It's a vital moderation function to do this, particularly when the parent is the top comment of the entire thread. Those tend to attract non-reply-replies, and that has bad effects on the thread as a whole. It causes the top part of the page to fill up with generic rather than specific content, and it makes the top subthread too top-heavy.
I'm not saying that you did anything wrong or that your post was bad or that it was unrelated to the original parent. The problem is that the effects I'm describing pile up unintentionally and end up being a systemic problem. It isn't anybody's fault, but there does need to be someone whose job it is to watch out for the system as a whole, and that's basically what moderators do.
Sometimes we comment that we detached a post from its original parent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and sometimes not. (Perhaps the software should display this information automatically.) I'm less likely to do it when a comment stands on its own just fine, which was the case with your post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007985 and which is usually the case with the more generic sort of reply—in fact it's one test for deciding that question.
> so now there is the whole other pointless branch polluting the relevance of the tree
Yes, please don't do that—especially in the top subthread. I understand the frustration of "WTF where did my comment go", but you can always reach us at [email protected] and get an answer.
Your original comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007985. I detached it from its original parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002977) because it was more of a generic tangent than a specific reply.
It's a vital moderation function to do this, particularly when the parent is the top comment of the entire thread. Those tend to attract non-reply-replies, and that has bad effects on the thread as a whole. It causes the top part of the page to fill up with generic rather than specific content, and it makes the top subthread too top-heavy.
I'm not saying that you did anything wrong or that your post was bad or that it was unrelated to the original parent. The problem is that the effects I'm describing pile up unintentionally and end up being a systemic problem. It isn't anybody's fault, but there does need to be someone whose job it is to watch out for the system as a whole, and that's basically what moderators do.
Sometimes we comment that we detached a post from its original parent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and sometimes not. (Perhaps the software should display this information automatically.) I'm less likely to do it when a comment stands on its own just fine, which was the case with your post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007985 and which is usually the case with the more generic sort of reply—in fact it's one test for deciding that question.
> so now there is the whole other pointless branch polluting the relevance of the tree
Yes, please don't do that—especially in the top subthread. I understand the frustration of "WTF where did my comment go", but you can always reach us at [email protected] and get an answer.