"[...] with about 5 [contributing] users." On the 'consuming' side, it's more than 20X of that.

In any case, the raison d'être of this is to maintain a quality discourse around human health and biology. Why it doesn't "seem" to have achieved that goal yet is simply because it's a brand new project.

Now the reason for starting with Discouse is that, among its numerous capabilities, it actually does more than you'd expect when it comes to moderation. So it will help us maintain the quality as the community grows and we build our own tools.

Again, this is still in its infancy phase and even HN didn't look like HN on day or week one; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

I guess good things don't get built up in a hurry :) especially good communities.