I suspect that the software used for this entire community is having a significant non-epistemic influence on our content standards and probably the composition of community itself.

Image hosting is an easier thing to comment about. In general, editorial comments about the form of the post rather than the content are frequently easier to write, but they let people socialize and gain karma just as easily (if that is their real goal). In the meantime they can be honestly helpful at first but then clog up the comments in a way that makes real discussion harder to find and harder to post in a way people might find it.

The smallest change to the site's software that I suspect might fix this problem would be:

• A radio button for comments that specifies the "meta level" of the comment as either "process" (for stuff aimed at the running of the site itself, like this very comment), or "editorial" (the comments about image hosting), or "object" (in this case, a discussion of either neurobiology or the way scientists frequently lose track of concepts as they move from theory to experiment and back again).

• When a post has not yet been voted up to the main page all the posts should be defaulted to editorial unless marked otherwise by the commenter.

• When a post appears on the main page all editorial comments are minimized or otherwise suppressed unless people specifically seek them out.

We have 16 comments so far, and all of them are about image hosting.

This is not an easily skimmable post. Readers could absorb it much more easily if you cooked up a simple toy example — something that can be grasped without digesting six bar graphs with noisy real-world data in them.

And the parent's a meta-comment on the comments, and this comment's a meta-meta-comment.

I had a difficult time understanding the post on first examination - I promise to comment when I've read it well enough to start clearing my confusion.