zlacker

>>unquot+(OP)
Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction.

The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. They might have an interesting angle on the story, or they might just be saying trivial things with beautiful prose. In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few.

That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea.

Edit: "molding the discussion" -> "molding every discussion"

>>gniv+pB
> That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea.

The content is there, by lesser known figures and lurkers alike. It’s just hard to discover. You need to stumble upon it by accident, instead of by a deliberate process like consuming the top upvoted posts.

>>0x8BAD+b01
That's a good point. It could be that since we don't know how to scale curation (and use upvotes as a proxy), we exacerbate the problem of lurkers not having their (few) comments discovered.

As a counter-example, I find the "editor's picks" comments on some New York Times articles to be high quality and quite diverse. But that model, of course, doesn't scale.