The solution to this problem is well known: an abstract. It's clear that many news outlets see their job as entertainment rather than delivery of information,

The solution to this problem is well known: an abstract. It's clear that many news outlets see their job as entertainment rather than delivery of information, and it's also clear from comment's like snookca's that some people like this. (I hate it, but to each his own.) So this is never going to be solved by complaining to the author or to your fellow readers. What could effectively solve this is if HN attached a short abstract to each article, written and updated by user submission. (The initial version could/should be provided by the submitter.) Maybe minimal GitHub-like version control with pull requests accepted by vote. This could be useful not just to save time, but also to keep article quality higher, if submitters are required to justify the intellectual value of the submission. The abstract would be more valuable than normal comments, so accepted modifications could get extra karma. This would have similarities to summaries on slashdot (which are written by moderators and so not very scalable) and the "submission statement" required in certain subreddits. https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introducing_submission_statements_for_news_and/?sort=new https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introdu... https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_policy_for_truereddit_submission_statements/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_poli...