I thought jerrya's original comment was reasonable until I got to, "citation-needed.jpg." I was actually "lucky" that he included that bit, making me question the relevance of his entire post.
It is not unintelligent or spammy comments that endanger the discourse at Hacker News. It is comments that seem to be saying something worthwhile that get upvoted and take up valuable real estate on the comment threads while being of almost no value that threaten to bring Hacker News too close to the multitude of other sites out there.
It used to be that the HN comment threads were multiple times better than the submissions themselves. I would have a very hard time arguing that today.
It is not unintelligent or spammy comments that endanger the discourse at Hacker News. It is comments that seem to be saying something worthwhile that get upvoted and take up valuable real estate on the comment threads while being of almost no value that threaten to bring Hacker News too close to the multitude of other sites out there.
It used to be that the HN comment threads were multiple times better than the submissions themselves. I would have a very hard time arguing that today.