I like thinking about the purpose, because I doubt there is a defined purpose right now. I have absolutely no idea why whoever hosts this site (ycombinator?) wants comments - if they're like reddit or twitter, though, it's to build a community and post history, because you can put that down as an asset and, idk, do money stuff with it. Count it in valuations and whatnot. And maybe do marketing and data mining. Or sell APIs. Stuff like that. So in this case, for the host, the "purpose" is "generate content that attracts more users to register and post, that is in a format that we can pitch as having Value to the people who decide valuations, or is in a format that we can pitch as having Value to the people who may want to pay for an API to access it, or is valuable for data mining, or, gives us enough information about the users that, combined with their contact info, functions as something we can sell for targeted ads."

For me the "purpose" of discussion on HN is to fill a dopamine addiction niche that I've closed off by blocking reddit, twitter, and youtube, and, to hone ideas I have against a more-educated-than-normal and partially misaligned-against-my-values audience (I love when the pot gets stirred with stuff we aren't supposed to talk about that much such as politics and political philosophy, though I try not to be the first one to stir), and occasionally to ask a question that I'd like answered or just see what other people think about something.

Do you think there's much "learning from eachother" on HN? I'm skeptical that really happens much on the chat-internet outside of huge knowledge-swaps happening on stackoverflow. I typically see confident value statements: "that's why xyz sucks," "that's not how that works," "it wasn't xyz, it was zyx," etc. Are we all doing the "say something wrong on the internet to get more answers" thing to eachother? What's the purpose of discussion on HN to you? Why are you here?

The purpose of my comment is I wanna see what other people think about my reasons for posting, whether others share it, maybe some thoughts on that weird dopamine hit some of us get from posting at eachother, and see why others are here.