I know it's against the guidelines to discuss the state of a thread, but I really wish we could have thoughtful conversations about the content of links instead of title reactions.
I believe this distinction is pretty fundamental to humans, so we're not likely to escape it, but the good news is that reflective comments do show up eventually if the article is substantive and the reflexive ones haven't ruined the thread. We also try to downweight the more reflexive subthreads.
Granted, a bunch of commenters are probably doing what you’re saying.
The brain processes and has insights differently experiencing it at conversation speed.
We might get what the conversation was that others had, but it can miss the mark for the listening and inner processing that leads to it's own gifts.
It's not about one or the other for me, usually both.
The criticism that people are only replying to a tiny portion of the argument is still valid, but sometimes it's more fun to have an open-ended discussion rather than address what's in the actual article/video.
edit: typo fix.