> If this medium is only for a specific subset of ideas

It is - "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There are countless websites for generic news discussions. To keep at bay the flamewars of the outrage news cycle that kill other discussions, this is not one of them.

This site is curated. Most of us prefer it that way. If you want to read an endless stream of memes and other nonsense you can get that elsewhere.