This is tricky to discuss since every NN is going to have similarities and differences. As for my personal experience on Excalibur's NN there's a mixed bag of Novices getting questions answered, Novices not getting answers, drama between mentors, off topic conversations, ect.

The biggest issues of these usually is the mentor drama, you have all these people with a role akin to a chat mod who can ban each other and it leads to some messy situations where the NN is flooded by pointless drama.

As it is right now it's just a default LS new players auto join with the topic being advice and help. This of course means all the problems that come with a large group of strangers talking in one place. (Heyo sounds familiar!) The biggest thing that would help is like mentioned before, some kind of moderation that has a final say, versus the wild west public policing itself. But even then I couldn't begin to tell you how that would work or what a better system would be.

TL;DR Group chats be like that tho.