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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Note to 6 out of the 7 commenters so far: this article is about distributed systems, not lying per se. I'm hoping this is not a bellwether of how many HN readers actually read the article.

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Most of the earliest comments seem to be like this. They just aren't so obviously incredibly off-topic as they are here (because the title matches the topic better). Someone who reads the article and thinks about it, assembles information from their own past as well as quotes and sources simply can't write a response as quickly as someone who just throws out a one-liner based only on the title.

It does happen more on certain types of articles (those that "everyone" feels they have a valid opinion on) but I have noticed this on pretty much all articles. Sometimes the commenters don't even read other comments that warn people what is not relevant to TFA.

I figure it's just the latest variation of "first post!" Slightly more content that might be on topic, but still driven by the same impulse.

This is a perpetual complaint on every link based board that has commenting as we know from Reddit

I wouldn’t put too much weight on it

i was thinking that. would be an interesting idea for a ranking penalty: underweight early comments to compensate for the momentum they build just from being early.

HN has a system for weighting generic or offtopic comments that aren't really connected to the OP, but it involves human review.

I thought I was amongst a group of morally upstanding article-readers but it turns out it was all lies.

I often come here for the comments as I often learn more from the comments than the actual article. I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing.

Nothing wrong with that. But the (toplevel) comments should still reflect the article. Otherwise it can be quite annoying for people who do read the article.

Says a lot about people on this website, don't it?

The trick to this is to downvote or flag the offtopic comments and if you want to comment, write an on-topic comment. Writing meta about other comments just adds to the offtopic commentary and ends up working against the thing you're trying to improve.

... so, like a significant number of articles on HN where all the comments only discuss the title or something tangentially related to it instead of the actual article? Not sure why it's any different here than on other posts.

It's annoying on those posts as well.

I disagree. It's just the nature of how conversation works and it gives us interesting discussions and insights. I think it's more annoying that you want to try to control the direction discussions can take.