I think the problem is that when a user base is small it tends to attract specialists who have sought out that content, and who's contributions make it useful/i

I think the problem is that when a user base is small it tends to attract specialists who have sought out that content, and who's contributions make it useful/interesting to others. If the site becomes successful and more mainstream, then it will attract more and more non-specialists - the peanut gallery who have an opinion on everything and expertise on nothing. I have a 5-digit slashdot user id, and saw this play out over there. In the early days it was great, and (believe it nor not) highly technical - lots of subject matter experts in the comments. If you look at slashdot today it has become entirely useless. The same thing played out at Reddit on /r/machinelearning - it used to be frequented by researchers and experts, but as ML/AI became popular the crowds moved in and now that too is useless. I joined Hacker News in 2017, so have no idea how it was before then, but it doesn't seem to have changed much in that timespan, still attracting a mostly technical and intelligent crowd, at least if one ignores the lower rated comments.