Edit to add: What's motivating me continuing this discussion is that I feel like you're pushing back on encouraging people from doing better, from improving how they engage with others. I'm not sure if that's really what you intend, so please do elaborate on that point. Clearly this is important to me, so I appreciate that you're taking the time. (Though, with that, I'm signing off fir the night. It's late :)
As an empirical matter, I would note that most threads (both here and on simmilar sites, such as reddit) seem to follow a predictable life-cycle. An initial wave of low quality posts gets down voted and gives way to more thoughtful discussion. In less trolly topics, the "low quality" posts are actually ok, but still give way to much higher quality posts through upvotes.
We can argue about the cause of this lifecycle. I think the general effort calculus I explained above is a part of it. However, I think that often times having low quality posts to respond to can be an effective prompt for high quality posts to respond to; or for a poster to consider why the thoughts expressed in them are wrong, and write a better top level post. Of course, this would be better done with high quality posts, but those take more time.
Put another way, the best way to get a good answer is often to give a bad answer and have people correct you.
edit for your edit:
I am pushing back because: A) I think you initial post is low quality. As such, it has led to (in my opinion) fruitful thinking on my part, and hopefully a fruitfull discussion. and B) Underlying your initial post is, in my opinion, a fundamental misunderstanding of how these threads work. I don't like you insulting everyone who comments on this thread just because you saw the thread at the ugliest part of its lifecylce.
I also think that one of the reasons for low-quality comments is due to people reacting reflexively and emotionally rather than reflectively and thoughtfully, and the intent of my comment is to remind people to take a beat before commenting. It's not motivated by the idea that the commenters are "bad" in some way, or to insult them. I get caught up often as well: I've certainly written posts that I then decide not to submit, or delete soon after submitting. As mentioned above, it takes effort to do this, but I think that many people do want to comment well and constructively, and that for many a reminder is useful.
One of my goals here is to minimize the initial period of low-quality comments and hopefully quiet the more heated subthreads. My comment wasn't a response to the comments that were already there: I hoped to get in early enough that those early commenters might see my comment and reflect a bit before posting something thoughtless and incendiary. I understand that this isn't going to stop all low-effort/low-quality/less-thoughtful comments. If we can shift the default towards more reflection, I think this can have a net positive effect on discussion quality overall, as well as perhaps encourage people to refrain from responding to the less-thoughtful comments, or responding in a way that can guide the discussion back on track. I know this isn't a novel idea, and it might be fruitless.
(As an aside, I had read this particular op-ed before it had been submitted to HN. I think it has some interesting points, and some that I disagree with, which is fine, and could be improved, but it is one worth discussing. I thought about submitting it, but had a pretty good idea of how the discussion would go on HN and decided not to.)
I think my thinking is consistent with how you understand threads like this work. Would you agree? Perhaps one difference between your position and mine is whether or not we can do anything to improve the sutation. Like you, I have a lot of respect and admiration for the work 'dang and 'sctb have done in moderating HN. Whatever quality has been maintained here is in part due to their efforts and those in the community who respect the place HN is. One point I do disagree on is the utility of low-quality comments. I'm glad you can see some positive effect from them. I'm a bit chagrined that you felt my initial comment was of that variety, but admit that it might have been better. The few times I've attempted this type of comment before have been longer, and I can see how "It would be really amazing if" can be read uncharitably. It reiterates to me the importance of the effort of all participants in communication.
You mention in another comment "This thread would seem to be a counter-example." Do you think our discussion may have played a role in that? It's impossible to ascertain this definitively, of course, and I chose the word "may" deliberately. Perhaps a better posing of this question is do you think discussions of the kind we're having could play such role? If you think it's possible, what is a better way to craft such a comment?
Maybe this is true on HN to some degree, but this is definitely not the case on reddit as a general rule. Here's an observation from an ex-mod of TIA:
At bigger sub sizes, unpopular opinions don't get that little bit of extra breathing time to justify themselves. Instead, the votes come in just too fast; circlejerks rise to the top immediately, while different ideas either get downvoted or simply ignored, languishing at the bottom of the comment section.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3qjsga/what...
You can see this happen on all sorts of different subreddits where people who post thoughtful opinions that go against the current "meta" of the subreddit get down voted viciously no matter how correct they are. For visibility being first and being in tune with what the community wants to hear supersedes being right or being thoughtful. That's not to say that thoughtful and well written posts don't rise to the top. That's to say that the system frequently does not work this way at all. Especially on subreddits where the community is majority polarized in a certain direction.
Low effort content that incites a reaction is a hallmark of the upvote system and currently the only thing that I've seen curtail it is human moderation.
An interesting thought experiment. Imagine a site like Reddit disabled all external numeric displays of score for a year. You'd only have indirect indicators like order prioritization and apparent visibility based on the number of comments responding to a post. Would usage increase or decrease relative to what it would have otherwise? In my opinion it would not only decrease, but somewhat precipitously. There are a vast number of people that seem to participate almost solely as a means of increasing their score. And even for those not fully addicted to the system, it certainly provides an emotional feedback mechanism. Without this, I do not see these users participating as much - nor do I see a sudden influx of others to replace them. On the other hand, I also imagine this would likely substantially increase overall quality. Like you mention low effort content that incites a reaction is a hallmark of gaming these score systems.
[0] Dang does have a comment but, if I understand the meaning of [flagged] correctly, it was user downvotes that triggered the killing, and Dang just provided commentary. There is also a perfectly comment marked as [dead], which I assume is a shadow-ban for an unrelated matter.
Inevitably it is the culture of the posting community and the adherence to that culture that allows for this kind of thoughtful posting to occur. Moderation is a fundamental requirement as well. I've seen many instances in large subreddits that experiment with relying on the upvote system that end in total failure. For a time the community policing works, and then the front page is dominated by low effort content and shit posting.
