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Still, please don't "Did you even read the article"—it doesn't help. However, if you (or anyone) notice one of these generic subthreads sitting at the top of a thread, gathering mass and choking out more interesting discussion, there actually is something super helpful you can do: email [email protected] to let us know. We downweight those, and doing that is perhaps the single best moderation thing we can do in large threads. It makes a huge difference.
Just please remember that the problem is a co-creation, and the bulk of it is caused not by the root generic comment but by the upvotes they routinely attract. It's more a tragedy-of-the-commons thing and not worth taking out on any individual user. The solution is moderation, i.e. a module whose job it is to watch over the main system and jiggle it out of its failure modes.
I plan to add software so that users can help identify and downweight these generic subthreads. Pending that, though, emails [email protected] alerting us to these are greatly, fabulously appreciated.
Though admittedly this article would probably be easier to approach if it was broken up into four parts that could each be addressed in different threads.
Btw, a lot of the time these comments are perfectly fine as long as they're halfway down the page. Humans like to talk and we naturally talk about what we already know, and repeat things we've said or felt many times before—it's just the way we are. The problem comes more because people upvote the familiar (because hey! I feel that way too!), and then suddenly the more boring category (regurgitating the familiar) chokes out the more interesting one (new and unpredictable information). In most cases that wasn't the commenter's intention. The solution is for a countervailing mechanism, like downweights, to dampen the effect of this suboptimal one. Unfortunately that still requires moderator intervention, which is a bottleneck.
As detailed as your comment is, it doesn’t seem germane to the OP at all and appears to be responding to merely the title and the identity of the author.