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I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular
by WA 10y ago
I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care about the comments of the JS folks.
- Kiro 10y agoSame and I've thought about this a lot. I so often only read the comments without reading the actual article. Surely the fact that so many people do this must mean there's an untapped opportunity somewhere?
- mromanuk 10y agoYes, I thought that, I have a note in my sketch ideas: "Extract comments from HN", normally I value them more than the actual article. They are important, like reviews.
- paki123 10y agoAre they important? I do it too, but it seems to just fuel my inability to get through boring and/or long articles. Sure they act as a filter at times, but sometimes I feel like I might be missing out on solid knowledge or something cool. Even if an article has a lot of positive reviews in it, it's a crapshoot whether I go and read the article at all.
- mod 10y agoGoing along with "reviews," in this era of blogspam, I like to read the comments first so I start out a skeptic, if I should be. Very often, the top comment for an article is a rebuttal, if there is some misinformation in an article, or perhaps a poorly-done study. Basically, people who are smarter than me usually get to tell me why the journalist is wrong.
- cmwright 10y agoI also do this, but I'm not sure that it's unique to hacker news. The immediate example that comes to mind is that while one might not watch something like a Presidential Address, or for that matter a White House news conference, one is more likely to watch the evening news or read a newspaper where people dissect the information and TLDR it for them as well as provide some contextual commentary.
- jaySmith 10y agoYeah, it would be cool if someone made a bot to extract a summary from the article and post it as a comment to help those who have not read the article.
- reitanqild 10y agoSomeone did. Or faked one. IIRC it was active for a few days but was told in clear terms to stop or be banned. Somewhat related: I have been using the HN bot on Telegram. That way I could even catch a glimpse of wildly popular stories that have been flagged of the site :-)
- detaro 10y agoA TL;DR service could maybe be made as a browser extension that pulls it from some external source instead. Not visible for those that don't want it, and also removes the problem from having to hunt for the TL;DR comment when there are many replies.
- mastax 10y agoThere's a bot like this on Reddit that works surprisingly well.
- cjf101 10y agoThe one I've seen (and been impressed with) uses http://smmry.com/ http://smmry.com/ to condense articles to a tldr.
- heenal 10y agosame here
- markatkinson 10y agoYea I do almost exactly the same. I am trying to make more of an effort to read the article as well though, as a part of me feels like going straight to the comments is lazy and/or a bad habit.
- cjf101 10y agoThat's pretty dead on to how I read HN. Full articles when I am curious about the subject matter, straight to comments when I am more curious about how others view the material. Sometimes the comment threads will prompt me to go back and read the source.
- Diederich 10y agoSame for me, with one additional piece: I'll almost always read the article before writing a comment.
- magic_beans 10y agoI just read HN for the comments.
- antoaravinth 10y agoExactly the same. By reading comments, you do get the community idea on that particular article. To be frank, I felt comments gives more information than the article it self, atleast IMHO.