I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad—whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable, as long as they're not done too often (at which point they'd count as generic).
We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case because it seemed more important to communicate to the community about this.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Without introducing more UI/UX it could then work like this: On-topic comments would go first, then side/generic comments and then down-voted comments. Side-vote would be a little like down-vote, but side-votes would count against other side-voted comments.
As always it would go down to many checks and balances. So it it easier to say then do.
Your manual intervention as you describe is often visible and welcome.
edit: that is to say, I wouldn't expect user-driven signals to automatically partition or downweight subthreads, I was more curious if they are useful in existing moderation actions and how they might extrapolate.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a distraction that takes away from the important stuff.
Here's an implementation. We have up and down voting. Let me vote these sideways.
This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone with "meta" turned off.
A lot of the "meta" is useful to me.
I come here for the comments, and like all the comments, even most of the silenced blurry ones.
Sometimes it sounds like a echo chamber, but I like the diversity of this crowd.
I think most of the regulars here realize HN has some strong rules. A bit too strong for myself, so I refrain from saying what I really feel.
I think most of us know the culture at Hacker News. Would I like to see the boundaries expanded--yes, but I understand most of you are afraid of this site becoming Reddit, and so am I.
A bunch of niceties over a article, or controversial subject, is not helpful to me.
(More meta coming up. Does anyone know the exact source code to HN. I've seen the old source code at Git. I'm looking for something current. I want to learn Lisp, and programming a site I like would be nice. Or, is there another language better suited (I guess more libraries) that would be a better fit for a HN clone?)
Maybe @dang is right that the negativity actually results from both popularity and timing of comments. That's an intriguing hypothesis. It wouldn't be right to kill the popularity of HN, but maybe there's some way to fix the timing or visibility of comments. I hope that doesn't mean a complicated moderation system. Maybe a new algorithm could help.
The right thing to do is to downvote it. If you can't downvote comments yet, well, they'll usually get downvoted by others soon enough. IMO, the nice thing about HN is that for all that it's imperfect, compared to most of the internet the community moderation (and official moderation) works very well!
There are also comments that are perhaps not exactly related to the story, but are adjacent enough to be on-topic or arise naturally from conversation. It's natural for conversations to move between topics, and many of these discussions are super interesting!