Internet comments get provoked by seeing something one objects to. When the thread is new, the only things to object to are the article and the title, so comments come from people objecting to those. Such posts tend to be reflexive and shallow because those are the fastest reactions to feel and the quickest to write. Mostly they are made from pre-existing thoughts and pent-up energy; there hasn't been time yet to absorb (let's call it) the fiber of a story—the specific information, the diffs, the curious bits. Thus they tend to be generic and angry, and usually are just triggered by some surface detail. Not good, but here we are.
Then there's a second wave of commenters who post objections to the objections. Those usually get upvoted, and that is how we so often end up with a "I can't believe these comments" or "WTF HN" comment at the top of a thread.
It's a mechanical process which has nothing specifically to do with either the content or the community. The community is simply large enough that for literally any $X there are sufficient readers who will reflexively object to $X. We're all full of reflexive reactions, just to different things.
Is that what we want here? No, but it's important to diagnose it correctly. The objections-to-the-objections wave (and yes, there are third waves too, and on it goes) can be just as reflexive and shallow as the original posts. The quality of these comments doesn't come from the content or the specific views being expressed—it's about what level of (let's say) the nervous system is producing them. If it's a fast, reflexive, cached reaction, that's not interesting. It can't be, because by definition it's about something else—something one has seen or felt or argued about before—while interest means being interested in this, what's new about it. For that one needs to access a slower, reflective mode (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Responses of interest are slower to appear and seem to come literally from slower processes in the body. It takes time to process new information and for a new response to form. New responses are interesting and produce richer waves of conversation, as people have new responses to those in turn. We could call that the curiosity dynamic and that's what we're going for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).