I don’t think HN should aspire to have comments of merely equal quality to the source material.
Why exactly do you think that subpar articles must automatically lead to bad discussions? That’s far from a given for me. The topic – users as products – is certainly interesting and touches on a whole host of issues that are traditional HN lore, from Google’s business model to startup monetization.
As I said, eloquent 1,000 word essays that emphatically disagree with Gruber’s position are certainly possible. Instead there’s spam.
