[detst]

I'll concede that this wasn't the best place to make the point (I'll make it again, along with others, including PG). Perhaps I did look at spiff's comment in a vacuum and took advantage of this post being near the top of HN, but this is something that bothers me and clearly does PG, too. Yes, there are not any "platinum-quality comments" but let's remember that this is a recurring problem and that I'm not trying to pick on sspiff.

While it is not outright dismissal, it is dismissive in nature, and again, my primary issue is with voting, not necessarily the comment. I think we could still ask, quoting PG, "Yeah, we know that [Intuit isn't a startup]. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article?"

[and now it's getting down-votes after your comment despite PG making it clear time and time again that this is a major problem for HN]

[mgkimsal]

I think we could still ask, quoting PG, "Yeah, we know that [Intuit isn't a startup]. But is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article?"

-----------

For the time being, yes, it is. And given that it wasn't an article being linked to, but a site that included ebay and intuit under the banner of "startups", yes, this might be the most interesting point of the site people want to discuss.

[detst]

> For the time being, yes, it is.

It's a hypothetical not a question of the present state of things but either way, I disagree. Rachel's comment [1] (I understand it wasn't present when I made my first comment), while terse, is more interesting, more likely to foster interesting discussion and doesn't have the dreaded HN "middlebrow dismissal". And I have no doubt HN can come up with much, much better. The point being, it became a "magnet for upvotes" and nothing better ever had a chance to reach the top to encourage more interesting discussion.

> but a site that included ebay and intuit under the banner of "startups", yes, this might be the most interesting point of the site people want to discuss.

That's unfortunate; I've found HN to be a place to find great tangentially related discussion to otherwise uninteresting posts. That doesn't happen by accident; we need to foster it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5736869

[sliverstorm]

rachelbythebay's comment is an interesting choice. The core idea could make for an excellent launching point of discussion, but worded so tersely it comes off as very dismissive, which is exactly what you are trying to rally against.

it became a "magnet for upvotes" and nothing better ever had a chance to reach the top to encourage more interesting discussion.

This is an interesting way to think of it. I think we could agree that the most valuable comments will not necessarily appear until the article has aged a bit. Clearly HN tries to combat this by moving certain new comments to the top for a little while, but perhaps something more dramatic is needed. Perhaps for a certain period in the thread's life, for example, distribute comments with positive scores using some random seed such that higher rated comments will generally be near the top to avoid wading through a morass of poor quality, but any one (positive-scored) comment might be at the top for any given refresh.

P.S. I don't think you deserve the downvotes you are getting. I obviously don't exactly agree with you, which is why we are having this discussion, but I think you raise valid concerns and make them in a reasoned and articulate manner.