[lmm]

I think our culture has evolved this as a defence against shills. If positive low-content comments ("I just had a great experience with x") were an accepted and normal thing to post, pretty soon we'd fill up with astroturfers. If you're posting in support of something, you have to go into depth about what made it good.

I think this is good; HN is optimized for signal/noise even at the cost of missing out on some content. It would be better to have a culture that frowned on shallow criticisms (“Why don’t you have X, Y, or Z?” and “Why would you waste your time on that? 12 things like that already exist!”, as the article puts it).

Above all HN (to me) is the antitwitter; it's a place for serious, in-depth discussion. I wonder whether a minimum of 161 characters would lead to better posts.

[cypherpunks01]

Your 161-character minimum is an interesting idea. It reminds me of Randall Munroe's IRC moderator bot that only allows novel lines that have never been typed before to show up in the room. He also has an interesting discussion of different techniques to improve conversational SNR:

http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...

[hammock]

In-depth useful comments are key. The best analogy is Amazon product reviews- the high-star rating serves as an initial screener, but the real test comes with the reviews. Positive but empty reviews are ignored, the useful ones talk about specifics of the product. Finally a quick glance at the negative reviews to see if they are about something substantial, or are just about a bad shipping experience or something.

[SparksZilla]

This is a really interesting comparison to draw. What do you think of the 'movement' towards more transparent commenting systems like Disqus?