Comment by lurk2

One of my favorite blogs is a curmudgeon from a city I used to live in reporting on the gangs there. It’s his entire life and he’s been at it for probably 20 years now.

Even subjects that aren’t local interest are usually produced at a loss. Forums can often attract subject matter experts who discuss issues like this effectively altruistically (vs. platforms like YouTube where it almost always a commercial interest). The general trend is for these communities to fall apart as new users alienate the subject matter experts by being uneducated, presumptuous, and impolite (usually in that order).

Given the comparatively lax moderation of Hacker News, I’m surprised it has held out as long as it has. It’s nowhere near as good as it was even five years ago, but it’s still one of the only online spaces I visit everyday. There are a lot of people here (older guys especially) who could be doing anything else with their time, but spend at least a portion of it providing the discussion that makes this place so interesting to visit.

This is a dynamic you also see in education; anyone qualified to work as a journalist could probably make more money doing something else (“Those who can’t do, teach,”), so you select for a group that is either incompetent to be reporting on the stories they are covering, technically competent but unreliable because they grift to subsidize the field’s lower earning potential, or are technically competent but independently wealthy and thus potentially unaware of certain issues.