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?"