7 ms·
Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just like on HN, if I see an interest
by throwaway81523 1y ago
Of course slow, shitty web sites also cause a massive drop in clicks, as soon as an alternative to clicking emerges. It's just like on HN, if I see an interesting title and want to know what the article is about, I can wince and click the article link, but it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments. That difference is almost entirely from the crappy overdesign of almost every web site, vs. HN's speedy text-only format.
- skydhash 1y agoI like good design as much as the next guy, but only when it does not impact information access. I use eww (emacs web wowser) and w3m sometimes and it's fascinating how much speed you get after stripping away the JS bloat.
- kome 1y agojs cult will never ever understand this. designers need the courage to work with html+css only.
- throwaway81523 1y agoKill css too.
- vismit2000 1y agoYou might want to try out https://hackernews.betacat.io/ https://hackernews.betacat.io/
- cornholio 1y agoThis is a pretty apt analogy: why settle for the original article when you can read the outrage infused summary of an opinionated troll in a hurry? It has little to do with overdesign or load times.
- throwaway992673 1y agoThe troll gives me the main idea without having to find five tiny x's on the screen like some sadistic minigame then paywall me. I'll take the troll.
- watwut 1y agoThey dont. Most commenters react to the title and preexistent opinions. Rhey frequently misinterpret the article too - misconstructing arguments they dont like and such.
- jacquesm 1y agoMost commenters react to each other, either to the comment itself or to different interpretations and/or knowledge about the subject of TFA. It is the top level comments that are supposed to react to the article.
- throwaway992673 1y ago[dead]
- jcattle 1y agoI was thinking exactly the same thing. It's the perfect analogy. What do HN comments and AI Overviews have in common? - All information went through a bunch of neurons at least once - We don't know which information was even considered - Might be completely false but presented with utmost confidence - ...?
- StackRanker3000 1y agoContradicting someone describing their own experience based on assumptions and generalizations that may or may not have a basis in reality is pretty arrogant. How are you so confident that you can presume to tell that person what’s going on in their mind? More generally speaking though, I do agree that comments probably tend to give people more of a dopamine hit than the content itself, especially if it’s long-form. However comments on HN often are quite substantial and of high quality, at least relatively speaking, and the earlier point about reading the articles often being a poor experience has a lot of merit as well. Why can’t it be a combination of all of the above (to various degrees depending on the individual, etc)?
- poemxo 1y agoI do the same thing, but it's not because of format. To me, blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches, whereas comments are full of raw emotion and seem more honest. I end up seeking out discussions over buttoned up long-form articles. This is not strictly logical but I have a feeling I'm not alone.
- visarga 1y ago> To me, blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches, whereas comments are full of raw emotion and seem more honest. I end up seeking out discussions over buttoned up long-form articles. Me too. That is why sometimes I take the raw comment thread and paste it into a LLM, the result is a grounded article. It contains a diversity of positions and debunking, but the slop is removed. Social threads + LLMs are an amazing combo, getting the LLM polish + the human grounded perspective. If I was in the place of reddit or HN I would try to generate lots of socially grounded articles. They would be better than any other publication because they don't have the same conflict of interests.
- arkh 1y agoWhy even bother linking to an article or blogpost: use a shock title, maybe associate it with some specific news source. No article to read, just a title and a comment section. Harvest said comments and create a 1h, 1d, 1 week, all time digest.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoThat reminds me of this webpage some years ago (idk if I can link it, it was very cynical) that summarized the week on HN with a lot of cynicysm and snark, it was a great, "grounding" read, a cynical break from the HN techbro overhyping of e.g. Rust. (I don't know if Rust is overhyped, it's calmed down again but at one point a recurring post on HN was "solved problem X... but written in Rust!", where the latter was the main selling point instead of e.g. the 10x performance boost that a lot of applications get from a rewrite to a lower-level language)
- HSO 1y ago> faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments Or, youre confusing primordial desire to be aligned with perceived peers -- checking what others say, then effortlessly nodding along -- with forming your own judgment.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoI think that's a mean and disingenuous. I often click on the HN comments before reading the article because the article I very often nothing more than the headline and I'm more interested in the discussion.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AlecSchueler 1y agoOr they know themselves better than you do and it's exactly what they claimed.
- nextzck 1y agoI think this is a really good take. It was mean for sure but you’re right. Why do we do this? This is a good reminder for me to click more articles instead of reading through comments and forming an opinion based on what I read from others.
- Arisaka1 1y agoI absolutely do that because I got so bullied that my personality shifted from self-expression to emulation. I realized that just this week because I caught myself copying a coworker he's respected and has people laughing with his jokes, and wondered why I have the tendency to do it. But I never expected that this would also link back to my tendency to skip an article and just stick to what the top comments of a section have, HN or Reddit.
- jacquesm 1y ago> wondered why I have the tendency to do it Because when you were still swinging from the trees a some generations back that was a survival trait.
- kimi 1y agoI do the same thing - Instead of going first to an unknown site that might (will?) be ad-infested and possibly AI generated, so that a phrase becomes a 1000-word article, I read the comments on HN, decide if it's interesting enough to take the risk, and then click. If it's Medium or similar, I won't click. Hey, coming out feels good - I thought I was the only one.
- SwtCyber 1y agoBut it's kind of a vicious cycle: users avoid bad sites, traffic drops, sites shove in more ads to survive, UX gets worse, and so on
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago> sites shove in more ads to survive This is where it breaks down; why would they shove in MORE ads when their readers are going down? I'm not saying it's a rational decision, of course. I suspect a big part is metrics-driven development; add an aggressive newsletter popup and newsletter subscriptions increase, therefore it's effective and can stay. Add bigger / flashier ads and ad revenue increases, therefore the big and flashy ads can stay. User enjoyment is a lot harder to measure. You can look at metrics like page visits and session length, but that's still just metrics. Asking the users themselves has two problems, one is lack of engagement (unless you are a big community already, HN doing a survey would get plenty of feedback), two is that the people don't actually know how they feel about a website or what they want (they want faster horses). Like, I don't think anybody asked Google for an AI summary of what they think you're searching for, but they did, and it made people stay on Google instead of go to the site. Whether that's good for Google in the long run remains to be seen of course, back when Google first rolled out their ad problem it... really didn't matter to them, because their ads were on a lot of webpages. Google's targets ended up becoming "keep the users on the internet, make them browse more and faster", and for a while that pushed innovation too; V8, Chrome, Google DNS, Gears, SPDY/HTTP/2/3, Lighthouse, mod_pagespeed, Google Closure Compiler, etc etc etc - all invented to make the web faster, because faster web = more pageviews = more ad impressions = more revenue. Of course, part of that benefited others; Facebook for example created their own ecosystem, the internet within the internet. But anyway.
- fireflash38 1y agoIt's why brands slowly and steadily lose value. What's 50c more for a box of cereal? Why not make it 12oz instead of 16oz? Sure use lesser quality material, you can't really tell the difference. The everyone just stops using it, cause it's shit and not worth the money.
- 1y ago
- deltarholamda 1y agoYC idea pitch: HN Commenters as AI Summarizer Simulator as a Service I will need $100M in seed funding.
- raincole 1y ago> it's much faster and easier to click the HN comments link and infer the info I want from the comments Except the other commenters didn't read the article either. Now you're all basically just LLM using the title as a prompt.
- sandos 1y agoIv'e been focusing on comments on social media for I don't know how long. It works 90% of the time as a pretty good summary for some reason. I do this on hackernews, and especially on news-sites I check (cleantechnica, electrec, reneweconomy) and I actively shun sites _without_ comments.
- sumeno 1y agoIf you're only reading the comments you have no clue how often it actually works as a summary.
- 1718627440 1y agoWhen I read the sites themself after reading the comments I'm often disappointed, because they contain no useful information that wasn't already in the comments.
- stronglikedan 1y agoYou monster!
- SoftTalker 1y agoThere are some contrarians. https://lite.cnn.com https://lite.cnn.com for example. I'm not a big fan of CNN but this is something I'd like to see more of.