I'll skip all of the side issues that I see being covered elsewhere.

I believe that Nodes to Consider (imperfect though it is) can be a good noise filter if used properly.

I didn't suggest reaping 70% or even 1% of the content, as I am quite happy with 99.99% of it as it stands already.

What possible good does a 0.01% reduction in noise (or even 1%) give us? It doesn't make searching faster or easier ("Oh, thank vroom that I only have 198 matches to drudge through instead of 200"). Even a 10% reduction would be hard to notice. And Nodes to Consider is never going to give us a 1% noise reduction.

So what is the harm? I see several but I'll skip to the big one. Where do we draw the line? I don't want to condone the treading upon that slippery slope of "that doesn't seem useful, let's just delete it"!

Go look at NodeReaper's stash and marvel at all of the interesting nodes with interesting replies that have been reaped quite recently! A lot of them are off topic or "poorly researched", sure. But did reaping them serve some useful purpose? Now we have threads with ugly, nearly missing heads.

I like the cultural/historical accuracy that is maintained by keeping all of the "same answer but not as fast/good" and "thank-you note that doesn't bother to sum anything up" and even the "this guy actually posted 14 thank-you notes". I don't like the idea of taking someone's thank-you note and just throwing it away!

But, more importantly, I think that drawing the line very clearly past the "useless" category is important. Reap trolls and true duplicates (I'm not even in favor of reaping personal attacks).

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")