Forums like this, reddit, etc. become worse over time partly because people demand (superficially) high-quality comments. People who's time is valuable are less

Forums like this, reddit, etc. become worse over time partly because people demand (superficially) high-quality comments. People who's time is valuable are less likely to comment. When a very talented & experienced person says, "that's a bad approach" with no explanation, you should pay close attention, but that type of comment gets downvoted into oblivion and on HN is explicitly against the rules. It's very artificial, that doesn't happen in real life. People who's reputation precedes them don't have to justify themselves. Guido Van Rossum is not going spend time laboriously correcting the things he disagrees with on open forums like this - he probably isn't browsing the forum in the first place. You have to adapt to that. That becomes a cycle, and gradually the average quality declines as each successive tier of experience gets sick of it (and of being ignored when they try to articulate the problem) and leave. Hacker News is not as vulnerable to this as other communities, and I'm not sure why, but it's still a problem. The core issue is that external reputation is both hard to decipher on Reddit-style forums, and not rewarded when it exists. Every post is judged on its local merits, who posted it is usually irrelevant. Sounds good, but it just leads to people BSing. So HN is full of overwritten pedantry and BS, interspersed by the odd person with actual, hardcore experience getting sick of it and writing a lone, high-effort rebuttal. Which will tend to do well, but... It's not the typical post. Most posts are high-effort bullshit and resultant arguments.