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Still, please don't "Did you even read the article"—it doesn't help. However, if you (or anyone) notice one of these generic subthreads sitting at the top of a thread, gathering mass and choking out more interesting discussion, there actually is something super helpful you can do: email hn@ycombinator.com to let us know. We downweight those, and doing that is perhaps the single best moderation thing we can do in large threads. It makes a huge difference.
Just please remember that the problem is a co-creation, and the bulk of it is caused not by the root generic comment but by the upvotes they routinely attract. It's more a tragedy-of-the-commons thing and not worth taking out on any individual user. The solution is moderation, i.e. a module whose job it is to watch over the main system and jiggle it out of its failure modes.
I plan to add software so that users can help identify and downweight these generic subthreads. Pending that, though, emails hn@ycombinator.com alerting us to these are greatly, fabulously appreciated.
Though admittedly this article would probably be easier to approach if it was broken up into four parts that could each be addressed in different threads.
