Comment by dang
7 years ago
This happens whenever a story is changing rapidly. It doesn't have to do with merging the threads—it has to do with different comments dating from when different information was available. In this case the initial story was "might acquire" and then turned into "has acquired". The threads weren't neatly partitioned before we merged them; people just post to whichever discussion they happen to see.
When a story has been changing while the comments have been accumulating, HN readers are smart enough to figure it out, and I'm not sure adding new software would help much.
The threads were neatly partitioned because they were all based on an initial source of information (the source article), but it was then merged into one mega-thread contained conflicting sources and thus it makes it confusing since all the comments which were based on different sources are now intermingled.
Also, auto-hiding my original comment? All I am trying to do is give some personal feedback in how you guys can improve your website and your response is to try and censor me? Let the other hacker news readers decide by voting considering that that is literally one of your companies essential startup advice: "For any company, software or otherwise, this means that in order to make something people want: you must launch something, talk to your users to see if it serves their needs, and then take their feedback and iterate" [0].
[0]: https://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-essential-startup-advice/
Not to disagree with you, because I understand your point of view, but for me the hiding doesn't come across as censoring so much as marking as "off topic, meta discussion".
People who care about that kind of thing click through and read it, otherwise it lets people skip over to read comments about the article.
I think it's reasonable to expect HN readers to realise that threads have been merged, but it can be difficult to track down the article in question all the same.
Whilst complex threading might seem to counter the simplicty of HN, might it be reasonable to include a link to the original article when merging?