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So many comments about how to wake up early... the article is about depression, right? The author makes a distinction between lazy-trouble-getting-out-of-bed (
by hashkb 11y ago
So many comments about how to wake up early... the article is about depression, right? The author makes a distinction between lazy-trouble-getting-out-of-bed (which is what all the comments here are discussing, and, of course, something most of us experience) and the much more serious problem she's struggling with.
- rasengan 11y agoThese days people seem to read only a title and begin writing their comments about it.
- d23 11y agoI wonder how many upvotes it would have if folks knew it had little to do with advice on getting out of bed.
- alextgordon 11y agoThe comment system on HN discourages discussion of the article, because threads cannot be collapsed and so there is only space for 2 or 3 top-level comments to get much attention. The top comment is often a poor quality one, expressing some controversial view that gets replies, starving the lower top-level comments of upvotes, and cementing its place at the top. It would be better to collapse replies to all top-level comments, and allow people to expand the replies to the comments they find interesting.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoWhat about randomizing comment order for the first N minutes of a submission's life? Although I do agree that built-in comment collapse functionality would be great; I'm using a Chrome extension right now.
- dave2000 11y agoI'm a fan of experimenting with voting systems, and as this never happens, i'm always disappointed. I think it would be great if the order of comments was always random and scores were never shown (I don't care what people think of other people's comments; how can an opinion have a score? the very idea is preposterous). It would encourage people reading more comments, and not being either fearful of losing points or posting comments just to get a higher score.
- grrowl 11y agoWorth noting, the score is intended to be an objective measure of correctness — well sourced, clear, and reasonable comments aught to add to the score, rudeness, questionable sourcing/factualness should not. Ideally.
- ethbro 11y agoThe problem is, given the current strict comment ordering system & the fact that many (myself included) read comments top to bottom, a 15 in the top position for two hours may in fact be equal to a 3 that's farther below. I hadn't thought about it when I started writing this, but I'd be curious what comment ordering results a points/time value function would produce. Although a fuzzy random ordering would still be needed to ensure that lower comments got enough viability. So maybe points/time/position-at-vote-time PS: That said, collapsing comments to promote more equality between highly rated level 1 comments would be an excellent idea.
- elementalest 11y agoI had never thought there might be an extension for collapsing comments... You have just saved me so much scrolling :D
- DanBC 11y agoJust checking: do you downvote those poor quality top level comments? Does anyone?
- rory096 11y agoFYI (and obviously it doesn't help with the systemic problem), a Chrome extension to collapse HN comments was posted a few weeks ago. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collapse/pdlifinplmfmoeppfooipommbdljhdmp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213479
- Razengan 11y agoI am often guilty of this. Why? Maybe it has to do with the assumption that the comments on an article will provide me with more knowledge than reading the article itself. The discussion here is more dynamic, from multiple parties, providing different views, sometimes correcting errors and filling in any omissions of the article, as opposed to the source piece which is static and written by a single, usually biased, individual. More simply, most people are lazy and do not have the time to read each article. They also go to aggregation sites like HN or Reddit to get all their news in a single format, and temporarily navigating away from that format can be sort of uncomfortable, especially with the ads and whatnot on most linked articles. Of course this is not a good habit; the articles should be read, at least before you comment on them. Commenting before reading only increases irrelevant noise and defeats the purpose of the news. Yet, the reasons for why people don't read articles, remain. Maybe HN and Reddit could balance this by providing a preview of the link in the comments section? Some subreddits already have a bot which provides summary, but it really should be a feature of the aggregation site itself.
- samstave 11y agoThese days? It is known. And I am guilty of this in this thread as well.
- kafkaesq 11y agoThese days people seem to read only a title and begin writing their comments about it. Yup, seems that way. Kind of depressing, isn't it? My highest-scoring submission so far, and almost no one seems to have actually read it.
- clapas 11y agoI agree with you, the article seems to be about depression. It starts like it is going to be about lazy troubled, but it suddenly turns into this matter. To me it makes a lot of sense, because I didn't want to wake up when there was not hope for happiness. What the author says is that adding the duty of waking up early does not help when your life is already bad, it is only one more source of remorse.
- id 11y agoInterestingly, the first thing I thought of when I read the title was, in fact, depression.
- anacleto 11y agowhen the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the/his finger.
- waffl 11y agoI also was a bit surprised to realize all the comments here were completely missing the point of the actual article and only a response to the headline. Coincidentally this very active discussion on another article is taking place and likely a good resource for anyone seeking a more relevant conversation with regards to depression: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367325
- curun1r 11y agoHaving dealt with a fairly serious depression (which resulted in a year of unemployment before I sought help from a psychiatrist), the two aren't entirely different. I found that establishing a routine wakeup time, especially when I shifted it to between 5am and 6am, was incredibly helpful in battling those "much more serious" problems that turned lazy mornings into nothing days. Every depression is different, so this may not be true for others, but I'm one data point that learning to wake up early is an integral part of learning to deal with a serious depression.