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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how you could ever hope to have productive debate on say an article about global warming. It's not a local topic, it's a difficult topic, there's millions of regular people and trolls around the world waiting to blab about something they don't have any clue about.

It's hard for me to imagine what a comment on a Washington Post article could add to the article or to anyone's knowledge. It's user involvement for the sake of user involvement. "Healthy debate" is maybe unobtainable at that scale.

HN can get pretty ignorant and off in the weeds (hey we're all guilty) fairly often, and that is despite being topical, relatively small, having relatively informed users and active moderators.

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I think the biggest thing forums and comment systems need to do is to ban tedious comments. On subjects that have been debated to death, it is really annoying to see all the comments for a new article just be repeated talking points that I have seen a million times before. I would suggest sites have a single mega-threads for debating hot topics. Then make a rule that for any new article, you can only write a comment that says something new or something specific about the article. Forbid writing generic arguments that have already been covered in the topic mega-thread.

A ubiquitous example of this is the Facebook "Like" button, which the creator of which said she wanted to "solve the redundant problem":

> So how did the like button come about? What problem were you trying to solve? I was trying to solve what we called the redundant problem. So for example, if you write "We're getting married!" all the comments used to say "Congratulations" over and over again. I found that really aesthetically ugly, plus, every time someone did say something heartfelt, the post was hard to find among all the other redundant ones. [0]

I find a similar situation on YouTube, where commenters don't add any insight or discussion to the video, they just say something like, "Great job!" or "Beautiful music!". Not a problem in itself, but when you have hundreds or thousands of these comments it leaves out real room for critique, questions, etc.

GitHub has a similar feature with reactions to issues.

However, one small concern I have is that such reactions might "dumb down" user/viewer participation and give the impression that using a reaction is all you need to do to have an opinion. Real discourse requires thought and reason, and not just slapping an emotional sticker on something.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/mbag3a/the-inventor-of-th...

I've thought about something similar - a site that would be the canonical source for all arguments. Something like Arguman but with a mod policy as strict as Stack Exchange, a more approachable UI, and each point is its own thesis statement that could be plugged into different argument chains.

It wouldn't allow for great conversations, but I like the idea that I could write a blog post, go to this site, pick a couple of thesis statements that basically sum up my article, and plug them into the bottom of my post. When people reply, they'd need to reply to those arguments and use the conventions that the site establishes.

Let the inaugural cordoned-off HN comment sink be about Electron apps having high resource usage.

While this is true, that would also eliminate 95% of potential posts. I am more inclined to "you cannot post until you have proven you read stuff" ala https://meta.discourse.org/t/additional-optional-barriers-be...

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