less engaging than informed (or even just not energetically misguided) discussion. I certainly have a predicate of "ok, there's no point in my commenting on this HN post; it's 'gone bad'; there's now an inverse correlation between people having a clue and their being likely to wade through all this and potentially see my comment". There's also "You play like you practice", and this is negative training on ignoring the criticality of recognizing expertise and its limits. A bar discussion with an expert can go like a seminar. Or if without, yet with experienced people, like a panel. But as the available expertise declines, things can rapidly collapse towards a stereotype of a DC cocktail party, with nonsense lapped up and shared due to an inability to judge expertise and its limits. You get bad reddit, with babbled nonsense undergoing memetic selection largely disconnected from reality. FOX News, and the NYTimes's deemphasis of the role of political and economic interests, also come to mind. > chewing the cud [...] isn't really hurting anything So perhaps, alternately, it might be viewed as a intellectual integrity fail? One with civilizational impact? > Anyway, at worst this is entertainment, So then... its like HN and US public discourse about trade wars, sanctions and shooting wars and their civilian casualties, regulatory capture and industrial policy, education, public health, ... and so on? All sort of a reality tv show? /end snark :) Hmm, random thought... my fuzzy impression is that views on lies are bimodal, with camps of "white lies are necessary social lubricant; to think otherwise is to be immature and inconsiderate" and "all lies are toxic; to think otherwise is to be oblivious to unintended and broader impacts". I wonder if there's a similar divergence of views with respect to comment and thread intellectual hygiene? Ideally, we would have more flexible discussion fora. Discussion preferences vary among people, topics, times of day, etc. Sometimes I enjoy reddit pun chains, sometimes I find them an annoying distraction. It'd be nice to be able to toggle seeing them, rather than everyone getting a similar view all the time. But for now... I think of HN discussion as "breaking down" as topics become distant from tech.