Small thing to note: While a lot of intelectual discussion does go on in /g/, the board's culture does often encourage misleading information and trolling. Browsers of reddit and Hacker News are often called out and ridiculed, and a number of technologies are dismissed based on being ran by "SJWs".
If you can filter out these things, /g/ does have a lot of discussion, but it is very different from Hacker News.
Every board has this issue, and the UI makes it difficult to follow the discussion. If you're not in it for silly greentext and a half hour (at most) of bantz, I think it's an uphill battle for quality.
It is better than /biz/, though, which is just MLMs and bad crypto advice it seems.
