Comment by concordDance
5 months ago
I'm quite curious on your retrospective thoughts on this thread once this article goes off the front page! Also whether you'd do the same again.
Having looked around, probably around 80% of comments are mostly uninteresting/partisanship (though a fair few of those combine the mud slinging with an interesting fact or argument, which complicates categorization).
(Aside: One of the issues for me is that on high emotion topics like this I can't take people's word for things as much as in a usual thread, it just becomes visual noise)
My thought is that it's not great in absolute terms but reasonably ok in relative terms. Any thread on a topic this intense is going to have a lot of qualities that aren't good-for-HN.
We do some moderation things to try to nudge it in a more reflective/interesting direction, but there's a limit to how much that can help.