/r/programming (and all of the other major generic programming subreddits) generally just do not have good conversation (or at least have much more noise to sig

/r/programming (and all of the other major generic programming subreddits) generally just do not have good conversation (or at least have much more noise to signal), as a large percentage of the community is very inexperienced. Same thing goes for non-programming, high subscriber count communities. You eventually get a lot of people who think they are knowledgeable about a topic because they've read a lot of topics on the subreddit, but they're really just inexperienced people parroting the opinions of other inexperienced people.