There's always been the talk of HN's comment quality deteriorating.<p>Why not turn off new account signups for a while to combat this problem?<p>Or even have more friction in the signup process. (Maybe I'm looking at the wrong part of the problem.)
I'd opt for a 'post anonymously' button as staunch suggested.<p>The only reason is not everyone that uses throw away accounts are doing so to troll others. I've seen several submissions where a person posts something extremely personal (ie. problems with their current job to dealing with depression or contemplating suicide) and they would not post under their real account for obvious reasons but still seek the support of this community. It could be a bad idea to hinder the ability of these people to post situations like this anonymously and promptly.
The account which posted the question is 33 days old. Alas, I have pledged myself to avoid gratuitously beginning my comments with "ironically."<p>HN is a gateway to and a tool of Ycombinator. The gateway function means that there will always be some degree of endless September by virtue of its purpose.
What kind of friction are you looking for? A coding test? An IQ test? A general knowledge test? (Each barrier to participation would select a different group of participants.) Or should cash money be the sign-up criterion? If so, should high-karma participants get a share of the proceeds?
Turning off new account signups won't reduce low-quality comments, unless in the rare case that HN is being raided. (i.e. during the Adria Richards incident)
If you turn off new accounts, how do you know you're not pushing away 10 high quality new users to avoid one negative user signing up?<p>The only thing I could suggest would be to lower the bar for downvote capability. Or is that not an option at all? I thought I was told at some point that once you reach 200 "karma" you get that ability, but I don't have it.
My only suggestion is to add a "save to local" button. That would mean that I would save most of my comments to a local store, instead of posting them to HN.
It is worth contemplating that 'quality' doesn't exist without a 'subject' and an 'object'. There is no such thing as universal quality. In other words, what you might class as poor quality might be good quality to someone else (some other 'subject').<p>So, given I don't think you can actually say that the quality is deteriorating, the question is flawed.