Ask HN: Have you commented on HN about a court decision without reading it? Why?
I'm curious how many people actually take the time to read primary source material—not just news articles about it—before writing a comment here.
In this case, the decision is long—113 pages!—so I can understand why someone wouldn't have read it in its entirety. But if someone doesn't have the time to read the decision, I don't understand why they think they're qualified to opine about it here, and why they think its fair to make other participants in the discussion waste time wading through their uninformed speculation. It's akin to writing a review of a film you've never seen and have no intention of seeing.
Is there something HN could do to discourage this?
(One idea that comes to mind would be banning news articles about court cases in which the article does not link to the actual text of the decision.)
18 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadBut the reality is nobody really cares (and perhaps never really cared) as the outcome matters most and justifies anything.
Which also makes it even more obvious who has or hasn't read it, or even the first few pages.
Also, the decision is based on a single-paragraph long part of the constitution. I tentatively disagree with the decision*, consider this hypothetical: a one-thousand page long decision that ruled the government was allowed to censor all anti-war speech, based on the 1st Amendment.
It would be bizarre to expect only people that read through the whole thousand pages to comment on such an on-it's-face misguided decision.
*But I don't consider it entirely unreasonable, and I think the law behind it addresses a very real problem that we shouldn't ignore by sticking our heads in the sand and yelling "1st amendment".
I mean, if you read the ruling, it’s based on a bunch of stuff. Your comment seems to me like a case in point—correct me if I’m misunderstanding your point.
And especially for mid to high profile court cases, there are likely hundreds to thousands of people that will read the opinion before a reporter is able to get to the first news story about it pushed.
User flagging of articles is the existing mechanism.
It works pretty well unless, perhaps ironically in regard to the Fifth Circuit ruling, the moderators deliberately disable flags to allow the submission leeway.
Or unless users who dislike that sort of thread don’t flag it.
As an aside, a few years ago during the political silly season, HN tried banning political articles completely.
That lasted less than a week.
Anyway, the nature of that type of topic is to spark dumpster fires in the comments.
The simplest thing that might solve your immediate displeasure is avoiding the temptation to walk down the alley.
Good luck.
Even without seeing the movie, if comment A says the director X has a history of doing Y, someone who's not seen the film can still talk to director X's history with Y.
To discourage this, HN could provide a more complex rating system than simple up and down, like /. has. Then you could hide all comments rated "uninformed speculation".
Reading the primary source material itself isn't some back door to being insightful, either. See comments about the new California law regulating the Internet for minors. A charitable read of the words in the law sound fine. Unfortunately, that charitable reading isn't how the courts are going to approach the issue, so comments taking that charitable take aren't really worth reading either.
That being said, I find it particularly ironic that in the context of this specific court case, your suggested fix to the problem is to ban certain content.
They can post snippets of particularly interesting parts. If out of context, other people can also post other interesting snippets that counter it.
I agree HN is too quick to discuss things they don't understand, but wouldn't consider this a significant portion of that problem.