Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?

joshu, you could give the greasemonkey script "HN OnePage" a try. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512 It may not be quite what you are looking for, but it will let you easily view the comments/article for any given submission. There are some other good greasemonkey scripts out there as well, such as HN Splitview, that address this issue.

I thought something similar when reading this thread and thought it would make a nice bookmarklet.

http://code.cohitre.com/snippets/hackernews.html

It opens the comments and original article in side by side iframes for easy previewing.

I guess it's a good method of second-level quality control. The fact that its on HN is usually a good primary check, so supplement that with good comments and the resulting link is usually a great read.

I also do this for situations where the article sounds like fluff or link-bait, but involves a subject where an intelligent conversation could occur amongst smart people. There are lots of times when the comment threads are more valuable/interesting than the links.

I think I do the opposite. If it sounds like it's going to be ridiculous/controversial/unusual I like to read it myself first and see what my unbiased thoughts are. If it sounds like something easy to agree with I usually just want to see if anyone has a unique perspective on it.

Often, the discussion will focus on a few sticky points, and skip much of the interesting or least-debatable content in the original article.

It would be nice if this were an option. I often end up making two passes at a story, reading it first via the RSS feed and then finding it again on the home page to read the commentary.

The RSS feed also has links to the comments.

Usually I have a quick scan of the article, read the comments, then return to the article if it sounds worth reading.

Socialite is designed with a modular structure, making it possible to support other sites. It would be feasible to write a Hacker News module to exist alongside reddit support. If you'd be interested in hacking on it, I'd be pleased to work with you.

-C

I think it's fine as is. I often scan the comments (not just reading the first one). I'd bet most of the comment readers do the same.

One feature I've always liked is when forums set the mouse over text to display the first n lines of the post. Makes it much faster to figure out if you want to read a topic if the title doesn't contain enough information. Also doesn't clutter the display of the page, because visually it's no different. Of course, given that editors can edit the titles of submissions on HN this is less of a problem.

I too check the comments on suspiciously titled stories. I think it would be a worthy experiment to try to label linkbait.

I find I often check the comments for stories first if I think the article might be long (from a magazine site like The Economist), if I can't figure out what it is about from the title, or if a title is designed to be a hook -- i.e. it leaves out information intentionally to make you curious.

Well, if you show enough of the comments to be useful, then the front page will be really long and cluttered. If you only show the first 100ish chars like gmail does, then it probably won't be enough to be useful, since HN comments tend to be long and well written.

So I guess I'm trying to say I like it the way it is. It would take just as long to read mouseover/preview text as it does to open the comments in a new tab and scan them.

I just read the new comments page.

Please make the "discuss" / "N comments" anchor have a distinguishing property when :visited -- maybe a faint underline or weight change instead of a different color. Currently there's no way to see that I've looked at a story unless I visited the link.

It'd be nice to have the thread anchor target be larger, maybe by having each story encapsulated by something like this:

  <a href="/item?=id=XXXXXX" class="story"> ... </a>
  
  a.story { display:block; }
  a.story:hover { text-decoration:none; background:#fff; }

That's probably incompatible with the WTF way you're using tables (TRs in flat series for the link, byline, and spacer) -- you'd have to switch to having each story be its own table. The result would be that the whole story's "row" (minus the anchors inside it) would be a link to the thread.

I'd actually like to try that -- maybe the first paragraph or so included.

The value of the clean look (to me) is only it's service in providing easy access to the information, and I think leading comment blurbs might be a big win in that regard.

From the mobile PoV it saves having to click (and suffer a mobile experience http+render round trip) on each interesting sounding link to get more information (wherein I might decide the thread wasn't worth it, or the title was too vague and I've already read the comments before).

You could compromise and just add an expander to each story. If a user is suspicious of the story, they can expand the first couple comments and see what people are saying without going to a new page.

At the very least, it would be nice if the "n comments" link were a little bigger and easier to click. I think that would greatly improve the comment-reading, without cluttering up the display too much.

I read from the RSS feed - and I was rather surprised that the main link leads to the other site, and not HN. My main habit with RSS is to go through a feed, opening the interesting links in new tabs, and then read them - I keep forgetting and ending up with a bunch of links rather than the HN comments!

I would argue that people often read the comments because the headline-only format of YC leaves them guessing what the article is actually about.

If you are considering putting the leading comment text up there, please consider getting submitters to include a one sentence summary of the article instead.

That would be interesting, although in addition to clutter it will give the highest-ranked comment even more weight than it has already. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I click comments first because I know what I'm going to get, vs. clicking on a link that might not even finish loading before I get back to work. As far as that goes, having a preview wouldn't change much.

Any time you're surprised at how often people read the comments, go read a few YouTube comments.

I like that I can be wrong or disagreeable here without getting called names. And that folks who know way more than me will show up and say stuff on the topics I'm curious about.

There is another problem, you can't really go to the comments /after/ going to the article, but you can go to the article after the comments.

Unless you add a toolbar option like reddit has.

I usually read the comments because I'm slashdot-hooked. One /. meme is to not RTFA. :p

Leading comment as a tooltip?

Paul,

I'd like some (low-key) visual indication for the text of "comments" links that I've already visited, as a reminder that I've already looked at the comments.

Although with the HN page's clean design, I'm not imagining right now what specifically would fit unobtrusively.

With HN, my memory is better as to what I've examined. Actually, I've commented on reddit a time or two on the desirability of this feature. There's so much clutter over there these days, that I'd like a reminder for those links where I examined the comments and decided to go no further.

> I could add a button people can click on to say that an article is linkbait, or mistaken, or whatever, and display icons to indicate this.

This is a great idea.

Also, it will help if we can see the sum of comment points on the front page.

  1. Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors (mitre.org)
     14 points by petercooper 1 hour ago | 10 comments [20 points] <<<<<

Comment link can be bigger.

/. uses tagging for this and I think it works well.

I'd like to see the plus and minus votes (or the total number of votes), not just the sum. There's a huge difference between an article/comment that only 3 people voted on vs an article that 103 people voted on.