[dasil003]

This highlights one of my main problems with social media in general which is that popularity does not correlate well to utility. Even in a relatively niche community like HN there is still tendency towards shallower, more general articles simply because they are applicable to a wider audience so they inherently attract more upvotes. But if you're running a business, the most important thing will be domain knowledge, and the most useful information will not be something found in a blog post that goes viral, but insight and wisdom discovered by insiders who have concrete, applicable experience. Finding these people is of course much harder than popping open HN, but it's possible if you stay focused on smaller communities and networking within your industry. Keep your nose to the grindstone long enough and you will become one of these people.

That's not to say that there's no value to be extracted from popular subjects. Of course there is a lot of capitalization to be done on trends and fads, and mass markets are the biggest, but as a daily visitor to HN I think I can safely say that I could come here once every two weeks and gain almost the same marginal value, significantly less than what I'm gaining in daily work experience.