> Interestingly, Hacker News has a fairly low barrier of entry and high quality discussions. Maybe because it's kind of ugly and scares away the average user expecting animated prompts and fancy style sheets.

Ignoring the hellthreads, the technical content here is pretty mid these days. The last year has been rough on this site. It's like reading a combination of r/linux and r/rust, a sort of nuance free assertion of FOSS-heavy technical preferences. If that's the echo chamber that you enjoy go for it, but even on Matrix I find a lot deeper content than here, let alone some Discords and smaller forums. What I do appreciate is the breadth on some more niche technical content (J and APL threads come to mind.) But IMO the glory days here are gone.

Social forums seem to "collapse" a few ways: die (like Usenet, many old IRC channels), calcify (many older forums I'm in, Lobsters), or become an echo chamber (Subreddits, this place.) I guess Eternal September comes for us all.