It's not the reading or even the submitting and commenting that worries me. Reading affects no one but the reader, and HN has pretty effective self-regulatory mechanisms for maintaining the quality of submissions and comments.

What worries me is the voting, which is anonymous and hard to self-regulate. Take a recent, heavily-technical article that made the front-page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730286 How qualified is someone (who just learned that something like Coffeescript is even possible) to judge the technical content of a blog post about how GCC shuffles references between the stack and registers, or the discussion around said blog post?