I completely agree, and this is already mentioned in the guidelines:

  Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wonder if we should add a guideline about that, a la:

Please don't comment about your own comment ('unpopular opinion here', etc). It's noise and it's boring.

We already have a guideline against talking about voting. "Unpopular opinion but here goes" or "spicy take here but" is just normal human conversation, and it doesn't actually add much noise; sometimes it's even a little useful. I wouldn't crud up the guidelines with this, but maybe refine the "commenting about voting" guideline.

I wonder how to refine the "commenting about voting" guideline?

Normal chattiness in comments is totally fine. What's tedious is "I, the noble freethinker against the hideous masses" posturing. It's also common, because of the biases in how people perceive the community; basically, anything you dislike shapes that perception 10x more than anything you like, so most people's image of the community becomes an inverse image of themselves. This leads to a lot of noise and pre-emptive defensiveness, a sense of being surrounded by enemies in a hostile place, when the reality is we're all just wandering in a big statistical cloud.

It's such a fundamental dynamic at work here, that I'd love a way to distill it into a new guideline.

"Preemptive defensiveness" hits the nail on the head for me. It's most problematic when it's the first thing in a comment, and makes it difficult for me to take the rest of the comment seriously, no matter carefully worded it is. I find it easier to write off as chatty if it's later in the comment and / or more offhanded like "... although I know that's not exactly flavour of the month on HN." The fact that it comes first carries a subtext of "I'm not really going to phrase this carefully and I don't care what you have to say," like they're already writing off anything critical that others have to say.

How about something like:

Don't try to preempt reactions by starting "At the risk of being downvoted..." or "Unpopular opinion here..." State your case clearly and let your ideas stand or fall on their own.

The problem here is that ordinary people sometimes start deep conversations with phrases like "this isn't going to win me any friends, but..." or even "candidly:".

It's natural to guideline out people (1) working the metaphorical refs with asides about voting and (2) posturing and, at the same time, implicitly disrespecting even the notion that some people might disagree with them. The former invites horrible meta conversations, the latter is uncivil and toxic.

But you don't want to go so far that people have to alter totally normal speech patterns in order to avoid some conversation tripwire that the guidelines set. If you do that, you get more pointless meta threads.

What I think you want is a guideline that says "no matter what, don't talk about how your comments are being voted, and if you must mention the feeling you have that what you're about to say is probably unpopular, do it in a nice way, and quickly". I don't know how to say that with any kind of concision.

(A lot of things would work as guidelines if they could capture the nuance of "this way of writing is fine if you assume the burden of being extra gracious about it, but not fine to do casually and thoughtlessly". But it's super hard to distill that sentiment into a guideline!)

All good points. If I was able to write guidelines that clearly I'd be a happy person! But it does feel like it's a distinct kind of approach to comments that provokes people into responding and the comment thread starts to dominate other more interesting threads further down.

I would appreciate such a guideline.

I wish people wouldn't comment about other people's comments like this. Just up or down vote, this makes for even more boring reading than the comment you mentioned. Here I am breaking my own rule because I cannot down vote your comment.

But I don't want to downvote their comment (although I don't want to upvote it either). The issue with your suggestion is that a downvote will be seen as a vote on the content of the comment. There isn't a separate "downvote for special pleading" option.

I think the current guideline on voting should be changed to "do not downvote if you disagree with the sentiment of a comment, provided it is substantive and factual". I see way too many downvoted comments that are purely statements of relevant fact, or are sincere questions. If HN members can't manage being reasonable and logical about controversial subjects, how do we ever expect the average person on the street to do so? No wonder politics is so screwed up these days.