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That would be an actual improvement. Reading the comments section usually just leads to personal energy waste.
by darthrupert 2y ago
That would be an actual improvement. Reading the comments section usually just leads to personal energy waste.
- zapkyeskrill 2y agoYes, but who will comment then and on what?
- anonzzzies 2y agoOn both HN & Reddit, I find the comments more informative and less frustrating than reading the article usually. But I guess YMMV.
- brabel 2y agoYou need to read the article first to know that. But most people won't.
- Jensson 2y agoYou can read the article after the comments.
- anonzzzies 2y agoIf the comments say it's worth it I read it, but often (especially on HN) the top comment starts with a summary of errors/inconsistencies in the article and then I don't really feel the need.
- creesch 2y agoYou do you, but hivemind thinking is a real thing. I have seen highly upvoted comments seemingly "debunk" an article where on closer examination it becomes clear they actually didn't read the article either. It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content. I get that is easier, but intellectually you are doing yourself no favors by having this be your default.
- Jensson 2y agoBut often the top comment debunks what you think is true, and then you learn something. > It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content. That isn't an issue though since the important part is what you learn or not, not whether you think an imaginary article is true or not. If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article. The only issue here is attribution, but why should a reader care about that? Edit: And it isn't an issue that people will think it actually debunks the linked article, since there will always be a sub comment stating that the commenter didn't read the article and therefore missed the mark.
- genewitch 2y ago> If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article. An argument for synthetic corpi (plural of corpus..esses?) - AI ingesting AI.
- Jensson 2y agoCommenter's doesn't live isolated only getting information from other commenters, they have lives outside of HN and use that to inform their comments. So no, it isn't the same as AI ingesting AI content at all.
- ScottBurson 2y agoThe plural is "corpora" :-)
- tmnvdb 2y agoThat is the biggest problem on this website, people want to feel smart by 'debunking' things they don't really understand. It leads to a lot of contrarian views with poor signal to noise ratio, especially when the topic is slightly outside of average user experience (midwit programming)
- greenchair 2y agousually the top comment these days is a diversion to push an agenda.
- darthrupert 2y agoI agree, they are! But reading through them, or even worse, engaging with them, is a serious energy drain. Especially if somebody is being wrong.
- lukan 2y agoYeah, but is your mission to correct anything wrong on the internet? https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ Sounds exhausting.
- darthrupert 2y agoYes, that was the joke.
- lukan 2y agoHard to tell nowdays..
- rzzzt 2y agoOccasionally the article is wrong.
- j4coh 2y agoEven more occasionally commenters are too.
- Jensson 2y agoBut extremely rare for a popular wrong comment to not have sub comments debunking them, they are much more reliable than articles therefore.
- j4coh 2y agoI’ve found the more I know about the topic at hand, the more wildly many of the comments seem off base, even the highly upvoted undebunked ones. Its harder for me to judge topics I don’t know much about, but I have to assume it’s something similar.
- kandesbunzler 2y agoLmfao you forgot the fact that especially on reddit and hn people tend to say a lot of bullshit especially if it goes hand in hand with their biases
- anonzzzies 2y agoSo do the writers of the articles, however, with them I cannot interact.
- northern-lights 2y ago10 years ago Reddit used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. 5 years ago, HN used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. Neither of them will go back to the same level of quality. Not anymore.
- cft 2y agoyou need to expend resources (e.g. "proof of work") to post, to drive away low effort spam. https://stacker.news/ https://stacker.news/ is an interesting experiment in that regard.
- anonzzzies 2y agoLuckily I am not a LLM and can read and select things rather fast without processing the crap. Both HN and some subreddits still are fine for quality if you know the users and their reputations; just skip the rest. Worse than 10 years ago, still a lot better than mostly anywhere else.
- inciampati 2y agoThis has been said by every long term user of these sites. And not at the same time. It was always better in the past. It's probably partly true... yeah, quality can decrease as things get better. But it's also partly an illusion of aging in a changing world. Ten years is long enough to completely change the way we write and express ourselves.
- schrodinger 2y agoIt's actually sort of in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
- solumunus 2y agoAnd yet the comments still provide more value than the article, almost always.
- concordDance 2y agoThey definitely used to be, but haven't been much good for years. At least 8 years in the case of reddit, maybe 3 in the case of hackernews. Though at this point it's a habit I cannot quite bring myself to break...
- qup 2y agoIt's worse, but there's nowhere better than here imo. Except very niche topics maybe
- IOUnix 2y agoToday is my first day on HN and I came here looking for the comments. I miss intelligent conversations and reasonable interactions and reddit is just a dumpster fire now (and arguably before). Even if you can find a reasonably mature sub you're still exposed to the muck raking of the front page overflowing into everywhere else.
- NiloCK 2y agoIn a way I agree, but the sustainability is shaky. The intrinsic motivation for providing the comments comes from a mix of - peer interaction, comradery - reputation building If becomes evident that your outputs are only directly consumed by a sentiment-aggregation-layer that scrub you from the discourse, then it could be harder to put a lot of effort into the thread. This doesn't even account for the loss of info that results from fewer people actually reading and voting through the thread.
- CMCDragonkai 2y agoYes but this assumes human input is the golden goose. Maybe it is at the beginning just to bootstrap the process, and then runaway AI starts to recurse homeruns with its own original comments.
- booleandilemma 2y agoHN comments are good, but the more nested a thread, the more inane they get. You see things like people arguing over punctuation, or the definition of punctuation.