Comment by taylodl
3 years ago
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.