@mostlyharmlessz Personally, not a fan of Hacker News. Its voting system (where most users can only upvote comments) encourages controversial and hostile statements rather than insightful discussion.

But as for Lemmy, subscribing to the right communities can help a lot already. A science-community will naturally have less memes, for example.
But yeah, different instances have different cultures, too. Unfortunately, it's usually smaller instances with on-average higher quality posts, so you get the flipside problem of not many posts/comments.
@vincent