It's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall I think it's been a positive influence. I've tried to mitigate the negatives by assiduously avoiding threads I know will

It's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall I think it's been a positive influence. I've tried to mitigate the negatives by assiduously avoiding threads I know will have meaningless flame wars or absurd overreactions in the comments - anything on Apple, or the culture war, or cryptocurrencies and associated tech, or (to some extent) Mozilla. Over time I've found that there's a few repeating patterns to HN comment threads so I can tell which ones to avoid from just the title or the top comment. If you find yourself mired in meaningless conversations here, do that same thing you would do in any other social network: learn to filter out things that don't add value.