There will soon be 1000 comments on this page- none of which are merely simple thoughts. Nobody could read them all and still maintain a cohesive, holistic perspective on all the issues presented. Most of the comments themselves splinter into anecdotal tangents, and surely every comment has overlap with another comment here. But, should any comment be omitted from consideration? I think not, because every opinion presented holds unique value. We, as mere humans, just can't consider each one individually. Not at internet scale.
While it's a precarious use of ML, we really do need computational synthesis and analysis to draw trends from these discussions. We all know ML recognizes and reinforces biases- so we shouldn't be training a classifier by using HN's sentiment as a baseline. That said, we need a solution here, ideally soon. Until that happens, I won't be wasting my time dropping 2 cents into a bottomless void.