[aray]

> Because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions, it ends up skewing an entire discussion.

I haven't thought about this before on HN, but it makes a lot of sense. I'm curious if you or others have written about this intuition and your experience with it -- I'd like to understand it more.

[dang]

I've written about it in comments over the years. You might find some interesting cases in there: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... It's one of the more reliable phenomena we observe on HN.