In all 3 cases, the original parent was a massive subthread, probably at the top of the page. When child threads develop under top-heavy subthreads and cause discussion to drift in a generic direction, away from the original topic, that's a problem for thread quality. This is one of the most common times when we detach subthreads. All 3 examples look like classic cases to me.
Moderating top subthreads in this and other ways is probably the single biggest thing that moderators do here to promote thread quality. It makes a huge difference. We've learned a lot about this in the last few years.
By the way, none of this is necessarily a problem with the detached comment, nor does it imply anything bad about your (i.e. the child commenter's) intent. Often the child comment has been posted for exactly the right reason—thoughtful conversation. But if it takes a step away from the original topic in a generic direction, or a flameprone direction, upvotes and replies often start pouring in, skewing the thread as a whole in a way that makes it less interesting.
In other words, this is not just the fault of the child commenter (and maybe not at all). It's a co-creation along with all the other repliers and upvoters.
The more we learn, the clearer it gets that we need to moderate not specific posts, but subthreads. Subthreads are the unit of HN comment moderation. (Edit: doesn't that mean—someone will ask—that you could maliciously derail/destroy a subthread by adding bad comments to it? No, because we can detach those. That's case (2) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402.)
Wow, thanks for taking the time to make that massive reply. This kind of Inside Baseball is facinating and really helps to take the mystery out of what goes on here. Surprised that this "tree balancing" really makes much of a difference.
EDIT: I wonder if trolls deliberately wait for and then target top main-threads, in order to maximize the blast radius of their trolling.
Lots of people do this without necessarily being trolls because they feel their comment would be lost, especially if some giant topcomment is dominating the discussion.
People also do the opposite - writing a toplevel comment to discuss (berate, more often than not) multiple other comments - 'I can't believe the nattering nabobs of negativism that have been commenting here, etc'.
In both cases, writing a good, non-repetitive, non-meta toplevel comment is probably better but it's more work and potentially unsatisfying - a lot of the time, a comment like that will in fact be lost in a big discussion.
As I've responded elsewhere in this subthread, a good top-level post can often succeed in gathering enough votes / mod attention to float up.
Probably not on the busiest posts (though those are something of a conversational lost cause already), but on most typical discussions without excessive comments, yes.
Searching for "by:dang <typical moderation phrase>" is a handy way for seeing what actions are taken, in what circumstances, and why.
I'll admit to tailing dang's comments periodically, or searching for specific terms when people challenge / inquire about my own takes on comments. (Most often in the case of dupe / non-dupe article submissions, occasionally others.)
Initial conditions, both over the lifetime of a post, and of a reader's encounter with a post, both have a huge impact on discussion direction. Much of HN's moderation seems to operate with this in mind.
Clickbait titles are de-baited. Indirect links are disintermediated. Divergent distracting comments are downweighted.
Much of my own interaction with the HN mod team (ask dang, I email fairly frequently, probably a few times a week) are with regard to link or title issues.
I'll also occasionally try to steer a discussion back on track with a top-level comment I hope more directly addresses the post than many early takes do. This isn't always successful, but I've been surprised several times where my own late-in-the discussion comment ends up highly-placed in the thread. One key is to really fight back against expressing frustration (the comments are usually born from an excess of that), and just lay out a strong case for an alternative take on what seems significant.
I actually did express that frustration out loud in this thread ... and dang commented on the initial-conditions aspect:
I looked for posts that match your description and found these three:
It looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058506 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058435 because it was offtopic - and probably also several other of the reasons I listed at the above link.
Looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28695222 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28694236 for similar reasons.
Looks like we detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30749836 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748070 for similar reasons.
In all 3 cases, the original parent was a massive subthread, probably at the top of the page. When child threads develop under top-heavy subthreads and cause discussion to drift in a generic direction, away from the original topic, that's a problem for thread quality. This is one of the most common times when we detach subthreads. All 3 examples look like classic cases to me.
Moderating top subthreads in this and other ways is probably the single biggest thing that moderators do here to promote thread quality. It makes a huge difference. We've learned a lot about this in the last few years.
By the way, none of this is necessarily a problem with the detached comment, nor does it imply anything bad about your (i.e. the child commenter's) intent. Often the child comment has been posted for exactly the right reason—thoughtful conversation. But if it takes a step away from the original topic in a generic direction, or a flameprone direction, upvotes and replies often start pouring in, skewing the thread as a whole in a way that makes it less interesting.
In other words, this is not just the fault of the child commenter (and maybe not at all). It's a co-creation along with all the other repliers and upvoters.
The more we learn, the clearer it gets that we need to moderate not specific posts, but subthreads. Subthreads are the unit of HN comment moderation. (Edit: doesn't that mean—someone will ask—that you could maliciously derail/destroy a subthread by adding bad comments to it? No, because we can detach those. That's case (2) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27132402.)
Understanding that online discussion gets less interesting as it gets more generic is one of the bedrock principles here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...