If I can be forgiven for an interesting meta observation, I think the time of day and the tone of some comments makes a big difference depending on the topic.

For example Snowdon topics posted during the European morning and then later on American users share their thoughts and comments. And then later on as Silicon Valley comes online.

same with RMS and other cultural issues, when just looking at the comments it's clear that there's differences in opinion due to different cultures.

I have not really observed these differences in pure tech stories though.