Dan Luu

One issue (IMO) is there are people who are legitimate experts on some topics who seem compelled to write up reasonable sounding but completely bogus comments on other topics. Unless you're a subject-matter expert, I think it would be hard to determine which comments are bogus.

The obviously completely wrong comments don't bother me (everyone can tell those are wrong), but a pet peeve of mine are the people who are credible who feel like they have to comment on everything. There are three or four people like this. Why!? It's a waste of everyone's time.

When they comment on topics I know about, the comments are very wrong (but not obviously so to a lay person). I'm guessing they're no different on topics I don't know about outside of their expertise. This is one of the two main reasons I don't read a lot of HN comments anymore.

Definitely. The same suspects turn up on regular expression threads and talk about regular expression derivatives *every* *single* *time*. They don't have experience building this stuff, but they've read a couple papers or blog posts and just want to show that off.

I'd love a forum where experts deleted bogus comments, like r/askhistorians but for tech. One funny side effect of that moderation policy is, if you visit a popular discussion a week or two afterwards, 80% to 100% of comments will be deleted.

That's a teeny bit like how stackexchange works, although the connection is fairly weak: "experts" are identified by enough points in the relevant categories, and the abilities conferred by more points don't directly include deleting answers, but do include locking questions.

I find it surprising how good "technical" Twitter is for this. I think the SNR is maybe 1:2 to 1:10 for questions I ask here. Terrible in an absolute sense, but extraordinarily good relative to other forums I know of (including mid-sized private forums).

The one thing I can think of that positively contributes is the combination of muting plus threading, which makes it easy to permanently mute people who inject noise into conversations without disrupting your own conversation with un-muted people.