I don't disagree with anything you have to say here. The problem is, you're talking about how things would work on a site that isn't Hacker News, and I'm talking about how things are not working on a site that is.
I think it's fair to say, even from the perspective of an impartial observer (I'm not one), that Wikileaks ran this whole comment thread off the rails. This is a discussion about what will probably be the biggest news about DNS over the next 2 quarters, and DNS has --- literally --- taken a back seat to someone trying to explain to Jacques what Joe Lieberman represents in US politics.
The arguments in favor of injecting WL into these discussions strike me as very similar to the arguments Ron Paul advocates used to inject Paul into discussions in early 2008.
True, I don't think it's working as-is. I'm picturing HN the way it could be, and it's clouding my judgement of its current UX (I picture "jumping down to the next sibling node to this node" as a single atomic action, so my brain doesn't record the time I spend doing it.) And, since people had to scroll so far to get to something relevant, they were more likely to give up and comment on the tangential sub-thread instead, which deprives the relevant threads of comments (assuming posters that don't read the entirety of the discussion.)
However, we do have the Arc source; what is needed now is a good incentive to actually implement/fix this stuff, other than just scratching itches (because if that was enough, it would have been done by now.) "A competitor to HN that does it, runs ads, steals traffic, and makes money" wouldn't work, because the value of HN is 99% the community...
I respect and admire the ingenuity and initiative HN hacker-types have, but also recognize that those qualities tend to lead to feature-y tech-y solutions to every problem.
The problem we're having isn't technical. It's simply bad-faith comments: comments made to advance an agenda (along the theme of "what's the point of a silent boycott", ie, "yes, we're protesting, not discussing the actual topic") instead of a topical discussion. In the WL case, the fact that WL approval trends 3-1 in favor means those bad-faith comments get jacked up in rank.
This thread is also a non-topical digression from Amazon Route 53, but the whole HN item is a lost cause and the meta discussion about how HN is mishandling this is more valuable than what's actually leading here --- again: arguments about Joe Lieberman.
If I were a different sort of HN user, I'd post a "Tell HN: Please Stop With The Wikileaks Stuff". But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.
> But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.
And that's the thing... you can't expect people to not try to advance their own agendas. You have to make a system that's robust in the face of human nature, not expect humans to subvert their nature to use the system. There will always be something like Wikileaks (on Reddit, that something is omnipresent pun threads that can sometimes eat ten pages before you find the rest of the discussion) and asking the userbase to stop won't help (I don't think...) as long as it doesn't visibly harm anyone the user cares about ('round here, if pg says stop, you'd stop, because he's in everyone's Monkeysphere, but that's not a principle that can work in every forum.) In the tragedy of the commons, the best solution is to get better commons.
The only part of this comment thread that you are posting in is exactly rhe one about whose length you complain so loudly, and it would have been at least 50% shorter if you had not done so.
You did not discuss anything whatsoever in the rest of this thread and in spite of 'leaving people to help themselves to the last word' you keep coming back for more.
I think it's fair to say, even from the perspective of an impartial observer (I'm not one), that Wikileaks ran this whole comment thread off the rails. This is a discussion about what will probably be the biggest news about DNS over the next 2 quarters, and DNS has --- literally --- taken a back seat to someone trying to explain to Jacques what Joe Lieberman represents in US politics.
The arguments in favor of injecting WL into these discussions strike me as very similar to the arguments Ron Paul advocates used to inject Paul into discussions in early 2008.