I think people leaving facebook en masse would be a good thing (TM) for society, not a doomsday. Fewer echo chambers, less disinformation, and people forced to make effort to contact each other.
Hacker News is at least somewhat informative in the tech sphere. It tends to favor more esoteric technology like Lisp in lieu of things like Java & JavaScript which is far more favored on Reddit/Programming. Politics are mostly left leaning mixed with some Libertarian views. There is a good splattering of non tech stuff as well (music, art, literature, linguistics...etc). I'd say it's a far cry from fake news and cat videos.
Its cause of the people. The more popular something is the worse it gets until eventually its all cats and outrage-culture "fake news". The medium is irrelevant.
Media sucks because you* suck.
*The collective societal you, not the particular individual you.
This effect is partially muted by the fact that one can only see the vote status of one’s own post. There is still a tendency toward conformity, but at least the suggestion to vote with other readers isn’t apparent like it is on many content aggregators/discussion media.
Yeah but I can predict pretty accurately which of my posts will get downvoted and they all have the same thing in common; they challenge the left-leaning groupthink common here.
Some might claim they get downvoted because they are "low quality" to which I'd retort why spend a lot of time crafting a "quality" reply when you know it's going to be suppressed?