Ask HN: Why do read you the comments

4 points by danfrost 4 years ago | 9 comments

Do you read the comments on HN links?

Why? What do you look for?

And 2nd question: do you read the original link before or after the comments?

And why..?

(I'm just interested for reasons I won't share yet as I don't want to influence the answers!)

brudgers 4 years ago |

2nd question: do you read the original link before or after the comments?

This thread shows that "reading the original link" has more nuance than rolls easily off the keyboard.

There's nuance.

How far does due diligence require wading into the swamp of a Twitter link? How many bullet items of Github Awesome List must be read? Or is scrolling down enough? Must I inspect the source of a linked repository?

Or there's not nuance if comments are a thing in themselves. Like any box on the internet, most of the text typed in is mostly unrelated to the article. The article or just the headline trips the floodgate and what someone was inclined to say yesterday gets said today.

The thinnest excuses to type are enough to start typing.

Case in point.

krapp 4 years ago | |

>The thinnest excuses to type are enough to start typing.

Yes, and that's how a forum ostensibly full of intelligent, creative people who want to satisfy their intellectual curiosity ends up with so many garbage threads wallowing in shallow mediocrity and bullshit.

But at the very least if you're going to attempt to comment on the TFA, you should be willing to put in the minimal effort to RTFA. I don't think that is an undue burden. There's nothing more frustrating than seeing an interesting article go completely ignored because everyone just riffs on the title and goes off on some political tangent or rant about the site's layout or something.

brudgers 4 years ago | | |

In which we make an implicit case that shallow mediocrity and bullshit is more a matter of will than anything else.

Jensson 4 years ago |

The article serve as a set of statements that the comment section then can analyse and pick apart. You learn way more from reading that analysis than the article itself, which often contains many bad or factually wrong statements since people mostly write articles about topics they just learned and not topics they are experts on. (Yes, this goes for both articles written by engineers and journalists)

indianpianist 4 years ago |

I like reading other people's opinions.

softwaredoug 4 years ago |

I often don’t click the article because long form writing on the web is increasingly a shitshow.

Clicking a random link is a barrage of ads, paywalls, and intrusive noise. If not that, the long form writing has been engineered with frontmatter to optimize SEO. So often the actual meat is a few sentences that require scanning paragraphs to find. Not to mention the general issues with web apps: poor progressive loading and bad design.

Hacker news is simple and fast. The comments offer a consistent, easier to read experience with the comments usually more insightful than the usual noise in the article itself.

Maybe the new motto of the web should be “Whatever you do don’t read the articles”

mikewarot 4 years ago |

I often read the comments first, hoping to find out if the article is worth it, and a way around the paywall.

At least half of the time, I write out a long comment, then delete it, as it doesn't really help the conversation after all.

I read my threads at least once a day.

bediger4000 4 years ago |

I read the comments on some links. Some times I'm looking for more information. Other times, I'm looking for other people's opinions on particular subjects. Some times, particularly on toxic subjects (like links to quillette.com) I look for extremely stupid comments to down vote.

Mostly, I read the original link first, because I want to form my own opinion before seeing anyone else's opinion. I'm old and I got online because of Usenet. Usenet was particularly pugnacious, and I occasionally still like to argue with people who hold moronic opinions, like creationists, or 2020 election truthers. If the original like is inflammatory enough, I can prep my arguments before seeing anyone else's dumbass takes.