What's not helpful is for someone to just read the headline and then start spouting off about whatever comes to the top of their head, without reading anything.

What's not helpful is for someone to just read the headline and then start spouting off about whatever comes to the top of their head, without reading anything. This problem is prolific throughout all sites that permit comments. Youtube is probably the most egregious. I do not believe this could be solved adding UI or UX changes or without adding a lot of friction. People will continue their habits that feed their endorphin and adrenaline addictions. On HN people quickly scan through articles and to your point fire off a comment and move onto the next thing unless the topic is interesting enough to keep them engaged with the community. So I think this is not just changing the commenters habits but also changing the journalist or bloggers style of writing to keep titles short and hard to either misinterpret or get an emotionally charged response as many authors try to do for engagement. I am skeptical that this level of changing global human behavior could be accomplished without some risk+reward system and those systems become gamed or risk killing off a popular site. Every site would have to implement the same changes on a global scale to keep authors honest and tone down the commenter replies.