HN does not have any unique angle or personalities that can comment on these topics, and it basically devolves into a "blue team good, red team bad" and a few -50 libertarians in every single article. A Markov chain could write the comment threads.
- Ignore the article.
- Ignore the comments.
- Participate but try to raise the level of discourse.
Note how complaining in the comments about how political stories are a problem is not a solution. That's because it's at best being ignored, but more likely adding noise to the discussion or starting an obfuscating thread about it, like this whole thread.
The only thing complaining does is possibly make the comment writer feel slightly better by being able to vent, but at the expense of everyone else. I hope you and the others at least got that little bit out of your comments, because at least there's some small benefit to this thread then (that's not meant to be snide, I truly do think it's a better outcome than this being a complete waste of time).
For this article, I'd say, it does qualify +5 on informative, and 0.5 on flamebait. It clearly worth attention
One wonders if one could construct a quality system for message boards that uses markov chains to predict common comment patterns and then reduce their visibility.
This would create a system similar to Amazon's "statistically unique phrases" view of books. Might be interesting to play around with.