Yes. People see the name of the project and want to discuss the project in general*—not the minutiae of the latest release. This is a problem because most of that energy goes to the most popular, best-known projects, leading to repetitive discussion, which is the thing we most don't want here. It also crowds out lesser-known interesting stuff.
The solution we've arrived at over the years is to have a major thread when there's significant new information (on a popular topic) but downweight the others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
* Edit: here's an example from today's Emacs thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30932332. That was the top comment on the page just now, until I downweighted it. (Downweighting generic subthreads turns out to be one of the highest-leverage moderation thingies we can do to help thread quality.) It's a fine, perfectly good comment—but it's about $PROJECT in general, not anything new. Such comments are half the fun of HN but they need to not overwhelm discussions in order for things to stay fresh.
