[dEnigma]

Personally I found Hacker News to be the best place for serious and thought-out comments. Research and critical thinking is rewarded (most of the time), while silly jokes (when not embedded in more substantial comments) and inflammatory content are frowned upon. It's actually a joy to read comments here, while I really dread —and often avoid— it on other sites.

Apart from that, technical forums for specific topics, like the ones for certain Linux distributions or other open source projects, have their merits; but they are naturally limited in the breadth of topics discussed. (Some might have very interesting and broad off-topic discussions though)

[mseebach]

I largely agree, but HN has some blind spots in this regard - most discussions about the workplace, open plans, working from home and especially interviewing almost invariably descends into angry rants and borderline conspiracy theory. My gut feeling is that this had been pretty constant, but the comparison of this thread with two years ago suggests otherwise.

I've also had a couple of brushes recently where what I considered reasonably calm and uncontroversial posts on a technical subject got alternating up and down votes for hours. I don't recall that happening before.