It's all about speed. Right now there's a post on the front page about "understanding higher-kinded types". Assuming this is something about certain kinda of

It's all about speed. Right now there's a post on the front page about "understanding higher-kinded types". Assuming this is something about certain kinda of people (I'm guessing a play on "high minded"?) I give this maybe 20% chance of being worth a read. So far I am 2 or 3 seconds invested. It's worth going further. Click in to the comments. HN comments always loads in well less than 1 second, and it takes me another couple of seconds to read the very first comment and find out that this is nothing to do with people at all - it's about some new higher level semantics about data types in programming languages. Fascinating and all, but not enough for today. So with about 5 seconds investment, I've got some mild techno-titillation and have "consumed" that post on HN. Move on to the next one. Do I want to be like this? No. But I feel HN is probably as highly evolved as possible at surfacing a wide range of technically interesting stuff to a wide range of consumers, and this is the fastest way to consume it. As another post says, going to the source article is like stepping out of the safe, fast zone of HN. That's every chance I'll wait for many seconds for annoying whirring popups and page renderings. Not all sites are like this (the one in question is actually great, to the point and loads fast). But too many are.