As much as I don't like meta comments I'm going to have to make one finally, because I think about it every day and just need to get it out there to at least relieve the pressure in my head.
Why is the top voted comment so often about the title of the story? I guess it's because it's the first thing we interact with and it frames our expectations, but man alive, the title is probably the least interesting thing about any article posted to HN but consistently I see top rated comments talking about the title. Maybe it's just lowest-common-denominator.
And it's not that I think the comments themselves are bad, it's just weird to me that I consistently see them at the top of the page.
Apologies for the meta rant, it won't happen again, at least from me. (In fact the reason we have a lot of meta comments might be the same as the reason we have a lot of title-comments making me a bit hypocritical, but I digress.)
I think it's because people upvote most often when they share a particular opinion -- and your first opinion is mostly about the title of the article.
For example. I saw the title, clicked through (also opened comments), gave the page a once-over (didn't even read) -- came back here, and saw that first post. I also agree with the guy said, I thought they came up with some amazing new way to view regular diffs in 3D. So, I would have upvoted. Maybe it's just me, but I'm guessing far more people do that
In this case, possibly because it may provide some value to anyone reading the comments before the article. I too through it was going to be a diff for text files using a different visualization, not a diff of a specific file type. In that respect, it's a clarification of whatever summary you might infer from the title.
In short, I found the comment useful, it not necessarily inspiring of conversation (although a discussion of different visualizations of changes may be worthwhile).
I've thought about this before and attributed it simply to bikeshedding. When something interesting pops up people really want to be part of the conversation but don't have the background to talk about the main topic so they comment about the meta information.
Why is the top voted comment so often about the title of the story? I guess it's because it's the first thing we interact with and it frames our expectations, but man alive, the title is probably the least interesting thing about any article posted to HN but consistently I see top rated comments talking about the title. Maybe it's just lowest-common-denominator.
And it's not that I think the comments themselves are bad, it's just weird to me that I consistently see them at the top of the page.
Apologies for the meta rant, it won't happen again, at least from me. (In fact the reason we have a lot of meta comments might be the same as the reason we have a lot of title-comments making me a bit hypocritical, but I digress.)