I definitely get valuable information from it and 95% of that is thanks to the work of moderators. I'm one of those people who would be on messageboards 15 yea

I definitely get valuable information from it and 95% of that is thanks to the work of moderators. I'm one of those people who would be on messageboards 15 years ago asking "What programming language should I learn???" as an Econ major who had over-engineered many an Excel spreadsheet. The commentary here often goes into details around certain technologies and roles that I wouldn't know had I just read the documentation or hung around someone's Twitter. Now, no place is perfect and HN does have its issues. As tech has grown beyond matters of "hacker interest" into something the majority of society participates in, the discussion here has naturally expanded into matters of society, economic fairness and regulation/taxation. Regular topics on HN reflecting this change involve immigration, crypto, diversity, free speech and more. These are topics where the signal to noise ratio is very low. In this current climate we also see heads of companies wading into these topics and speaking in black and white terms designed for broadcast on social media. Nonetheless, these topics sometimes lead to disproportionately lengthy HN threads, where it becomes clear that there is a lot of hero worship and "appeal to authority" thinking that powers the same people that write thoughtful, helpful comments on topics that are more 'tech' in nature.