> low quality discussions

I'd put your citations of tweets clearly expressing personal opinion as devaluing the conversation.

I typically find highly rated comments on HN as useful in adding new information or perspective to an article or discussion.

I agree. I would argue that I get a lot more value out of the comments than than the linked content.

The only major issue I have with the comments on HN is that early ones get a lot more upvotes, causing later--but just as valid--points of view to be lost.

The early bird gets the worm and the early comment gets the karma.

Maybe a dynamic system that randomly shows an order weighted on upvotes in the past X minutes. That’d give fresh comments a chance to compete.

When a discussion is interesting enough for me to want to follow it, I will search the page for "minutes ago" to find the newest posts. It might be nice if new posts were highlighted for some amount of time.

I have a user script for that [1]. If you visited a story's comments before, it will highlight new comments and can auto-collapse threads without new comments. Otherwise, it gives you a slider you can use to highlight the X most recent comments.

[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees

That's on our list.

Hacker News temporarily lifts new comments towards the top for a couple of minutes to give them a chance of being seen.

I have to agree. The rules can seem a little ridiculous and somewhat arbitrary seeming here sometimes, but i have to admit, HN probably has the highest level of discourse on most articles I read here, sometimes better than the articles themselves, than most other sites i tend to browse. I read with showdead on and i find sometimes it's somewhat insightful to read a dead comment and figure out why. Sometimes they're completely infactual, spammy or rude but other times it's hard to figure out why.

Above all though, I learn things here all the time. There's some really knowlegeable people here and the range of topics that gets covered is more diverse than you might think.

I can't remember exactly when, a few weeks ago at least, i remember seeing an article about brewing tea or something on here and there was an extremely in depth discussion on the subtlties of tea and effects of brewing. There was some chemistry thrown in there and some oddly specific knowledge. It was great. I don't think i've ever learned so much from a discussion on tea before.

Also, just some of the personal anectodes and life stories i've read here really blow me away sometimes.

I've browsed a lot of different sites, the community of people here seem to be unlike most other sites, even similar ones.

There's a fairly high level of snobbishness and disconnect from some oddly ordinary aspects of life...and honestly sometimes I worry this site is full of sociopaths....

But, it's a pretty cool community of people that reminds me of the days of the old internet in ways that a lot of other sites don't. I never really feel like I'm wasting time even reading comments here, because the amount of accumulated knowledge and experience just seems to be a lot higher than pretty much anywhere else I browse regularly.

If you can dig up the discussion on tea, I'll ask Craig to add it to the next highlights list (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...).

I think it may have been this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654982

It seems familiar. That was the most recent I could find. I'm honestly not too sure. That discussion's pretty good too if it's mot the same one. There were a few articles about tea that came up in my search.

I honestly can't tell if this is a shallow dismissal or if you are proving your own point by being the most upvoted comment.

I don't immediately see the relation to his random tweets almost a decade later?

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rofl