Comment by fxtentacle
3 years ago
I read HN precisely because of "this".
The article criticizes that too many comments are about related context and not strictly about the article. In my opinion, that's very valuable because I could have read the article by myself without HN. But I only get shown other people's associations through the HN comments. So them being slightly off-topic widens my horizon of knowledge.
This is 100% why I often read the comments -- possibly without reading the article. The article might be talking about something I already know or might have even read already. But the comments often just veers off and I learn about something new but slightly related. For me comments is about discovery and exploration with the original topic as a starting point.
Same here. The comments are the gold. When panning for gold you have to filter through a bunch of stuff you're not interested in. Sorry, you're not going to find gold every day and there's no motherlode to mine - unless you consider HN itself to be the motherlode - and you still have to mine! But those nuggets of gold can be extremely valuable when you find them!
Also addictive; it's more exciting to read through the comments because of that chance of striking gold.
Partway through an article, I tend to get bored and start skimming (or just stop reading) because I already have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to find in the rest of the piece.
With comments, I never know what I'm going to find next, so I keep reading just in case I hit something good. Even really bad comments way down at the bottom can have good responses.
I wish I didn't read in such an endorphin-seeking way, but functionally this is how it goes for me unless I put in a lot of deliberate effort to do otherwise.
I like reading HN more than Reddit because the low bar for content is a lot higher. I don't encounter as much noxious waste in my search for the gold.
Some comments are worth reading. Some aren't. Reading the latter is the cost of reading the former.
Absolutely. Comments are sometimes critical around here and could maybe arrive softer but this is one of the few remaining spots on the internet to read largely civilized, high-value discourse on a topic and related context.
Increasingly, I won't even read the article itself, but the comments, because the topic is one of interest and I want to soak in the adjacent commentary and percolate some new thoughts before doing my own reading on a subject.
Sometimes I start with the comments then go back and read the article pre-conditioned by the commentary. It usually enriches my experience.
This is not a good thing but I read HN comments as a way to outsource my critical thinking. The author of a blog post or article is speaking from a single perspective and set of biases. Reading through the comments gives me a sampling of thinking that comes from different perspectives and biases.
Most articles on blogs are just hackernews comments posted in a place where criticism won't appear there.
What does this even mean? The average blog post I read on the front page has much more effort put into it than the average hacker news comment.
Maintaining a comment system on your personal self-hosted blog brings a number of annoying issues such as spam and security vulnerabilities.