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”