Comment by injb

The argument here (which I may have misunderstood, but take to be essentially that articles are likely to be of a higher quality because they're harder to produce than HN comments) makes sense, but it turns out not to be true in practice (at least from my experience on HN, which is mostly limited to certain technical topics).

I understand where the author is coming from, but the fact is (unfortunately) that the quality of HN comments is typically better than the quality of online articles, blog posts etc.

I think it's a combination of the fact that there are a lot of smart, accomplished people on HN, and also the overall low quality of what's found elsewhere on the internet. Most of what's out there is just pants, but even when it's good, a discussion with smart people is almost always more interesting, and I honestly doubt that it stops me from reading worthwhile stuff. You can generally tell when the person commenting has read the article, and you can usually make a good guess at what the basis of their opinion is.