4 ms·
Ask HN: Do you ever browse HN on the New Comments page?
I'm curious how useful some find it and if I'm missing something on effectively using this page [0]. The comments are out of context, thus not so meaningful as a result, and they will lay on arbitrary articles all mixed together, which further complicates context and train of thought, or even an understanding of what the topic is.
How do you use this page, if you do?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments
- PaulHoule 4y agoI am building a smart RSS feeder that works like Tinder, I give articles a thumbs up or thumbs down. Right now on the weekdays the system shows me a bit less than half of the articles it ingests. Early when I didn’t have a lot of text I tried the new comments RSS feed and mixed those in with other RSS articles. I had the same problem you had. I still have the top comments RSS feed going into the system, it is better but still not that great. The highest ranking comments that it shows me have a predicted probability of 0.3 that I’ll like them compared to 0.7 or so about for articles about the NFL and 0.2 for articles about the other kind of football. What I’d say is that some comments do stand on their own, but many don’t. There is the dependence of the comment on the prior conversation. Some comments make sense without that but you may find the comments to that comment will change the meaning for the comment for me. My take is that the bag-of-words classifier I use for articles is not so good for comments because it does not take context into account.
- FireInsight 4y agoDo the articles ever give you back a thumbs up?
- PaulHoule 4y agoOnly if i go off my meds.
- warrenm 4y agoI've accidentally hit the new comments page a few times Always instantly regret doing so
- sysadm1n 4y agoSometimes it's fun. You can tell if a comment is good if it doesn't need context and good writing always explains itself without referring to the article/URL in question.
- warrenm 4y agoCan't say as I've seen more than a tiny handful of those in the past however many years I've been here :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fattybob 4y agoI’ve tried that a few times, but it’s not a thing that stuck for me, in fact I haven’t tried it in quite some time….
- elecush 4y agoit shows you who commented last -- it's kinda like an RSS feed of most recent comments, it can be helpful for finding new accounts that you can trace back to their other contributions / comments
- carapace 4y agoSometimes when I'm bored. The comments are so new that they haven't been filtered yet, so there's a lot of noise compared to "main line" discussion, but you get a sort of cutting edge view of the collective instantaneous zeitgeist of HN. But that's really only interesting briefly. The fun thing to do is find somebody who makes intelligent and constructive comments and then trawl through their comment history for other good comments. YMMV
- akkartik 4y agoI've been using https://www.val.town https://www.val.town to follow people on HN. Val Town had a Show HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343122. So far it definitely seems like a positive. But I could do a lot better with finding people. I tend to think of HN as 3 overlapping communities: startups, programming and other random stuff. Lately I care only about the latter 2.
- carapace 4y agoFWIW you're one of the people I pay attention to outside of HN, your Mu project is very interesting and impressive IMO.
- justin_oaks 4y agoI just looked at it for the first time. While reading down it, I got the feeling that I was a content moderator looking for stuff violating the HN guidelines. So maybe it's useful for dang? Otherwise, comments out of context do seem pretty useless.
- DevKoala 4y agoAlways. The default page is heavily biased towards the common denominator of technology understanding and intellectual curiosity, and it is also manipulated by people with a strong left leaning bias. The "new" tab is where I find a lot of the more domain specific tech articles and also some interesting topics worth paying attention to before they get censored.
- maxbond 4y agoI think when community moderation & curation (upvotes, downvotes, flags, and the choice of what to submit) feels great when it matches your personal feelings/political beliefs, and frustrating when it opposes them. As a "left leaning" person I often feel the same way, there's a subset of HN which is really into things that grind my gears, and if I spend more than 15 minutes on HN I'm sure to find it in stories or comments. I'm very confident "left leaning" people are in the minority on HN, and that HN is a largely centrist forum with perhaps a rightward lean - just as you're very confident the opposite is true. But as a general rule it isn't a conspiracy, it's just people who agree with each other and disagree with you using the site without coordination. And if you have evidence they've formed a voting ring or a flagging ring, then email dang about it and he'll fix it. If you can't find any evidence - it's probably just people who disagree with you. A good test is to ask yourself, "if this was all above board and there were just a group of users who disagreed with me, because they had independently formed a different opinion than I had, would it look any different from what I'm seeing?"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- labarilem 4y agoSometimes I do it out of curiosity, I mean it's not as good quality content-dense as the most popular pages.
- the_only_law 4y agoYes it’s almost always a mistake now. I used to be able to find interesting threads I might miss otherwise, but for a while I tend to just find whatever the most popular flame war thread at the time is.
- cheapliquor 4y agoI do. It's a good way to find articles I would have otherwise missed. It's also fun to catch a comment that's mid-argument so I can go right to it and catch up on the whole thread.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- muzani 4y agoI normally accidentally end up there. I find it leads to better content than browsing by headlines to be honest, just really unintuitive. I tend to go Ask HN first, then my threads, then main page, then Show. But a lot of the good stuff is actually on the 4th page of news - things that are not controversial enough to get back and forth conversations, but interesting enough that someone comments on them after they're no longer featured.
- severine 4y agoI do it. Specifically, I go to "comments" and inmediately press the End key, and go back up from there; if I don't go into a tangent before I reach the top, I refresh the page (and press End again). This yields links and discussions I would otherwise miss, so I still do it sometimes. YMMV. Edit: mixed "new" and "comments". Fixed.