Sometimes you need to give the HN comment section some time. First people that didn't rtfa comment, then the skimmers, then the better in depth comments flow in...

It's good to call this out, because it's possible that the less valuable comments will accumulate enough engagement that the later in-depth comments will be found at the bottom of the thread.

I work in healthcare (or health-tech), I sometimes forward articles from HN to colleagues or higher management. Often times I regretted that based on comments that came in later on articles. So now I muster up the discipline to wait some hours, keep the tab with comments open en refresh every now and then. I hardly ever get disappointed and the comments reveal the true value of an article almost without fail and always with extra resources to back up why a claim is true, false or questionable. I love this community for this reason and it provides a lot of value to me and via me my colleagues.

A good example is the recent discussion on the amyloid plaque "cabal" [0]. The comments confirm, but also attenuate the article, and together with my own experiences in science I feel confident to forward the article. Comments and discussions such as [1] are clearly from people deeply involved in the field or at least from very knowledgeable people, and they nicely balance the often polarizing articles.

Imho the HN algorithms seem to work very well in getting quality content to the top, given time (an article may well be gone from the home page by then).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21912471

There needs to a word for making a comment based solely on misreading the title. It happens all time. Or how about another word for making a comment without reading the other comments and realizing that many people, sometimes hundreds, have made the exact same comment you want to make.

I nominate 'Litella' for misreading the title and then commenting. This is based on the SNL sketch played by Gilda Radner in which her character would comment on 'Soviet Jewery' by going on about 'Soviet Jewelry' Usage: Don't litella your comment next time

Karma-eager people, or karmeagers.

Karmongers?

DRAAA := didn't read at all (again)

DRA = Didn't Read Anything, or ORT = Only Read the Title

would be my nominations

Karma-haste.

The purview of "could have been" is that of the imagination, i.e. fiction. Nobody knows what would, or even could have been, one can only surmise. I submit that in this sense those "hints" are, in fact, science fiction. (Notwithstanding anyone's hot-takes on the title.)

Sometimes the most interesting comments are only tangentially related to the article. Think of the article’s topic as a starting point, not a boundary to stay within.

There is a word for that: threadjacking

When it's a top level comment, I would not use the word threadjacking, and I would not say it's very problematic.

Replies need to connect to the comment they reply to. That's not the issue here.

Direct replies. One of the best features of tree-based discussion is that "thread-jacking" not only isn't a problem, it's beneficial. A discussion tree can handle subthreads and tangents just fine.

There's also another term for it: casual conversation.