Counterexamples:

1) Every Bitcoin thread

2) Every NSA/Snowden thread

Source (cough): I've been around for 6.3 years, am in the top 40 users in terms of net karma, and am actually very frustrated with the unfortunate turn the community has taken in the past 12-18 months. And am considering leaving, which makes me sad.

I've only been here slightly under five years, but I've lost track of how many people have made "unfortunate turn"/"this place is going downhill all of a sudden"/"Oh no, the proles have discovered the site" complaints over those years.

That behavior certainly doesn't add anything to the site.

It's not all of a sudden. It's been the past couple years

Not sure what either of those two topics has to do with this thread..

There is an unstated willingness to have content-less congratulatory posts on threads of those two topics. Usually puffed up with a few "look how smart I am" sentences.

That said, I'm pretty sure my highest karma (~50) comment was a joke about Tau Day back in 2008. Soooooooo.

My highest scored comment ever was a one line throwaway at 250 or so. So I hear you.

Absolutely nothing, so downvote away. I'm just expressing my overall frustration with this board.

I think it would be sad if you left.

thank you. i'd be very sad if i left, too.

I, too, would be sad. Why do you want to leave?

For the two reasons I mentioned in my OP. Thanks, too. It's very nice to hear.

I think it's going to become more necessary to moderate through downvotes. I've almost never downvoted anybody on HN ever, especially not in comparison to reddit where downvoting is extremely rampant, but I think, sadly, the times might be changing.

Maybe they need to turn down the account-ghosting requirements a few notches?

I'm not actually familiar with that one. Clue me in?

Well chances are that the OP I responded to (I can't even see his name well enough to repeat it he's so faded now) will have his account ghosted if he keeps this up. One too many mega-downvote-comments by a new user and you end up being ghosted. Where you still think you're posting to HN, and you are, but nobody else can read it.

All I was saying is perhaps if pg et all decreased whatever threshold they have set for account ghosting, that we may see less of these pointless comments in the future.

It is not automatic, as far as I know. It requires human intervention for someone to be hellbanned, or "ghosted". It isn't very systematic, and I've seen people hellbanned who probably didn't deserve it (and it usually does get fixed when that happens).

Perhaps it would make sense to automatically hellban possibly problematic posters and then hand review those hellbans later. Worst case scenario is a good posters posts aren't seen for a short period of time.

They're referring to "hellbanning"