I'm at that point too. I know if I click a link, I'm not going to get to read intelligent discussion until much deeper in the page. Take for example the article about the LinkedIn acquisition, top comment has people arguing over the origin of the word secular...

How about we solve this problem once and for all by turning this thread into a two-page series of complaints about how HN doesn't allow you to collapse comment threads. :P

I look at the comments to determine whether the article is worth reading. "The article is unreadable" is as useful for me to know as something like "Hm, everyone seems to be talking about a programming language I don't use". So I appreciate complaints about popups and the like being at the top.

(The other very useful comment at the top is "Warning, it autoplays a video")

I think Hacker News should allow tangents, but make them easier to hide. Maybe have a button to collapse everything under the top-level comment somehow. This would also be good data to collect as input into ranking.

I disagree that we should discourage engaging discussion just because it happens to be meta or only tangentially related. This is a user experience problem, not a content problem. More specifically, this is a use case for comment-thread collapsing where when, as a user, you come across a long thread that doesn't interest you, you can collapse it and immediately be at more content, rather than needing to manually find the end of the uninteresting thread.

This allows both for the community to drive the discussion to what most interests the community, and to allow those with different tastes than the majority to still participate without alienating or frustrating them or those involved in said discussion.

There are many browser extensions for HN, and thread collapse is possibly the most common feature in them.

I'm of the opinion that HN doesn't implement features like this on purpose, because they expect you to find a way to work around the limitations that works best for you, and that will likely result in a more customized and comfortable experience than them forcing their opinion of how the content should be presented on you. HN is somewhat notorious for having these soft limitations (such as not showing reply on very active threads for a few minutes, which also has an easy workaround for those that know).

I completely agree that I should be able to easily collapse any sub thread and also see only the comments that have been made since the last time I viewed comments on an article.

Flag?

Same here! This is now just a place where people gripe about whatever they don't like about web pages.