The Pokemon story you show in an example (and you wrote and submitted) looked interesting so I looked it up. I recall now that I had started reading it but never got through more than the beginning, because I got totally sidetracked by Twitch plays Pokemon which you linked to in the very beginning of your article. I guess I get to revisit and read that, so thanks. ;)
Granted, the primary reason I had written that Pokemon article was because the response of tech media outlets was essentially "lol weirdos" when the mechanics are pretty interesting.
I've always been interested in seeing a statistic that shows how often the top comment is a negative comment that attempts to controvert the original story.
Didn't someone try to run stats on this recently? Maybe it was the post that announced the same HN dataset was on BigQuery? I recall that some people weren't convinced by the accuracy of the sentiment analysis of the top comments though. I'll see if I can find it.
Edit: I think this[1] is it: "Hacker News as a case study to test the wisdom of the crowd theory". Not quite what you were asking, but you might find it interesting.