You need a critical mass for any decent discussion to happen, but there’s also a tipping point—go beyond that, and no matter what you do, it turns into chaos.

You need a critical mass for any decent discussion to happen, but there’s also a tipping point—go beyond that, and no matter what you do, it turns into chaos. A bunch of people here have mentioned having great conversations back in the old Usenet days. Maybe because the barrier to entry was higher, naturally filtering people out (aka a gatekeeper). Now that anyone can post anything online, every discussion attracts a bunch of people throwing random shit for no reason. This is why I usually prefer Lobsters over Hacker News. Anytime someone shares a bad experience with JS, Vim, or Emacs, an armada of people shows up, ready to obliterate them. Trolls existed before 2010 too, but they weren’t nearly as bad.