No offense at all, and I realize this happens with zero intent. It's a tragedy-of-the-commons thing. No one creates the flamewar, and still a subthread like this ends up gathering mass at the top of the page on a regular basis, clogging out the curious conversation.

There's nothing so simple as an index. Perhaps that's for the best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum. One can certainly use HN search to see which topics have this generic quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thanks Dan. I'll try to keep the generic/specific dichotomy in mind.

That would catapult you to the top 0.5% of HN users. I'm not sure this distinction is really getting through, though it seems obvious to me after staring at these things so much.