I ask you then, who are we if we don't have our experiences? What defines you as a person? Let the man speak. It might show that there are more cases to this dilemma than just one lonely person who experiences this.

He's more than welcome to start his own thread to speak, rather than just dumping irrelevant stuff in other threads.

It's fairly typical that the entire top half of this comments section is about michaelochurch and his honesty (which I'm not especially interested in) on a Hacker News item about a specific ethics debate regarding Facebook and hiring (that I'm especially interested in). This is the second day in a row that michaelochurch has specifically centered a popular item's discussion on him in a completely irrelevant manner:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784685

He knew, writing it, that people would call him out on the relevance of the comment so he threw in that little flourish at the end of the comment to establish some kind of a weak link between the content of the submission and his comment. None of the same wording here, just a completely irrelevant comment that's not even loosely related to the submission.

Just look how far you have to scroll in this comments section to get to the discussion about the SUBMISSION ITSELF. Seriously. In all seriousness, I have no idea who michaelochurch is, nor do I really care about his escapades against Google or his honesty or quality as a person. I just want to read discussion about the topic at hand on Hacker News.

(edit: strongly edited)

There is an easy answer to such (real or perceived) attention-whoring: folding. I should be able to collapse the entire thread related to michaelochurch, and quickly move on.

Web boards: reinventing Usenet every 3 years since 1996.

Due to this comment, I have implemented the comment-folding feature as a Firefox+GreaseMonkey script (which also seems to work in Google Chrome as a Chrome Extension for me).

It lives at: https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027

Smashing! Using it now, works quite well.

One comment: the triangle gets a bit confused with the upvote/downvote buttons. Maybe it'd be clearer if it was something like [-] / [+]... it would also enlarge the clickable area a bit, probably.

Not a bad idea. I found the Unicode glyphs for "Squared Plus" and "Squared Minus" and used them instead. They needed to be scaled up a bit but after that it was fine.

This latest version of Hacker News Comment Hiding is available at the same URL as before, https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027 .

This is absolutely awesome - thanks!

Here ya go! https://gist.github.com/8aa2f590dcd0cdd7179f

Link to a bookmarklet which folds all child comments when you click on a top-level parent. (top level parents only sorry!)

I've taken to downvoting such comments. Not because I disagree with them or think they are wrong, but simply because they are offtopic and taking the place of a better ontopic comment. We really need an 'offtopic' flagging mechanism.

1) I'd argue that downvoting is an appropriate course of action for this. As I understand it, the purpose of downvoting is to discourage the type of comment or submission being downvoted. 2) A little Javascriptiness to collapse trees of comments would do wonders to make it ignorable, too.

Not to spam, but I took your suggestion and implemented it at: https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027

Unfortunately, downvoting is going to do absolutely nothing because there are a plethora of people upvoting it.

It must suck to be forced to read and respond multiple times to it, too.