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But firing comments from the hip derails discussion even worse by making everyone discuss whatever obvious knee-jerk reaction there is to the article. It's regularly the top comment thread where people are essentially arguing a straw man. And people have to scroll through hundreds of comments to get to the next thread so they receive far less attention.

It's HN's worst aspect.

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> But firing comments from the hip derails discussion even worse

The proper response, then, is to downvote the derailing comment, not to respond with an attack. Downvotes are HNs tool for maintaining S/N ratio, attacks making ascribing what you presume caused the poster to post in a way you find less-than-worthy don't deal with any problem, they just exacerbate it and fill HN with toxic noise.

You can also, if you see a particularly bad example sitting at the top of an active discussion, email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We moderate the threads to try to prevent shallow dismissals from sitting at the top, but we don't see everything.

I agree.

>derailing the discussion by not reading is perfectly okay

Is according to guidelines, not me. My fault that wasn't clearer.

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