I usually scroll through the headlines list, and unless i know the website being linked to isn’t garbage, editorial/opinion, or paywalled, i check out the comme

I usually scroll through the headlines list, and unless i know the website being linked to isn’t garbage, editorial/opinion, or paywalled, i check out the comments first to get a sense of whether or not it’s worth my time. Most “news” sites take at least 10-30 seconds to load even on a gigabit down connection, because of all the trash they shove in there. HN is usually sub-second for a big page of comments, so i scroll through those to see if the article is even remotely credible, useful, or worth the effort/time/browser tab memory. Doubly true for mentions of projects I’ve never heard of. “X software blahblahblah” - well what the fuck is X? Not wasting 30+ seconds and hundreds of mb of memory on some trash article only to find out it’s not even remotely useful or interesting in the slightest. Not when i can load up comments and infer from the context WTF X actually is.