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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

Tbh, I don't see most articles staying on topic. They'd be much shorter if they did not add the human angle, some backstory, and that time somebody did something that hilariously failed but led to whatever somebody is writing about today.

And how do you even decide what's on topic and what's not? Is pointing out some flaw of some pattern on topic for an article that says "this pattern has this great advantage", or is only that advantage and its greatness on topic? I'm pretty sure the perceived width of any topic varies between readers, so others might not consider that same things off topic that you do.

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There is almost always a main idea to any given topic (it starts and ends by saying something specific).

> And how do you even decide what's on topic and what's not?

Good point. But in general, one can sense an overall picture emerge out of a comment stream. As you scroll and read comments, you can tell when the stream provides value or not. My point here is, that when people do not stay consistent to the original topic, the value of the comment stream goes down. And here, I'm not talking about comments being totally out of context of any given original topic. Even a slight divergence leads to unnecessary path down the road.

You are right about there being a main idea. And then there's all the off topic-stuff that surrounds that main idea and makes the article long enough to be considered an article ;)

The value of comments are very subjective. To you, they might not be valuable, to me they might be (depending on my mood, maybe).

When talking about things, especially with people you don't know and without all the non-verbal side-info, you'll often have to agree on what you actually mean with some term you're using, and off you go from an article about any topic to a discussion of not-really-related things.

I don't have the impression that people just jump to very off topic things, but then again, you might be reading totally different submissions on HN based on your interests vs what I click on. Maybe if you gave some examples of low-value off-topic-discussions, it'd be clearer.

How about an example of say, someone shows something new on HN, and the number of commenters providing alternate services, line up? I guess the 'shameless-plug' types are fine (because they provide value) but my point still would be, why not just discuss the pros and cons of what is being shared?

Or, another example may be. It has been consistent, that whenever a thread starts up about any given password managers, the discussion right away diverge to myriad of other password generators. Back in the days, it used to be about bookmarks managers.

I agree that this is a subjective topic in itself. My main concern is that as the number of people commenting gets large, the value being derived out of any post, gets challenging. My argument here is, that this should have been potentially managed better online.

It sounds like you're weighing depth vs width in comment sections. By depth I mean "more detail on this single thing", by width I mean "more over an overview of things like this single thing". Maybe you can tag users accordingly, and ignore comments based on the "this user tends to go wide, not deep"-score. Would be something to show (and get annoyed with endless possible alternatives mentioned in the comments ;).

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