Comment sections are like a bus without addressing. Everyone needs to scan the content of a message and decide if it's for them.

How good would software and ml have to be before you wouldn't really need to have centralized forums? If the content of messages could be sufficiently indexed automatically- not in the sense of keyword searches but in the vein of actual comprehension- surely there are ways of doing that without anything that far from what currently exists. I don't think it would require skynet.

As someone who has only ever succeeded in bringing down the level of every discussion i have ever been in and never in contributing anything useful, it would be very helpful if i could just be automatically directed to the appropriate content sewer by posting my thoughts directly into a search engine that could dump them in the most suitable location.

Sounds like you're describing current year social media.

The point is that, for many years, there was a well shared understanding of what was signal and what was noise on HN - even if there were hot disagreements on the content of that signal. This is changing.