HN Explorer

Ask HN: Do you click "comments" on Hacker News?

10 points by jamesbressi ↗ HN
Curious to see how some find value in the link at the top that shows most recent comments--"comments" at the top of HN.

Of course, the front page and "new" are handy to discover what is popular and what has recently been submitted; and "threads" is handy to see how some respond to your comments, but what about "comments"?

Since all of the comments are new, it doesn't seem as useful to me as looking at new submitted links. Now if there was a "front page" for trending popular comments (and if I'm missing it, let me know), I could see that having the potential to drawing your eye to a possibly hotly debated topic.

So, do you click it and how do you "use" it?

Help me find the value.

16 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] thread
buster
Usually on interesting links i middleclick the comments-links and leftclick the link, so that i read the link first, close the tab and read the comments.

An extra page with most popular comments wouldn't be as interesting for me, as a comment without context (the link) is rather worthless. And if i first read the article i might be interested in all sorts of comments. Quite often, only because a comment has many points, it doesn't mean it's the most interesting.

jamesbressi
I believe I understood you correctly, and that is what I do for the articles I am about to read, but I'm referring to the "comments" at the very top of HN.
buster
Oh i see. Well, my comment applies there.. for most comments on that page i have no clue what they are about as most comments are oneliners
bartl
That means "no".

You can count a "no" for me too.

pg
I'm missing it, let me know

http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

Locke1689
Interesting, are these also weighted by date? I remember seeing (and posting) comments which are highly ranked which are not on that list.
pg
It's the best comments among the most recent 15k items. (Most items are comments.)
riffer
It is a useful view on which threads currently have active discussion. That's nice b/c if you're the last person to comment on the thread, you get to voice your opinion but that's about it. You want to participate on active threads.

Also, sometimes I load the "comment" page, and scroll down to the area where the comments are 30-60 minutes old. Generally anything that's gotten voted up at all is pretty interesting, so the insight efficiency ratio is pretty high.

I picked up that second habit from something similar that I think a lot of people do on the "new" page: if a submission is 40 minutes old, giving it it's fourth vote can make a real difference to the arc of the submission, in terms of how much attention it gets.

shmichael
You can get comments pushed into the page you are currently reading using this small greasemonkey script:

http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

It shows a small tab on the right side of the page that expands to display the relevant HN page.

Here's a screenshot of the comment panel, once you open it: http://shmichael.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/hne.png

And for chrome, ported by a friend:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hhedbplnihmkekhg...

ochiba
Link to script is broken: You don't have permission to access /hn_comment_embed.user.js on this server.
anigbrowl
Never. Just tried it; seems pointless to me.
what
I use the comments section to watch for new comments on article that is generating an interesting discussion. It's useful if you already know which article you want to follow (you can scan for the title). I find it easier than revisiting the article's page because comments move around over time which makes it difficult to pick out the new ones. Also, as someone pointed out already, you can find comments that have been upvoted which usually lead to an interesting discussion.
pedalpete
I find the comments page visually backward.

The comment is in black, with the title in grey, so the first thing that sticks out is the content of the comment. You're automatically jumping into the conversation mid-stream without knowing what it's all about.

You have to concentrate to go to the title first, then the comment.

Also, you end up with the same articles again and again, but contextually broken up. It might be nice to have the page show just the unique entries, and then the most recent comments on that entry which would have made it into the 'comments' page.

Just my thoughts. No I don't go to that page, I suspect the reasons above are why.

elijahbuck
No, because I never visit the site directly. Instead, I read through an RSS reader.
nick5768
Interesting, because I always click the comments link in Google Reader rather than the article. I read the comments first to get a sense of whether I will read the article or not.