What I mean by "cultural wasteland" is that you have a lot of social retards and moral cretins on here who, for whatever reasons, will gladly lumber threads with crazy sociopathic BS. You have to wade through and weed out a lot of arrogant unsympathetic bastards (like me.)
On the other hand, awesome people show up all the time like, "Oh yeah, I did that, AMA." I once interacted with Alan Kay on here! Carl Hewitt is on here regularly (trying to get people to finally pay attention to Actor model.) Walter Bright (D lang) is here. Charlie Stross replied to a comment I made in re: O'Neill colonies the other day. I could go on and on. (And those are just (relatively) famous people. There are all kinds of brilliant not-quite-so-famous people on here too. I'm just name dropping to make m'point.)
So that's nice.
- - - -
Another thing about HN is that it's not a community. It's more like a bar at a train station. Most people are just passing through and the regulars it does have should probably do something better with their lives.
Like me. I'm pretty much a recluse these days, and this HN account "carapace" is damn near the only outlet I have to communicate with the outside world. I'm on here pretty much every day (for better or worse) wasting time I could be spending on important projects (like my Joy interpreter. Heh.)
Imgur is more of a community than HN: those folks send each other pizzas! I'm seriously, there's a whole pizza club that just sends pizzas to imgurians who are broke and hungry. HN doesn't do that.
- - - -
To the extent that HN is a health community it's all about dang and sctb. Those two do an incredible job and I have nothing but respect for them. Ask them about HN's community health.
- - - -
Last but not least, IMO the way to judge the health of an online community (or any community) is to ask, "Has it made me a better person?"
FWIW, I think that participation on HN has, over the last few years, made me a little bit of a better person. I'm less knee-jerk sardonic, more willing to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. And I've learned to value good faith conversation over witty barbs and sarcasm. (Although I do still consider a good rant to be a kind of art, like slam poetry.)