For instance, the person who has the highest karma is in Brazil. Very few of the people I have met on Hacker News are in the Valley and San Francisco, but I have met people from North Carolina, Philadelphia, Portugal, India, Singapore, ...
If you're interested in both technology and business and you've had enough of the self-promoters promoting self promotion that dominate LinkedIn and other social media places, Hacker News is a refuge.
What is missing from Hacker News is a handful of sensationalist topics that dominate the mass media but lead to discussions that never go anywhere and never terminate.
That's what they are designed to do. Neither the democrats or republicans want the situation with guns or abortion to change dramatically because it would disturb an ecosystem where they can count on a large proportion of the population to vote for them automatically, thus they can get elected while promising less.
What both sides have in common is they look at a place like HN and think that their side is being discriminated against because they are special snowflakes who really have something to say that matters about fake controversies and they don't seem to be satisfied posting to the 99.99% of forums that are choked with that stuff.
The real difference between HN and the social media giants is the business model. I believe Y Combinator runs HN to extend it's reputation, attract startups to join Y Combinator and otherwise participate in it's ecosystem. To do that it has to have quality.
Facebook, Google and other companies based on advertising pretty much have to be merchants of outrage because that is what people click on.