I'd be careful with this assessment. HN isn't immune to these effects. Especially with the approach towards quality. Maybe that's just me, but I often end up no

I'd be careful with this assessment. HN isn't immune to these effects. Especially with the approach towards quality. Maybe that's just me, but I often end up not submitting comments on HN, or reducing them*). This self-censorship has multiple reasons: First, I often ask myself if the comment adds some value to the discussion; or if it just ends up being one of these fly-over comments that's just the tenth repetition of the same musing/opinion/question/thought. Second, if I evaluate that some discussion ends up being to polarized or too exhausting (if I make an argument, I should be prepared to defend it and not just run away), I don't hit that reply button as well. That's not to say that this is inherently evil. Do we need low quality comments? I think no. Should I/others always write ten paragraph comments instead of condensing their thoughts? Doesn't sound like an inherently bad idea, but maybe some things get lost/censored that way. And thanks to a lot of effort put into productive discussion by most people here nice discussion can be had, but to pick some examples: I myself would still be careful joining a discussion about RMS here, or on some areas of politics (e.g. taxing), or on vaccination (let alone something complex as mandated vaccination). Even though I think that some of these should be had (not necessarily on HN). Yes, FB is worse and, to stick to the current theme, dead-end discussion about vaxing are probably running rampant there and I am happy that I only get some rare glimpses of that when a friend is acting like Don Quijote and posting on it on our Discord; but essentially I think that's a dangerous whataboutism. *) I was actually considering cutting the comment there, even after writing the rest. But I think some more elaboration doesn't hurt in this case ;-)