HN Explorer

Ask HN: I read comments before the article, do you?

77 points by Crystalin ↗ HN
I find myself reading the comments on HN before the articles most of the time... It usually brings a better/shorter description and decent reaction.

Only when I don't fully understand the arguments then I read the article

54 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread
bediger4000
I usually don't. I don't want the comments to color my thinking on the article.

The exceptions arise when I have already read up on the topic, so I might read the comments to see how the article effects others, then go read it to see what slant it has.

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sircastor
Often. Sometimes I don’t read the article at all because I’m more interested in the conversation happening than I am in whatever the article was about. And it’s common for HN comments to evolve into a conversation about something the article is tangential.
tus666
Yes, and I often don't read the article at all, especially if it's blogspam that can be largely inferred from the title.

e.g. "Why I like small projects"

notreallyserio
I usually don't even read the comments on those posts. I think I need to start making better use of the hide button.
usr1106
Depends. If I don't understand from the headline what it is all about I check the top comments. If the topic sounds like genuinely interesting technical information I read the article first. And everything between those 2 extremes depending on the phase of the moon...
yen223
I used to, but I'm trying not to anymore. I've seen enough instances where the top comment was either irrelevant or outright wrong about the article in question.
Semiapies
It's rare that I do more than skim the comments after the article, anymore. If the number of comments is low, I don't even bother, because it's always "Why not use this other language/program/distro?"
Havoc
About 50/50 depending on the title (and platform linked).
derekja
usually. Depends on how much I care about the article. If it is squarely relevant to my interests, I click to it directly. Otherwise, the HN commentary is often more enlightening (or at least amusing).
karaterobot
Not usually, but sometimes I will read part of an article and then look to the comments to see if there is an explanation or discussion of something I didn't understand, before continuing. I would not trust HN comment threads to replace the content of articles: I'm fairly certain there are a lot of people who don't read the articles before commenting on them.
MuffinFlavored
I never read the articles to be honest. Dead serious.
CAPSLOCKSSTUCK
+1, was looking for this. Some of the articles are rewarding, though.
mitchbob
I skim the top comments first to try to find out if the article is worth reading.
AnimalMuppet
Yeah. Too many articles waste too much of my time. They want to make me go down two or three screens before they bother to tell me the interesting part, but the HN comments tend to center on that part.
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stevenicr
9 out 10 times never read the article - comments often shine the light that there is a better X that is open source, or that the thing I wanted when reading the title is Mac or IOS only - save me the click and the time.

I do try to read the article / thing if I am going to comment - but that's not many.

Many times the comments let me know that other needed thing is not released yet - or that no pricing info is published - love those saved clicks.

xnorswap
I do this, but it's a dangerous trap to assume that the commenters are more reliable or a better authority than the articles themselves.

The articles have a filter that someone has gone to the "effort" of writing up an article, and it takes a lot of upvotes to get to the front page. The commentary has no such filter.

It's very easy to shoot down ideas on HN in the comments and get rewarded for it, especially if it's to dismiss a product with alternatives. Not just the now notorious dropbox comment, but I'm often seeing comments here suggesting alternatives that if you're in the know you'll realise just don't solve the problems in a pain free way.

stevenicr
I agree with your statements here, and certainly what I do mostly is not what I do all the time. Especially if it was like health info I'd dig deeper for example. I think part of my method is also what threads I click or don't click - so the experience is going to vary with that selection biases as well.

when people mention mac only (big thanks to those who do this!) - I tend to just believe and move on.

with some projects I open tabs for the article and all the alternatives people mention bookmark to dig into later.

So my methods are not always this or that - but as a general 'way of HN' for me, these methods are what makes HN a great time saver in general, but not always.

stackbutterflow
9 out 10 times never read the article

I also do that. Most non-news articles aren't better than the average two paragraphs HN comment, but they are 10 times as long. Time is precious and at some point who has the time for yet another "[strong opinion about some technology/pattern/that's how we do at our company]". Almost 100% of the time the comments contain better information on the topic tackled by the article and with higher information density.

If it's a news article there's always a few comments quoting important parts of the article which is usually enough to understand what's being reported.

The articles that I tend to prefer and to read are the ones that highlight a feature that I wasn't aware of about a language that I'm interested in.

tayo42
I think of the title as more of a conversation topic starter. most threads end up totally derailed.
paxys
I almost always read the comments before reading the article (and sometimes don't read the article at all).

I do, however, read the article before I write a comment of my own.

jdrc
I write comments before the article
a9h74j
Sometimes I write comments before reading the title. What are we talking about?
m4rc3lv
I always read the article and then I most of the times also read other articles on the site linked before I return to HN
forgotmypw17
Almost definitely not reading the article if it’s not on the page. Cookie banners, newsletter modals, paywalls gtfo.
naoqj
I don’t see newsletter modals as often as I see cookie banners or paywalls by far.
paskozdilar
I just come here to read discussions. I learn so much just from random people mentioning stuff like "hey I use X and it's really great for Y, much better than Z". I don't care much for the articles themselves, especially if they come from a website whose sole purpose is "writing articles", has paywalls or advertisements, or is terribly designed or implemented with a crapload of JavaScript code whose execution is needed just to show a simple paragraph of text.

Occasionally, I find an interesting article and actually read it, but most of the time such articles come from personal blogs of developers who just wanna write about an interesting thing they learned. Coincidentally, such writers tend to share my love for simplicity and terseness - they contain no ads, no distractions and in most cases no necessary JavaScript code - they just write about the thing they're writing about and don't distract you. The j3s.sh website is a nice example that I could find amongst my bookmarks.

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krapp
I try not to. Sometimes I'm lazy but I usually try to put in the effort to read the article first, if I think it might be interesting, because I tend to find the articles to be more insightful than the commentariat, and because I tend to complain about people not reading the articles a lot. I think it's important to try to expand one's intellectual horizons and take the risk of engagement in a community predicated on satisfying intellectual curiosity, because otherwise comments tend to feed on each others' ignorance rather than spread insight. Especially for subjects not likely to be in HN's wheelhouse (anything non-technical, or technical but not related to programming) or subjects with any political or social dimension, where the tendency towards the "aggressively ignorant hot take" might prevail. I see little value in reading the comments first in those cases.

Conversely, if I haven't read the article, I try not to comment as if I have.

marginalia_nu
Depends on the topic, even if HN has a relatively high signal to noise ratio, a lot of it is still noise. I mostly read blogs off gemini aggregators like Antenna.

So I'm mostly using HN as an ersatz message board.

rendall
Often. I use the interestingness of the discussion as a proxy to see if the article is worth a look.
lucozade
If the title looks like clickbait or overly US political, I'll skim the top few comments first to see if there's any interesting conversations. If not, there's a decent chance that the article is also pants so I won't bother with either the article or the comments.