If one could also upvote the articles from there, it would be perfect. A weird thing is that if that page is very successful, not many comments will show up here. :-)
It's not necessarily a bad thing to prefer the comment section. But yes it's addictive and a quiet-mode would probably allow people to form their own opinions from the source, before viewing the debate.
To me anything that - reduces the hive mind effect and promotes diversity - is a good thing...
> Doesn't this increase monoculture by preventing those who think there's a problem with comments.. from commenting?
This is probably true, unfortunately. In the last few years I've given up on most of the forums and mailing lists I used to frequent, due to my low tolerance of trolls, zealots, and adolescent behaviour. HN is one of the few places left with a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to keep me reading it.
Not really using it, I sort the frontpage by (votes/comments) to filter 'Comment sections that will devolve into discussions (see: condescending, pedantic arguments)' and their links: http://xash.in/hn/
>If I still had social media accounts, I would absolutely be making quiet(instagram/twitter/facebook).com to remove the notifications, gamification, noise and what have you, I think they’re all brilliant tools whose utility has been downtrodden by companies obsession with having our attention.
I would support a project in that line with as much contributions as I could. This seems really important.
What I did on youtube was that I blocked the recommendation-bar on the right side with UBlock and had a plugin that redirected https://www.youtube.com to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. This made my relationship with youtube healthier.
The author is right that sometimes a thread will descend in to the usual tired old arguments[1], but the value I get from reading people's comments far outweighs how annoying I find the tedious stuff. I've learned a ton of stuff from the comments here over the years.
[1] Which I'm guilty of posting every time there's a front end dev topic. :)
I've always thought of some way to minimise replies (probably a browser extension, ughh). 1st or 2nd order should be done by default in many places. Certain types thrive on this stuff, others just simply get worked up at the first thing they see. I'm very much guilty of this. (First comment for me!)
There's actually some really good content in incredibly popular threads but it's nearly always overwhelmed by nonsense replies to the first comment.
I guess some people that, but I challenge anyone to close every top level reply in a very popular article and see exactly how many are at the top. Basically the same everytime. It's like a virus.
Am a regular in r/space and most things aren't that popular but some things randomly blow up. There was one thread with well over 1000 comments and right down the bottom, Only 4 hours after the original post was a JPL employee, who was working on object in the story, it was highly detailed, incredibly informative, well-written, and with all the nitty-gritty downsides and shortcomings of engineering work. I'm guessing very few saw what that person wrote compared to 400 puns at the top. It's shameful.
No it isn't. There's nothing about the content of the comments on anything on the internet that automatically means one comment warrants more attention than any other. The reason why we have voting systems is so the community can push things to the top. That's tempered by the fact Reddit moves fast so people who comment later are much less likely to get to the top of a thread, but really it just shows that people who vote in r/space value puns a lot. That's the community you're a part of.
It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.
In the parent's example the reddit post blew up so presumably the people making and upvoting puns came from /r/all, not /r/space. This is why some subreddits have opted to exclude themselves from /r/all (which comes with other downsides).
> It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.
I like it. You can make a joke, but if it's bad, you end up paying for it.
I think the problem OP alludes to still exists on HN. While the replies are sorted (partially) based on their score, they're displayed fully expanded. That means a mid-quality comment with 200 points that has so much upvotes because it wasn't bad and was first, will have all of its hundred child comments displayed above the second-best top-level comment. If the discussions under the first comment explode for some reason, there's a good chance a lot of people won't see the second top-level one.
Possible improvement, at a cost of increased JavaScriptitis - auto-collapse child comments under top-level ones, but in a more prominent way than it's done now, so that people would usually be inclined to browse them. And for the love of people in need of CTRL+F-ing for something specific, provide an "expand all" button at the top.
Which does not work well. At the time the item is posted, there are mismoderations. For example, one person can mod a post as off-topic because they don't like the narrative. You're not allowed to bring up such moderation right away. By the time you are allowed to, the momentum is gone. Effectively the post got silenced.
Discussions are more mature here anyway.
Although Tweakers used to have a moderation system akin to Slashdot back then funny comments (or "funny") comments were much more allowed. I'd say funny without intellectual basis or cleverness is not acceptable anymore. I suppose it still is on Slashdot and Reddit.
I spent quite some time looking into the problem. The solution imo is twofold. First, yup, collapse all comments past 2nd level by default, show only top comments (others collapsed) on second level.
Second, the same model used for HN threads should be applied to comments - not just karma, but a combination of recency and karma. Right now we are demotivated to post on 1st level of existing threads exactly because of karma accumulation for top level posts. Hence, my comment is here :)
We're working on a relevant product for communities so if you're also interested in this problem, let me know.
I've come to accept that in complex systems you can't separate the signal from the noise. Signal emerges from the chaos, but chaos is a precondition to the emergence of signal. So when reading social media you just have to train your brain to quickly scan it all, discount the chaos, and search out the signal.
Yeah that's what I mean, it has to be separated after it's created. There's no naturally-occurring generative complex system that can only generate signal and no noise/chaos.
That's not really a why answer - not a good one anyway. If someone built a customized cutting tool for a specific task, "I do not use scissors" wouldn't be a good answer to "why not just use scissors?" if they were indeed suitable to the task.
>There’s an obvious trend as to which comments section I am mostly drawn to: ones with inflamed arguments
I have been lurking /r/programming and HN for over 4 years (still not that long compared to many) and this is a trend I definitely see. Which is a shame because this goes at the cost of much more interesting discussions.
I’ve been trying to quit Reddit over the poorly disguised political advertisements that flood it, and so I came to HN hoping to fill some of that discussion void. It surprises me that HN users think comment sections are inflamed here, to me things seem pretty tame.
I mostly use it to remove unwanted sections, like the "posts by youtubers" thing. No I am not interested in what you ate for breakfast, or if you think your video did worse than usual.
I prefer reading the comments because there's no ads and it loads quickly. I could use an RSS reader, but then I wouldn't see social media notifications (new messages from my girlfriend) happening in other tabs in the background, so I prefer to use a browser. Flame wars are something I try to avoid in comments sections. Writing tl;dr summaries for new articles is something I enjoy, and earns me quite a few upvotes.
I worry that the plasticity of my brain is decreasing as I age. I've begun to notice that my attention is increasingly difficult to manage. I haven't blamed HN (yet) but I certainly emphasize with the author.
Tangentally, as a young adult I had severe ADHD/ADD. I stopped taking meds for it after is ceased causing a negative impact on my life towards the end of puberty. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to my personality and creativity if I started meds again. Would I be the same, gain an unfair advantage or excel at things I've given up on?
I don't think HN can necessarily be to blame. It might just be one of those "you're getting older, so think things were different when you were young" things, but I certainly feel I have a shorter attention span and have to try really hard to pay attention for extended periods. I don't know what to blame, but suspect that the attention economy is part of it. It could also be that I'm both a programmer and a gamer, so my brain now expects to be stimulated a lot of the time.
Also, just in case it's one of those words that you've been mixing up (rather than a typo), I thought you might appreciate knowing that it's "empathize with", rather than "emphasize with". I had that for the longest time with not knowing that the spoken and written versions of "awry" are the same word...
I feel the same way, but it's not only HN - it's also Reddit (endless dopamine fixes), youtube (at most 10 minute videos), and my daily work routine (code / review / merge /etc, three Slack spaces, Discord, messenger, etc) - it's a lot of small distractions day in day out, which I do believe affects your attention span.
That said, my girlfriend was diagnosed with ADHD not too long ago and has been using medication, which greatly helped her focus and balanced out her mood. In your case, you can always go and talk to a professional, get advice on e.g. medication. Don't be afraid you'd get an unfair advantage, it can make you feel like a normal functioning adult again.
I am not sure this is age related, it may be down to the internet as a whole. Things like reddit/YouTube etc did not exist 10 years ago and really have come alive in the past 2-3 years. It’s so easy to churn through content mindlessly these days.
> Things like reddit/YouTube etc did not exist 10 years ago
Remarkable :-)
It's fascinating how people think of the age of things.
Quite a few people think of Python as recent. It's hip, it's popular. But it's 29 years old. 29!
Go and Rust feel shiny and new. Talk about them feels recent, like they came out just a few years ago. They're like "challenger" languages. Yet, both are 9 years old. Aging challengers.
I bet Hackernews feels older than Reddit. Am I right?
But Reddit is the older brother. HN is a miniscule 12 this year, compared to Reddit's creaking 14.
Did YouTube and Reddit exist 10 years ago?
Yup! YouTube is 14 as well.
So when did they become wildly popular? When did all the mindless content arrive?
I'm not sure about Reddit. But some argue YouTube went viral, entering its exponential growth phase, 12 years ago. Commercially, they had already achieved their VC "exit", selling to Google for $1.65B, 13 years ago.
Imho, the ability to filter useful from useless information is very valuable and should be cultivated. What better place to do this than the HN comments section, since it contains both kinds of information? :)
> I simply open the comments and am able to deduce the gist of the link through the unfolding arguments.
Hold on, the HN comment section is sometimes a tire fire of people who don't know what they're talking about giving their uninformed opinions.
You need to read the articles to see whether the comment section is addressing points made in the article.
(This is why I disagree with mods about posting links to paywalled content. Some of those paywalls are now hard to bypass so the comment threads are full of people who haven't read the article.)
After all this I noticed a reduction in critical
thought, my ability to form my own opinion on topics,
as I had a) stopped reading the damn links, b) would
skim what I needed off of the most upvoted comment,
c) would then take that comment as gospel.
This is also why I'm against negative reputation. The number of people who can down-vote and do so emotively rather than because something is factually inaccurate is just plain depressing at times. Add to that people who "drive-by down-vote" - in that they'll mod something down but then fail to provide a rebuttal - really does nothing to keep those experienced engineers motivated to keep coming back to the comments section. Thus you end up with more uninformed drivel posted and more people arguing unsubstantiated bullshit.
I used to come on HN daily. Now it's a couple of times a week (and even that feels too frequently at times). Simply because I can discover content without HN and the comments section is increasingly adding little value to HN's aggregation.
I write HN comments somewhat regularly (like once a week), but my approach to it is more or less a "note to self". I use the comments to mostly describe my observations and thoughts. It's pretty much a monologue. When I'm technically replying someone, that's because my thought was based or inspired by that comment, and I don't actually expect that person to read my reply. I usually ignore most of the responses to my comment too. But I try (and enjoy) to make my comment helpful or useful to someone, in a "my two cents" manner.
I do the same. Writing things out is a good way to play around with a thought; reshape it, morph it, look at it from different angles. A thought in my mind is too abstract, fleeting and formless. A comment on paper is forced to take a shape.
Words are not the best medium for every thought, or sometimes it turns out the thought is not worth spending the necessary writing time to complete, such as this one.
I've been here since 2015 and one thing I've noticed in the past couple of years is that simply browsing HN gives me a kind of dopamine fix. When I'm in a 'browse HN zone', I voraciously consume any and all content, often times just lightly skimming everything. This can sometimes go on for hours at a time and I'll often go over feeling extremely fatigued and having remembered little of it. This is somewhat similar to the author, because I've noticed the same arguments over and over again, enough that I get a kick out of watching oftentimes the same people bickering over the same viewpoints. As I'm so accustomed to all the bickering, I simply just consume them without thought anymore.
Weirdly, I get more pleasure out of using reddit nowadays because I can focus on subs related to my hobbies, discussions around how to get more enjoyment out of a particular activity rather than just jamming large amounts of general knowledge into my brain.
Every article I read, for better or worse, has been filtered. The following describes my filteres when I am simply enjoying articles posted on HN (My filter's are different if I am researchinig a topic):
The first filter is whether the article makes it to the front page of HN. This is followed by a quickly formed opinion about whether the title captivates my interest. If the first two filters pass, then I will take a couple of minutes to skim the comments section and decide if I want to read the article. In this way I leverage the minds of others as a final filter. If the article passes every filter, then that means that I have remained motivated to invest my time in reading the article myself. I open each article that passes all of the filters in a new tab and move on to the next title of interest. Once I reach the bottom of the page, I have the set of articles that I will read throughout the day. It is true, that I let other peoples' opinions influence what I read, but I justify this by reasoning that it would be impracticable for me to read every article that makes the front page of HN. This will cause me to have a biased perspective on things, but for me the strategy is one of practicality. I did read this author's article by the way. I think that the project is creative and interesting. Thank you for posting!
You know, I am going to try this out. Up until now, I have not been voting on pre front page posts; therefore I have not been contributing to the front page filter effect that I take advantage of on a daily basis. I probably won't do this every day, but for this week I will. Thanks for the nudge!
The short of it is that for most articles which seem interesting the comments implicitly recap the most interesting parts of the article. Furthermore, the comments give a good idea of how reasonable the points of the article seem, since there's usually at least a few people here with plenty of knowledge in the relevant field.
If an article seems interesting but doesn't have a lot of comments, I'll usually open the comments in a new tab and then refresh later to see if more comments have dropped in. If the comments indicate the article is interesting and I am interested in more than a quick summary, then I'll open the main link.
There are good—I would even say “great”—comment threads, that are just as worth reading as standalone articles are. Threads where all of the comments are good, and nobody dares ruin the “mood” of productive conversation by butting in with the usual argumentativeness†.
• threads where the authors of the post do a “post-article interview” to add extra information in response to questions;
• threads on posts that are stories about something historical, where in the comments, a person involved in the history itself (not the author) shows up and tells more such stories;
• threads on posts about some cool thing the author made, where commenters point out other cool things the author has made; or point out other cool things that are complements to the original cool thing (rather than getting into a debate about replacements for the cool thing.) Threads about new works by prolific hackers (e.g. DJB), or prolific academics (e.g. Scott Aaronson), are good for this.
• threads on posts about choosing tool/technology X and the anecdata of its advantages/disadvantages for the author’s use-case; where the comments are from other people who either made the same choice, or a choice of comparable technologies Y or Z instead; and, rather than just being a partisan argument for their technology, they give a compare-and-contrast of the products in the product-space X occupies, giving a clinical evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of X, Y, and Z for the original author’s use-case, as if they were asynchronously collaborating with the author on a greater work.
As it turns out, all three of these, in one way or another, are “encores” to the post. Things that add value of the same kind that the post itself has.
...and then there are bad comment threads. Which is, IMHO, everything else. (Including this thread! I shouldn’t be in here!)
† I think it’s kind of like street art. Paint a beautiful mural on a wall, and nobody’s gonna deface it with boring old graffiti. Every graffito thinks themselves an artist, and so respects good art. Every HN debater thinks themselves a scholar, and so respects productive scholarship.
——
Honestly, I wish there was a meta-HN, with a lag-time of ~48hrs behind HN, that just linked to the ensuing discussions that turned out to have been worth people’s time to read, when judged by the same criteria that we use to upvote links (“gratifies intellectual curiosity”, etc.)
In combination with a “just the links” feed (as in this one, or just as in consuming HN via RSS), you’d both 1. get a really enjoyable experience, and 2. probably feel much less of a need to participate yourself. (I need this, honestly.)
> Reading the comment section of HN for so long has taught me a valuable lesson that I will take away with me: no matter what you do, say, think or feel, there is someone out there that does, or merely wants to, have the opposing action, speech, thought or feeling. And that’s absolutely fine, and how the world should be - home to a diverse set of views and opinions, but not to the detriment of your desire to build, share, create and form your own opinions.
I used to welcome opposing views for the simple reason that I whatever beliefs or values I hold, I am probably somewhat biased towards them, and critical input is therefore something extremely valuable to me.
However, more and more, the opposing views are of the type described by the author above. People are less interested in actually broadening their horizon, in finding synthesis between thesis and antithesis. More and more, it's just about finding a position, digging in, and attacking the other with full force.
This reminded me of the following quote by Stephen R. Covey: "Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
>People are less interested in actually broadening their horizon, in finding synthesis between thesis and antithesis. More and more, it's just about finding a position, digging in, and attacking the other with full force.
Do you notice this about yourself, or just other people? If the latter, that's part of the problem. Everyone thinks they themselves have an open mind and well formed arguments.
With the exception of certain values that I treat somewhat axiomatic (none of which are controversial), I'm happy to change my mind in light of a better argument.
The phenomenon isn't new, but I believe the extent of it is.
In my perception, discussions are being becoming more and more polarized, and Twitter and Facebook have becoming major contributors outrage culture rather than furthering critical thought.
I think HN should not allow voting until you open the link. However being able to flag should be kept regardless if you open a link or not. My favorite feature has been the favorite tag. Both as a reminder but also for sites flagged by work.
The flagging without opening the link is to make it easier to suppress the indirect but sometimes direct political tripe that filters in during election cycles. I don't think comments/stories are PAC managed here but it could happen one day.
>I think HN should not allow voting until you open the link.
People would just complain about HN tracking them, and would default to just opening the link for voting privileges, or just skimming the article. There's no technical solution to the problem of getting people to actually RTFA first.
My current cure to news binge is to use RSS inside emacs with elfeed[1]. Emacs has the great advantage to be quiet by nature. I use spacemacs[2] more precisely. So in the morning I simply type `SPC a f` then `g r`. That's it.
HN itself can filter by the points, afaik. Search for “Undocumented Hacker News”, it's mentioned there among other features. However, that's on the site—dunno about the feed.
132 comments
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To me anything that - reduces the hive mind effect and promotes diversity - is a good thing...
This is probably true, unfortunately. In the last few years I've given up on most of the forums and mailing lists I used to frequent, due to my low tolerance of trolls, zealots, and adolescent behaviour. HN is one of the few places left with a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to keep me reading it.
- Score
- Link
- Upvotes
- Comments
I would support a project in that line with as much contributions as I could. This seems really important. What I did on youtube was that I blocked the recommendation-bar on the right side with UBlock and had a plugin that redirected https://www.youtube.com to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. This made my relationship with youtube healthier.
[1] Which I'm guilty of posting every time there's a front end dev topic. :)
There's actually some really good content in incredibly popular threads but it's nearly always overwhelmed by nonsense replies to the first comment.
I guess some people that, but I challenge anyone to close every top level reply in a very popular article and see exactly how many are at the top. Basically the same everytime. It's like a virus.
Am a regular in r/space and most things aren't that popular but some things randomly blow up. There was one thread with well over 1000 comments and right down the bottom, Only 4 hours after the original post was a JPL employee, who was working on object in the story, it was highly detailed, incredibly informative, well-written, and with all the nitty-gritty downsides and shortcomings of engineering work. I'm guessing very few saw what that person wrote compared to 400 puns at the top. It's shameful.
No it isn't. There's nothing about the content of the comments on anything on the internet that automatically means one comment warrants more attention than any other. The reason why we have voting systems is so the community can push things to the top. That's tempered by the fact Reddit moves fast so people who comment later are much less likely to get to the top of a thread, but really it just shows that people who vote in r/space value puns a lot. That's the community you're a part of.
It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.
I like it. You can make a joke, but if it's bad, you end up paying for it.
I think the problem OP alludes to still exists on HN. While the replies are sorted (partially) based on their score, they're displayed fully expanded. That means a mid-quality comment with 200 points that has so much upvotes because it wasn't bad and was first, will have all of its hundred child comments displayed above the second-best top-level comment. If the discussions under the first comment explode for some reason, there's a good chance a lot of people won't see the second top-level one.
Possible improvement, at a cost of increased JavaScriptitis - auto-collapse child comments under top-level ones, but in a more prominent way than it's done now, so that people would usually be inclined to browse them. And for the love of people in need of CTRL+F-ing for something specific, provide an "expand all" button at the top.
To quote John Scalzi "the failure state of clever is asshole"
-1 undesired, 0 off-topic / irrelevant, +1 on-topic, +2 informative en +3 spotlight
Works quite well, AFAIK
Edit: this is their FAQ on moderation: https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2
Discussions are more mature here anyway.
Although Tweakers used to have a moderation system akin to Slashdot back then funny comments (or "funny") comments were much more allowed. I'd say funny without intellectual basis or cleverness is not acceptable anymore. I suppose it still is on Slashdot and Reddit.
Hiw does lobste.rs deal with this?
Second, the same model used for HN threads should be applied to comments - not just karma, but a combination of recency and karma. Right now we are demotivated to post on 1st level of existing threads exactly because of karma accumulation for top level posts. Hence, my comment is here :)
We're working on a relevant product for communities so if you're also interested in this problem, let me know.
>Why not just use the RSS feed?
>I do not use RSS.
I have been lurking /r/programming and HN for over 4 years (still not that long compared to many) and this is a trend I definitely see. Which is a shame because this goes at the cost of much more interesting discussions.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/MSsblMm.png
That's what I do to remove the YouTube front page.
I mostly use it to remove unwanted sections, like the "posts by youtubers" thing. No I am not interested in what you ate for breakfast, or if you think your video did worse than usual.
But also, an annoying aspect of HN's design is that the markup lacks semantic classes and is thus difficult to amend with CSS.
I prefer reading the comments because there's no ads and it loads quickly. I could use an RSS reader, but then I wouldn't see social media notifications (new messages from my girlfriend) happening in other tabs in the background, so I prefer to use a browser. Flame wars are something I try to avoid in comments sections. Writing tl;dr summaries for new articles is something I enjoy, and earns me quite a few upvotes.
Curated content is okay, but I got a feeling theres lots of fake news.
Tangentally, as a young adult I had severe ADHD/ADD. I stopped taking meds for it after is ceased causing a negative impact on my life towards the end of puberty. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to my personality and creativity if I started meds again. Would I be the same, gain an unfair advantage or excel at things I've given up on?
Also, just in case it's one of those words that you've been mixing up (rather than a typo), I thought you might appreciate knowing that it's "empathize with", rather than "emphasize with". I had that for the longest time with not knowing that the spoken and written versions of "awry" are the same word...
That said, my girlfriend was diagnosed with ADHD not too long ago and has been using medication, which greatly helped her focus and balanced out her mood. In your case, you can always go and talk to a professional, get advice on e.g. medication. Don't be afraid you'd get an unfair advantage, it can make you feel like a normal functioning adult again.
Remarkable :-)
It's fascinating how people think of the age of things.
Quite a few people think of Python as recent. It's hip, it's popular. But it's 29 years old. 29!
Go and Rust feel shiny and new. Talk about them feels recent, like they came out just a few years ago. They're like "challenger" languages. Yet, both are 9 years old. Aging challengers.
I bet Hackernews feels older than Reddit. Am I right?
But Reddit is the older brother. HN is a miniscule 12 this year, compared to Reddit's creaking 14.
Did YouTube and Reddit exist 10 years ago?
Yup! YouTube is 14 as well.
So when did they become wildly popular? When did all the mindless content arrive?
I'm not sure about Reddit. But some argue YouTube went viral, entering its exponential growth phase, 12 years ago. Commercially, they had already achieved their VC "exit", selling to Google for $1.65B, 13 years ago.
This stuff is old :-)
Hold on, the HN comment section is sometimes a tire fire of people who don't know what they're talking about giving their uninformed opinions.
You need to read the articles to see whether the comment section is addressing points made in the article.
(This is why I disagree with mods about posting links to paywalled content. Some of those paywalls are now hard to bypass so the comment threads are full of people who haven't read the article.)
I used to come on HN daily. Now it's a couple of times a week (and even that feels too frequently at times). Simply because I can discover content without HN and the comments section is increasingly adding little value to HN's aggregation.
> Why did you use Go to write this? You know Go does not have generics, right?
> You need this site more than me.
That's my two cents.
Words are not the best medium for every thought, or sometimes it turns out the thought is not worth spending the necessary writing time to complete, such as this one.
Weirdly, I get more pleasure out of using reddit nowadays because I can focus on subs related to my hobbies, discussions around how to get more enjoyment out of a particular activity rather than just jamming large amounts of general knowledge into my brain.
The first filter is whether the article makes it to the front page of HN. This is followed by a quickly formed opinion about whether the title captivates my interest. If the first two filters pass, then I will take a couple of minutes to skim the comments section and decide if I want to read the article. In this way I leverage the minds of others as a final filter. If the article passes every filter, then that means that I have remained motivated to invest my time in reading the article myself. I open each article that passes all of the filters in a new tab and move on to the next title of interest. Once I reach the bottom of the page, I have the set of articles that I will read throughout the day. It is true, that I let other peoples' opinions influence what I read, but I justify this by reasoning that it would be impracticable for me to read every article that makes the front page of HN. This will cause me to have a biased perspective on things, but for me the strategy is one of practicality. I did read this author's article by the way. I think that the project is creative and interesting. Thank you for posting!
The short of it is that for most articles which seem interesting the comments implicitly recap the most interesting parts of the article. Furthermore, the comments give a good idea of how reasonable the points of the article seem, since there's usually at least a few people here with plenty of knowledge in the relevant field.
If an article seems interesting but doesn't have a lot of comments, I'll usually open the comments in a new tab and then refresh later to see if more comments have dropped in. If the comments indicate the article is interesting and I am interested in more than a quick summary, then I'll open the main link.
• threads where the authors of the post do a “post-article interview” to add extra information in response to questions;
• threads on posts that are stories about something historical, where in the comments, a person involved in the history itself (not the author) shows up and tells more such stories;
• threads on posts about some cool thing the author made, where commenters point out other cool things the author has made; or point out other cool things that are complements to the original cool thing (rather than getting into a debate about replacements for the cool thing.) Threads about new works by prolific hackers (e.g. DJB), or prolific academics (e.g. Scott Aaronson), are good for this.
• threads on posts about choosing tool/technology X and the anecdata of its advantages/disadvantages for the author’s use-case; where the comments are from other people who either made the same choice, or a choice of comparable technologies Y or Z instead; and, rather than just being a partisan argument for their technology, they give a compare-and-contrast of the products in the product-space X occupies, giving a clinical evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of X, Y, and Z for the original author’s use-case, as if they were asynchronously collaborating with the author on a greater work.
As it turns out, all three of these, in one way or another, are “encores” to the post. Things that add value of the same kind that the post itself has.
...and then there are bad comment threads. Which is, IMHO, everything else. (Including this thread! I shouldn’t be in here!)
† I think it’s kind of like street art. Paint a beautiful mural on a wall, and nobody’s gonna deface it with boring old graffiti. Every graffito thinks themselves an artist, and so respects good art. Every HN debater thinks themselves a scholar, and so respects productive scholarship.
——
Honestly, I wish there was a meta-HN, with a lag-time of ~48hrs behind HN, that just linked to the ensuing discussions that turned out to have been worth people’s time to read, when judged by the same criteria that we use to upvote links (“gratifies intellectual curiosity”, etc.)
In combination with a “just the links” feed (as in this one, or just as in consuming HN via RSS), you’d both 1. get a really enjoyable experience, and 2. probably feel much less of a need to participate yourself. (I need this, honestly.)
I used to welcome opposing views for the simple reason that I whatever beliefs or values I hold, I am probably somewhat biased towards them, and critical input is therefore something extremely valuable to me.
However, more and more, the opposing views are of the type described by the author above. People are less interested in actually broadening their horizon, in finding synthesis between thesis and antithesis. More and more, it's just about finding a position, digging in, and attacking the other with full force.
Do you notice this about yourself, or just other people? If the latter, that's part of the problem. Everyone thinks they themselves have an open mind and well formed arguments.
In my perception, discussions are being becoming more and more polarized, and Twitter and Facebook have becoming major contributors outrage culture rather than furthering critical thought.
I think HN should not allow voting until you open the link. However being able to flag should be kept regardless if you open a link or not. My favorite feature has been the favorite tag. Both as a reminder but also for sites flagged by work.
The flagging without opening the link is to make it easier to suppress the indirect but sometimes direct political tripe that filters in during election cycles. I don't think comments/stories are PAC managed here but it could happen one day.
People would just complain about HN tracking them, and would default to just opening the link for voting privileges, or just skimming the article. There's no technical solution to the problem of getting people to actually RTFA first.
And very important I use HN feed filtered by number of points (thanks to hnrss.org): https://hnrss.org/newest?points=500
[1]: https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed [2]: http://spacemacs.org