[Jack_Hacker]

Everybody can have an opinion about general topics tangentially related to a story; to have an opinion about a comment related to the specifics of a story, one typically has to read the story first.

One suggestion I've seen put forward would be to have story submissions include a quiz about the article which must be answered correctly before commenting/voting. This would obviously add friction to the process of engagement, and not everybody would like it, but I found the thought interesting.

Another approach would be to allow different categories of upvotes, like slashcode-based sites have. Then users can set "Informative" comments to get precedence over "Insightful" ones in their personal browsing, since "Informative" typically means that a comment is related to the story and "Insightful" merely means that upvoters agreed with whatever was being expressed.

I'm not arguing that either of these options is right for HN, just throwing out a couple of possibilities that seemed relevant.