Contrarian dynamic in action: I'm not sure the first part you wrote about "reacting from cache" and "triggered" capture the entire phenomenon. From personal e

Contrarian dynamic in action: I'm not sure the first part you wrote about "reacting from cache" and "triggered" capture the entire phenomenon. From personal experience, an empty comments section only leaves the article to comment on with no inspiration for specific content. A poorly written article will obviously provide plenty of fodder (and inspiration!) but hopefully won't end up on the front page. Meanwhile, a well written one (which hopefully does end up on the front page) often doesn't leave me feeling the need to add anything. Worse, truly brilliant technical articles generally leave me completely out of my depth as far as commenting goes but are really what I come here to read. So the more desirable an article is (to me), the less likely I am to be capable of adding anything of merit. Assuming the majority are in a similar situation (which could be totally wrong of course), it seems to me that the initial comments will necessarily select for people with less common view points. Of course that includes "triggered" as you say, but I think it's also all sorts of other things - a unique angle, factually incorrect, controversial but correct, a genuine misunderstanding, whatever. (The time constraint would certainly favor "triggered" reactions though.) That would then naturally lead to the rest of what you described. (Ridiculous idea: Run GPT-3 against each new submission to generate a set of "seed" comments for people to disagree with, elaborate on, make fun of, etc. It would probably just end up derailing things, but who knows?)