That being said, I find it frustrating that every topic has the first 2-3 comments be something completely tangential to the point of the submission.
For instance, say there's a submission for "company A buys company B". The often upvoted comments will be about how A will destroy B, B will destroy A or how they both are terrible companies based on anecdotes and lots of personal opinions.
You will often find that the 4th or 5th comment will have a sensible commentary on what that means for the market, the synergies, challenges, etc.
IMHO, the latter should be the upvoted comments because you'll learn something and there's a sensible discussion by knowledgeable people.
One solution is to put the burden on moderation to kind of super upvote those comments. But that doesn't scale. Should HN have "super upvoters" (people whose upvotes add more than just 1 point to the comment)?
One of the things I like about HN's system is how simple and transparent it is. I don't have to worry about how some algorithm is going to treat keywords in my comment, upvotes, downvotes etc. Instead, I just upvote what I find interesting and write what I think others might find interesting.
There are definitely downsides to the system too (like the ones you mention), but ultimately I think it's a decision to pick the least bad interface. Sort of reminds me of that Churchill quote ~ 'democracy is the worst kind of government except all the others' (or something like that).
The good thing about nested forum software is that you can ignore entire sub threads that you don't like.
HN has a major problem with it's comments but tangential discussion isn't it.
But seriously, I get tons of value out of writing and reading comments that start with “tangentially related: ...” On a recent thread on ZFS I asked for advice on a system build I’m doing and got tons of great advice. Anyone working with ZFS implicitly cares about building physical systems (so they can abstract over them), so without being especially on topic, my question and the ensuing responses create “peer reviewed” information that is germane to the same crowd of people reading the thread. It’s like a human powered recommendation engine: “interested in this thing? Here’s a sampling of the neighborhood of nearby topics that people who are interested in this about also care about.” It lets you traverse an idea space at an organic, human level in a way that no other medium manages. A+ would ask and answer tangentially related questions.
It sounds like you have your own personal opinion of which commentary is “sensible” that you want to see.
But nobody is obligated to share your opinion. The point of democratic upvoting and downvoting is precisely to allow everyones’ different opinions of what makes a valuable comment to compete and the net result determines comment order.
It’s rude for you to imply the result of that process has a “signal to noise” problem. That’s your opinion, which you can use to vote like everyone else. If you don’t like the results, that doesn’t mean you should rudely insult them by suggesting the situation needs “improvement” due to poor “signal to noise” problems.
Given the insulting nature of your post and the implied arrogance of believing your assessment of sensible comments is better than the community average, I’m inclined to believe that if the type of comment you would prefer isn’t appearing in the top few, that’s probably a good thing, as it means these negative qualities of your own communication might be less correlated to the top voted posts.
One suggestion I've seen put forward would be to have story submissions include a quiz about the article which must be answered correctly before commenting/voting. This would obviously add friction to the process of engagement, and not everybody would like it, but I found the thought interesting.
Another approach would be to allow different categories of upvotes, like slashcode-based sites have. Then users can set "Informative" comments to get precedence over "Insightful" ones in their personal browsing, since "Informative" typically means that a comment is related to the story and "Insightful" merely means that upvoters agreed with whatever was being expressed.
I'm not arguing that either of these options is right for HN, just throwing out a couple of possibilities that seemed relevant.
So you basically want people to repeat whatever pablum is in the related press releases?
It's largely self moderated, right?