I've absorbed a lot of good information from HN comments, but I hate to say that the signal to noise ratio is not particularly high in 2020. Reading the comment section without a significant degree of skepticism could result in a lot of misinformation.
I didn't fully understand how off the mark the HN comment section could be until reading the comments for topics and companies I was closely familiar with. There are a lot of very confident posts here from people who don't really understand what they're talking about, mixed in with some great posts from people who know exactly what they're talking about. Take everything with a grain of salt.
I agree that there are plenty of incorrect comments, but that's life everywhere... You can't enforce truth for every comment, and especially not in a place with such general discussion.
Also, I've been reading HN for around a decade now, and I actually disagree that it's gotten worse. I like HN of 2020 too!
Are there any other similar sites that are better? (Asking seriously, I'd like to know!)
So if I have a choice to make, I prefer to push them towards a source where people who write nonsense are more likely to be corrected than a place where tribalism or conformism is so high that another opinion does not have a chance.
All of this is the introduction to discussions between us afterwards (where they get one more biased opinion - mine), but I prefer the topics they would get from HN than Instagram.
As an example, we spent a good amont of time yesterday when he brought up the case of a child (11 yo) that paid for the artwork of his mother. It was a very interesting exchange of opinions about what parents and children are entitled to vs responsibilities vs casual money management etc.
This is one of the reasons I like the non-technical threads on HN that much (myself being uber technical): you have often well-balanced people providing a reasonable (and often sourced) perspective on topics I have a faint idea about.
This is also why I am trying to push my teen children to read HN, so that they get a really unique perspective from a dynamic source, where they can quickly select the points interesting to them (as opposed to, say, tech or sociological magazines where you need to have a interest to read longer articles). It sometimes work :)
Without sounding like HN marketing dept, it is actually sad that it is not advertised more in these circles (teenagers) who could benefit from the discussions. My children go to very good schools and exactly nobody there ever heard of HN (not one single person)