The reason I stay on HN is the signal to noise ratio is considerably higher here than on any other site.

It isn't even close. Digg.com used to have it and so did reddit, but it degraded so much that they became unuseable.

More interesting/well thought out bots on hn

To me there were two ways of using social media: #1 interacting with people I know about things in my life and #2 interacting with third-party content and then people I don't really know.

To me Facebook, Instagram and Twitter went completely downhill when it became about #2 for me and my social circle. Twitter was the first, followed by Facebook and then Instagram. I just deleted them in that order. To me they became divisive, angry, political, it made following certain friends impossible, it made people addicted to it, it generated influencers, it made certain friends behave strangely IRL (communicating via meme language only).

HN is definitely #2, but way less political due to moderation.

I like the fact that there's less politics - I know that many people might call it censorship or something, but I feel like it does do somewhat to reduce doomscrolling, as it is one of the topics that people are deeply invested about. Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism (low-effort social conservatism, kneejerk reactions to technology, toxic startup grindset positivity), that I still tend to get sniped by.

For interacting with the people I know, I try to collect Signal/Discord contacts for those who I find valuable enough to talk at a future point, with the end goal of moving all contacts I know to Mikoto Platforms (a messaging platform that I am building).

I wonder if we can even call what happens here with politics "censorship". Apart from things that get flagged, political articles, or anything that causes flamewars, are still there if people want to keep posting/replying... they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling. And the exact opposite of what Facebook/Twitter/Instagram do!

> Still, there's that mix of "A Modest Proposal" style faux-intellectualism that I still tend to get sniped by.

Hah, same, this also grinds my gears!

> they just get dropped out of the homepage. So it's really anti-doomscrolling

Can those two sentences really live together? I mean, if you go hunting down content and more importantly discussions outside the homepage, isn't that some flavor of doomscrolling?

Is it because of moderation or because people come here to learn about STEM & tech?

You could have HN for politics, or art and philosophy.

That split can also be recognised by the change in naming- social networks vs social media.