Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. Just look at HN comments; they are among the highest quality available, but still it abounds.
> bloggers/commenters who are ... subject matter experts
And orders of magnitude more who claim to be.
I suppose the idea I'm trying to communicate can be also expressed as navigating towards localized pockets of lower misrepresentations levels in the cesspool of Internet. I'm arguing that regular news outlets have high concentration of misrepresentation, and quite frequently are the source of it.
Or: I'm not saying that if you pop on to a random subreddit you'll immediately find gold-standard, unbiased people. But I am saying that for any given domain, if you find a niche community and browse it for a bit, you'll get, on average, much better information than you'll get from reading news articles on the same topics.
Another extra feature of niche communities like various specialized subreddits, or HN, is that the experts, the pretend-experts and the wannabe-experts will engage in a discussion. This does not only help filter out obvious bullshit, but also provides extra information and can tell you when a problem is so complex it can't be accurately summarized in a headline or a short article.
However, I still think it greatly underestimates the prevalence of misinformation in specialized communities (e.g., I have never found a valuable subreddit), and greatly overestimates human ability to know when they are being mislead. And the latter is far more difficult when trying to understand, as a non-expert outsider, experts in conversation about their domain. I fear what someone outside IT would walk away from HN thinking about some things. Even I have a hard time identifying the BS sometimes.
Subreddits are the answer to the philosophical question: 'Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what they're talking about?'