[bjourne]

I have noticed that too and it is pretty fucking annoying (+). If the article is about US colleges then the first comment is always about over education and how not every job requires a college degree. If the article is about trains it is about how the US, unlike Europe, is too large for train networks. If it is about renewable energy, the first comment is about how the green movement is shooting itself in the foot by shunning nuclear. And so on.

I think you could at least partially solve the problem by having the ranking algorithm bias more heavily towards recent comments. As it is now the first comments are much more likely to reach high scores than later comments, which is stupid because it might take an hour or two to read an in depth article and formulate something insightful.

+ - And I've been guilty of it too.

[chroem-]

Many people would already consider HN to be a bay area-centric echo chamber. Based on the examples you listed, this seems to be an argument to explicitly enforce that echo chamber so that nonconforming posts are blocked outright. At that point, why even bother allowing users to discuss things at all, if posters are only allowed to agree with each other?

[jgwil2]

Nowhere does GP suggest anything of the sort. Only suggestion is to weigh upvotes less heavily relative to recency in determining comment order.