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I think there's a huge problem with attention span on the internet. Dopamine rush from new content is a thing and there is so much of it available that people c

I think there's a huge problem with attention span on the internet. Dopamine rush from new content is a thing and there is so much of it available that people can't help chase it all the time. This kind of engagement really degrades the quality of a community and I think we should do all we can to keep it at bay. Explicit, inoffensive, boring headlines can go a long way in weeding out people who are looking for their next rush. I don't know, maybe if this post was titled, "Scientists discuss what concepts ought to be widely known", it would lend itself less to clickbait?

quitit 5y ago
Similar to other social news sites: a great many HN readers go straight to the comments to chime in. Often the articles themselves aren’t even more than a few minutes reading and the comments have questions and ideas that were directly addressed by the piece. There has been a long discussion about what to do about this problem (from slashdot to digg to reddit and so on) - however the idea of requiring commenters to jump through hoops or unpaid moderators to somehow keep the discussion factual seems more like a way to kill the site. For your amusement: pay casual attention to the comment count on any HN post that contains “apple” or one of their better known trademarks. No one is reading anything - it’s just a gangbang.