[adw]

HN has always been a tense standoff between a few cliques, the first two being the ostensibly intended audience;

* competent and curious engineers

* entrepreneurs, who live on a continuum where one end is...

* ...hucksters and snake-oil purveyors, of which there are plenty, and

* (because this is the Internet) conspiracy theorists and other such loons

and recently

* political provocateurs

You can make a thread work (for that group of people) if it self-selects who reads it. Unfortunately, AI is catnip to all five of these groups, so the average thread quality is exceptionally low – it serves all five groups badly.

Whether some of these people _should_ be served well is a separate question.