I'm going to slightly lean against this notion. For me personally the actual value of HN is the number of people that have some neat insights on niche topics, r

I'm going to slightly lean against this notion. For me personally the actual value of HN is the number of people that have some neat insights on niche topics, rather than it being a "good" place for discussion in comparison to chat. > Also chat platforms can't bring valuable discussion like hn . Most chat devloves to dramas and fight. This to me seems more like a function of the aforementioned people involved. I've personally had plenty of valuable discussions in random chatrooms. Even in more active ones. Meanwhile on HN, a decent portion of the comments also is drama of some kind. (rude remarks, off-hand comments, FUD spreading) Mind you, either medium has it's high's and low's, but I just think they don't differentiate themselves much in that regard. It probably depends significantly on the specific communities one engages with. > Because there's no topic to follow, nobody read back original posts and it became personal. To me this same issues exists on HN, possibly even more prevalent by virtue of being a news aggregator. People frequently do not even appear to read the article before arguing about things (mostly the title). This sometimes makes comments feel like they are done in bad faith, or out of hostility towards the topic/author. Which I don't think makes a good climate for discussion. On some topics even going slightly against status quo can result in gray or dead comments, even when the comment is well argued. Meanwhile, some hostile comments are not pushed against enough. I think the value of the discussions within a community depends far more on how much the community polices it's standards by discouraging unwanted behavior rather than the medium in which it happens. But ignoring that, the lack of notifications on replies, which is something I don't really mind, also seems antithetical to the concept of discussion. Some threads don't end by merit of their arguments but because one of the parties involved did not reply, possibly because of a lack of visibility.