> Beats all the "Trump did X, popstar married gf" crap out there.

No doubt, HN is one of the best resources for tech and tech adjacent topics. It has all sorts of people ranging from the experts to beginners. Also, tech is one of the easiest thing to provide proof or refute (Ofcourse subjective debates lik vim vs emacs, formatting, best practices exists for fun). So, the quality of discussions on those topics are high.

When HN posts deviate and gets into murky discussions like (geo)politics it gets ugly too. The title may not be "Trump did X" but the content on those related issues is not too far from that on other forums.

I don't think HN crowd and discussions are immune to the crap found on other forums, it's just the theme and majority of topics that reach front page are resistant and have less scope for ugly discussions.

That said, I'm not discounting the effort put in by everyone and the mods to keep the discussion clean but in the end we are all people and (hopefully) not AI bots and that shows sometimes.