Similar to other social news sites: a great many HN readers go straight to the comments to chime in. Often the articles themselves aren’t even more than a few

Similar to other social news sites: a great many HN readers go straight to the comments to chime in. Often the articles themselves aren’t even more than a few minutes reading and the comments have questions and ideas that were directly addressed by the piece. There has been a long discussion about what to do about this problem (from slashdot to digg to reddit and so on) - however the idea of requiring commenters to jump through hoops or unpaid moderators to somehow keep the discussion factual seems more like a way to kill the site. For your amusement: pay casual attention to the comment count on any HN post that contains “apple” or one of their better known trademarks. No one is reading anything - it’s just a gangbang.