Comment by tinco

The minus button makes it really easy to sift through comments. Much easier than finding the interesting paragraphs in an article actually. A blog post might have required some deep thought, as the author says not as much as a book, but probably more than went into a comment. But it's deep thought that went into a single idea, by a single person, in a single circumstance. Deep thought can only go so far.

When you're using the minus button you'll go through all sorts of thoughts and responses. Sure, if you're easily offended by dumb reactionary comments, then you'll often find a couple at the top. That might hurt your ego, but if you just let it go, hit downvote, and then the minus button, it can be out of sight out of mind in an instant. You'll get to the good parts of the comments soon enough. Those comments might not have been worked on for hours or days or weeks, but the authors might have deep knowledge regardless. And if not deep knowledge, different perspectives stemming from different backgrounds, circumstances and personalities.

I usually read the comments first, and depending on the topic and how engaging the comments are to the topic I might read the article. In the example post of the news of Elon's bid on Twitter, no way that I'll read the article, no way that Bloomberg put any deep thought in their article, and guaranteed that there's people on HN with way more interesting perspectives than that can be stamped out in the couple minutes an overworked tech journalist has to make sure their article attains maximum reach.

This comment took more than 10 seconds to write, and many comments on HN did. I'd just as much enjoy 36 hundred second comments, as I would a one hour article.