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One reason I almost always read the comments before the article on Hacker News is that the comments have less control over the narrative, so it's harder to get
by feoren 5y ago
One reason I almost always read the comments before the article on Hacker News is that the comments have less control over the narrative, so it's harder to get away with these tricks. People also love to write things like "well duh: of course writers optimize for attention, that's literally their job!" which, while a little bit snotty, helps highlight occurrences of this. By reading the top few comments on HN first, I feel like I get a good idea of whether an article is worth reading, and if I do read it I can go in "armed" to protect against this.
The hard part is forcing myself not to respond to those comments until I've actually read the article myself.
- slibhb 5y ago> One reason I almost always read the comments before the article on Hacker News is that the comments have less control over the narrative, so it's harder to get away with these tricks. Coloring your opinion of the article before you've read it is a significant downside.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoI actually just read the comments like 95% of the time, and get good value.
- dfabulich 5y agoIt seems unlikely that you could know that you get better value out of skipping the article if you skip the article 95% of the time.
- electroly 5y agoPoint of order: they didn't say better, they said good. They didn't compare it to the value of reading the article.
- jareklupinski 5y agosame; my RSS feed opens the comments section of each article, and I check the first two for someone saying 'this is blogpam / clickbait' before reading maybe i should just delay reading articles for 24hrs until the filters do their thing, but then i cant contribute to the convos :(
- omginternets 5y agoAs opposed to coloring your opinion on the subject via tha article? At some point, yeah… you have to actually stop and think about what you read, whether it be a comment or an article.