[dang]

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.

[tentacleuno]

This also seems to happen quite a lot for Firefox on here, Dan. I'm a bit tired of seeing Firefox releases on the home page as (IMO) there's never much interesting about the new version. It's mostly just, as you put it above, people wanting to discuss the project in general.

[dang]

Yes.