In my opinion, it seems like you may be taking random internet discussions a bit too seriously; I don't actually expect too much meaningful programming language discourse to occur in Hacker News comments. I think the reason why I keep coming here is in part because it's one of the rare public forums where occasionally some truly interesting discussions really do happen, but don't forget Sturgeon's Law. For better or worse, public and open forums are rarely productive places to have discussions, and a lot of the real innovations certainly seem to happen behind closed doors. (Personally I greatly prefer public forums for discussion, and even would prefer anonymity if it were feasible, but I take what I can get.)
What does that say about participating here? Well, for me, sometimes when I write a comment that I feel is constructive, reasonable, and honest, it goes gray anyways, and it's easy to chalk it up to people just irrationally downvoting it because they don't like my opinion. It's also pretty easy to do this, I just need to be cynical about Apple or optimistic about the Go programming language, or something similar, and there's some percentage chance it will go negative depending on presumably who sees it first. It's not going to stop me from doing so, and ultimately it's pretty inconsequential, as I'm just some guy and my opinions are not really that important anyways.
Somehow, even though I have all of this internalized, I can't help but go 30 nested replies deep into threads debating about something senseless and unimportant, but it almost feels like it wouldn't be the Internet without debates like that. XKCD 386.
What does that say about participating here? Well, for me, sometimes when I write a comment that I feel is constructive, reasonable, and honest, it goes gray anyways, and it's easy to chalk it up to people just irrationally downvoting it because they don't like my opinion. It's also pretty easy to do this, I just need to be cynical about Apple or optimistic about the Go programming language, or something similar, and there's some percentage chance it will go negative depending on presumably who sees it first. It's not going to stop me from doing so, and ultimately it's pretty inconsequential, as I'm just some guy and my opinions are not really that important anyways.
Somehow, even though I have all of this internalized, I can't help but go 30 nested replies deep into threads debating about something senseless and unimportant, but it almost feels like it wouldn't be the Internet without debates like that. XKCD 386.