You need to think about it this way: historically, the comment pages of HN have made for very good, diverse, and interesting reading. One learns odd and varied details about historical technological decisions, rocket engine design, et cetera... anything may come up. The commentators on Hacker News include a wide variety of domain experts, mildly historical figures, legions upon legions of extremely experienced programmers, managers, entrepreneurs, and so on. This is what has drawn most of us here. The comments, ideas, and speculations produced by persons such as myself are fine, perhaps, but frankly, they're not nearly as interesting to read.

This leads us to one of the most frustrating oddities of the Hacker News website: you can't collapse the comments. If there's a tree structure of comments, every comment will take up at least a good thumb's width of screen space.

The consequence of this is that every comment is an imposition on the reader. Every comment needs to be able to account for itself. Posting on Hacker News is a performance, rather than a conversation. We're on stage, whether anyone wants us there or not, and unless we're trying to write words that other people might find valuable, unless we're at least trying, then yes, we will be swiftly downvoted to oblivion by everyone, including people exactly like ourselves. There may be annoyance behind it, but there's scarcely enough thought wasted for malice.

One-liners must be very informative or situationally relevant messages. And properly capitalized and punctuated. Or else they should go unwritten.