The sarcasm didn't come through, sorry.

Recently it seems like almost every post has a comment thread about how the post isn't hacker news... those threads end up being more annoying than the posts imho.

I've noticed that too. These comments are in the same category as people complaining about being downmodded; they don't make very interesting reading. Perhaps I should put something in the site guidelines about them.

Even more concerning to me is how frequently these "not hacker news" comments are added to posts that are off the beaten track (i.e. not about code, startups, and such) but which I find genuinely interesting. The last thing I'd want for this site is diminished diversity. I don't like the spam or bait posts either, but I'm glad you haven't cracked down on them in a way that triggers this other, imho more significant risk.

Edit: while I'm at it, the "not hacker news" noise belongs to a more general class that I've been training myself to tune out, which is the "meta hacker news" category. A bad day here is one in which there's more discussion of the site itself than anything else. And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm doing it right now. :) But I've been resisting it successfully for weeks...

Perhaps before posting any post that contains red flag words or phrases should require an additional confirmation:

This post contains words that suggest you are being boring. Are you being boring?

Strings that stick out: "belong.*on hacker" "doesn't belong" etc...

Interesting idea. Though of course the way to do it is to train a filter...

I can't wait to read a post on the use of Markov chains or Bloom filters to prevent boring posts.

If your Markov chain can plausibly generate the post - it's boring?

Please do. It's really getting ridiculous at this point.

Meh. I had really meant the above post to be a sarcastic satire of the 'this isn't hacker news' posts you all just mentioned. Sorry, I suppose it sounded different in my mind.

>Recently it seems like almost every post has a comment thread about how the post isn't hacker news...

Most of the ones I've noticed are on stories such as "entertainment celebrity x dies", "politician y does z unrelated to tech", or "OMG we're all going to die as soon as the economy collapses and we devolve into cannibalism and the last survivor is driven insane from Global Warming and kills himself".

I don't read every comment thread, but it's mostly those stories that I see "not Hacker News" on.