As amusing as comments like these are (I've seen another story today that had a "no" response), I'm worried that comments on Hacker News are starting to become diluted. A similar thing happened early on with Reddit, before it started its decline.

Ok. We get it. We've read that kind of message hundreds of times. We know the reddit/digg/slashdot decline cautionary tale. It's enough. Just stop. No more. No more!

Of course we know it. But that doesn't stop it from happening.

Sorry, I'm a bit of a worrywart. In the last week or so things seem to have noticeably declined. :-/

EDIT: Am I really harping on it that much? I didn't think I was. I'll try and tone it down a bit.

You are right - I thought the article is useless and the discussion is also useless as there is nothing to discuss but techcrunch/news.yc going downhill etc etc.

As there was nothing to dilute I posted the "No" comment just to see what will happen with it. Reflexive voting happened, but not too much (for the quality of the story and discussion).

There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html

I think this is also true of "diluting" comments. Once they become acceptable, the forum has had it. Everyone will say "it's already diluted, so what's the harm?"