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The reason people don't read the article: They just want to socialize

90 points by yourabstraction ↗ HN
Many people here like to think HN is some bastion of intellectual conversation, and it is to some extent, but it's still a social network. Or maybe just a social space, because there isn't much of a network since profiles aren't used much.

Post titles are a jumping off point to socializing, and generally reading the article isn't necessary to converse with strangers on the internet. I won't write more, you probably won't read it :)

51 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] thread
enchiridion
Will have to read the rest of your post later, but you're wrong. Thinking you're right it's a common misconception.

Anyway, how is everyone?

smlss_sftwr
Good thing I don't think I'm right then, I know I'm right ;)
marcusverus
Ah, you know, hustlin' after that eudaimonia.

Would you recommended any texts on stoicism (other than the classic trio of Enchiridion/Meditations/Seneca's letters)?

enchiridion
For stoicism you've got it covered. I would say make sure to get at least somewhat modern translations to avoid the irony of phrases like "thou shalt use plain speech". Part of stoicism is about being simple and direct. The older translations are not as effective at driving that point home because language has changed.

For philosophy in general, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance continually comes up on HN for good reason. I would also say the audio version narrated by Michael Kramer is the best way to experience it, given how big a roll the idea of conversation plays in the story.

marcusverus
Thanks for the response, I will check out your recommendation.

My preference regarding translations lean in the opposite direction, at least for Meditations--imo the newer translation I've read (Gregory Hays') seemed breezy and unsubstantial when compared to a much older one (a revision of George Long's). But that might just be a side effect of being raised on the King James version of the Bible!

andrei_says_
Also, TFA is often 90% fluff and reading a few insightful commends is much more efficient.
wiml
It's definitely partly that, but it's also that the reading experience for many articles is atrocious. If I click the comments link, I get to the comments immediately — perhaps incomplete, uninformed, argumentative, but they're right there. If I click on the article, I have to wait for a bunch of branding banners, ads, sidebars, and analytics scripts to load. Then I have to wade through some popups for cookies and the site's app and wouldn't I like to subscribe? Then I have to read a couple pages of the author reminiscing about a bagel they once ate before they actually start talking about the topic at hand — along with some more slow-loading fade-in images and scrollbar hijacking. It's exhausting! I don't have time for all that.
BayAreaEscapee
I do the same thing.

Often, I'll look at what kind of comments are made on HN to decide if the article is even worth reading.

I agree with your position that lots of web site are annoying in the way they load slowly and display lots of nonsense, ads and overlays and awful UIs in addition to the article itself.

Once in a while someone here will take a swipe at the primitive layout of Hacker News. But I love the utilitarian layout of Hacker News. It's simple, clear, uncluttered, fast and intuitive. Saying that it looks like 1992 isn't a meaningful criticism.

Kinrany
Could HN measure and display the time it takes for the link to load?

Are there browser extensions for that?

ALittleLight
Even if the article were to load instantly you might have to actually read some or all of it to understand if it was worth reading or not. I often check the comments first just to make sure the comment section isn't full of people complaining about the article not being worthwhile.
runawaybottle
I immediately start rolling my eyes when someone starts their article with some crap like ‘It was a dank afternoon, Trump had just won re-election. This was difficult for Johnny to take, but he managed to get up and head downtown. Little did he know, it would be the most important day for downtown ever, as Bitcoin was coming to town’.

Like, goodness. TSDR - too shitty, didn’t read.

Matt Taibbi usually takes Thomas Friedman to town for writing like that:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/late...

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/create-your-own-thomas-f...

theonemind
I'm guilty skipping straight to comments and even commenting when I haven't read the article, however, it doesn't feel at all like an urge to socialize.

Articles usually feel like they need some minimum length or to fill a word count. Comments tend more toward someone actually wanting to say something and working uphill a little bit against a natural tendency to not type.

It just annoys me that people can't separate weight of points and value of content from some kind of mental tendency to use word count as a proxy, the same way they think heavier stuff is more valuable.

Compact stuff is just more valuable to my cognitive style now. I used to like things lengthier.

ergot_vacation
Things made for profit tend to rot, and become increasingly hostile to actual humans over time. Things made for fun do not have this tendency. Initially, most content on the web was made for fun. Over time, this has shifted almost entirely to content made for profit, and the current web is dramatically hostile to any actual human user. The discussion threads, here and a few other places, have no profit motive, so they're untouched by the plague.

To your point: the web used to be a great place to get very clear, concise stuff that cut through the crap. Some of that's still out there, but now most places pad their shit out for SEO and who knows what other tricks.

zzo38computer
Sometimes you might want to reply to another comment, rather than to the article itself.

Another possibility is maybe the article won't load but you might have something to write anyways, in which case reading the article first won't do.

I know, because both of these thing sometimes apply to me, and probably others too.

dalmo3
The comments often tell you if the article is worth reading or not. I don't mean indirectly - if the comments barely mention or quote the article then I probably won't bother opening it.
QasimK
It feels like a flaw of the voting system for articles to end up on the front-page, yet we still need to check comments to see if it is worth reading.

Who are all these people upvoting an article that isn’t really worth reading? Why are they doing this? Is it too easy to upvote?

lethologica
The comments typically boil down the article from a bunch of fluff that would take me 20 minutes to read to getting straight to the point. That’s why I go to the comments first. To find out if the article is even worth reading.

It’s the equivalent of scrolling down to the bottom of a recipe page and skipping all of the “my grandma made this during the depression” nonsense.

krapp
>It’s the equivalent of scrolling down to the bottom of a recipe page and skipping all of the “my grandma made this during the depression” nonsense.

That "nonsense" is the interesting part, though. I feel like you're missing the point of Hacker News if your only interest is getting the Cliffs Notes version as quickly as possible.

lethologica
If I’m looking up a recipe I want to know the ingredients and the method, maybe a few pictures and details like temperatures and cooking times and that’s it. The rest, the “my grandma made this apple pie and it cured world hunger” fluff isn’t for me, the reader. It’s to please the SEO gods instead.
krapp
No one posts recipes to Hacker News, though. They post articles which are supposed to gratify intellectual curiosity. That implies an interest by the reader in taking the journey, not in reaching the destination as quickly as possible.
lethologica
It’s an analogy. Doesn’t matter what the content is. It applies to most content these days.

You’ve never seen a YouTube video on here extended to 10+ minutes to get ad revenue when the main point could have been boiled down to a sentence or two?

krapp
>You’ve never seen a YouTube video on here extended to 10+ minutes to get ad revenue when the main point could have been boiled down to a sentence or two?

I can't remember seeing that very often. On the other hand, I've seen plenty of Youtube videos well over 10 minutes that were worth the effort. And the list of submissions from youtube doesn't seem that awful.

Tomte
That nonsense is oftentimes simply invented or a straight lie, the only reason it's there is to let the recipe get copyright protection.
timoth3y
There is some truth in that, but I think HN is different, at least in how I use it.

The overall quality of comments on HN is pretty high. I use the the comments to vet the article. If there are a number of thoughtful comments discussing what people got out of the article, I'll go and read it. If I have anything to add after that, I'll add a comment myself.

At the moment, HN is the only forum I trust to do this, does anyone have others they would recommend?

mijamo
The quality of comments is good for purely technical articles about software.

For anything else it is more like pretentious people thinking they know what they're talking about and being thought provoking without any solid bases just for the sake of showing about better they are.

Articles about economics often have the worst discussions together with anything related to social sciences but even physics and biology get a terrible treatment. Even reddit is better in that regard because even if the commenters are not necessarily more knowledgeable at least they don't take themselves too seriously.

Unfortunately I don't have a great unified resource to propose as an alternative because the interesting people to follow in those domains are often not super active in the internet.

ergot_vacation
The pompousness of HN is what makes it fun though.

And for the record, reddit is plenty pompous too, just in a covert, hipsterish way.

ItsMonkk
The assumption that the first thing you should do is read the article has never been backed up by any sort of logic. Doing so means that you must trust the metric that is the HN scoring system. A system that can easily be gamed by bots and fake users. As this is an unreliable metric, your behavior is exactly what we should prefer.

You rely on the personal accountability of the peers that you have built up a rapport with to determine if an article is worth reading. Not only should this not be discouraged, this should be encouraged. There should be more ways to easily determine that the people that you have vetted as trustworthy have rated an article high enough to comment positively on it.

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krapp
One of the biggest problems with HN's aversion to reading the articles is that many good articles go unread because no one is vouching for them in the comments. So this is a reminder that the second chance pool is now open[0].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

pyb
Unfortunately, I am not sure this is working well. There is a low-quality article on top this pool right now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27330400

krapp
According to the standards set in this thread, at least, it's of extremely high quality. The comments to it seem to be generally insightful and informative, no one seems to be complaining about the quality of the article itself. The site isn't inundated with advertising, and the word count doesn't seem to have been inflated for the sake of SEO.
pyb
But do you find the article to be very high quality?
krapp
No, but I don't find it particularly low quality, either. Just not personally that interesting to me.
forgotpwd16
I'll say all Quote Investigator articles are of high-quality by the fact they do an extensive literature research citing all their found sources in the process. This alone puts it above most web articles I read. Moreover the general theme of the site, that is tracing quotations, on its own makes it stand out as not only it isn't a simple task but also a quirky and interesting subject. Finally this specific quote and the found texts are probably relevant to many in this forum and that's why all comments are around this.
JMTQp8lwXL
The early bird gets the worm (the points). Early comments get higher visibility. It disincentives reading the article first. A post already has 200+ comments? Don't even bother adding a top-level comment, nobody will see it.
bradlys
This is when you just respond to the top level comment or the freshest and highest level one to that top level to farm the points.

People read the first comment threads and engage with them the most. It’s obvious when you can see one comment taking up the entire first page with all its replies.

joshxyz
For me its because the external site ads suck and the tangent conversations here in hn are mostly insightful and thought provoking lol
ergot_vacation
People gravitate to the area of highest value. On an information aggregator of sufficient size, with a healthy community, the comments on the aggregator are often of much higher value than the article itself. They are, in effect, a competing article, and one that often wins that competition.
forgotpwd16
The debate on social network and fora equivalence seems to never stop. Social networks (Twitter, Facebook, ...) are structured around individuals. The profile of each individual matters. Fora (Usenet, HN, Reddit, ...) are structured around discussions. The topic of each discussion matters. (The topic being indirectly set by the article submitted in HN's case.) You can have topical discussions in social networks, you can have an identity in fora, and yes, there's a socialization aspect in both but their core focus differ.
rl3
>The reason people don't read the article: They just want to socialize

At first glance, I figured you were talking about private conversations. Curiously it's just as applicable in that context. Nobody has time to really read anything anymore, but people sure do love linking stuff nonetheless.

It's the same dynamic just with differing magnitude of dissemination.

>Many people here like to think HN is some bastion of intellectual conversation ...

I disagree with this in an unduly hostile manner that will involve absurd levels of pedantry unfolding over the course of days. The final toll will be two dozen replies deep despite automated countermeasures' best efforts at discouraging this.

>... and it is to some extent ...

Thankfully the neat moments here make it still worthwhile. :)

rchaud
I used to jump straight into the comments here because that's what I did on FB/Twitter.

Using HN this way made me feel just as distracted, frazzled and upset as regular social media. Fortunately I've spent enough time here to know which topics tend to have useful information in the comments, and which ones are going to be a retread of stuff that's been discussed ad nauseam before, H1B visas for instance.

The average HN comment tends to be more civil and erudite than elsewhere, which I mistakenly conflated with being knowledgeable and open-minded. As it turns out, people can be just as stubborn and non-emphatic here as anywhere else.

To get the best out of HN, I always decide first if I'm going to read the article. If no, then I'll pass on the discussion as well.

cblconfederate
I sometimes comment as a way to bookmark the article
austincheney
Reminds me of a relative with autism who jumped into a card game in order to talk to her sister. It was clear she had no idea what was going on and it just pissed everybody off, but she got her noise in.
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