Comment by WarOnPrivacy
7 days ago
> I have seen this question asked on subreddits, "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy" To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here"
I don't disagree with this observation about Reddit. However, I feel HN readers are more topic-oriented. Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a discussion.
I grant there are some topics here that tend to be more engagement driven but on balance I think the above holds.
> Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a discussion.
based on the number of comments i see that are oblivious to the actual content of the articles, i'm pretty sure the user flow is "Folks come to HN to read headlines and have a conversation, and then maybe get drawn into reading an article"
Those comments can't reflect people who are drawn in by the article but don't engage. Upvotes hint it is a significant number.
Past that, I don't see non-reading commenters being a dominant presence. Some topics draw a few more than normal but that's the worst of it.
Really? I feel like P(didn't read the article | wrote a comment) to be quite high personally. Any thread with > 100 comments seems to be full of these posters.