Comment by tomhow
6 months ago
We've always discouraged summaries, TL;DRs, and now, LLM-generated digests of articles, and we don't seen any reason to change this position.
The main reason is the same reason for insisting that the original title be used (unless it is baity or misleading); it's not fair to the author or the community for someone to take it upon themselves to re-phrase the title or the article’s content into something different from what the author wrote themselves.
The community won't know – without reading the full version – whether the rephrased version is an accurate reflection of the author's original words or ideas. But some commenters will write comments in response to the rephrased version, rather than the original, which causes the discussion thread to be poisoned.
We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting. Of course, many won't, but at least if any misplaced comments are based on a mis-reading or non-reading of the article, it won't be due to an inaccurate summary that is tacitly endorsed by HN.
> it's not fair to the author
To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors. You must be aware of this, yes?
I think it would be refreshing to have a summary from the submitter who, more likely than other commenters, read the article and appreciates it. As an article author, I say that I'm least worried about the submitter being unfair to me.
> We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting.
The community missed here is the people who not only don't read the article but don't comment either, who completely ignore the article, because the article title was uninformative.
I gave an example in another thread of a submission whose title is so vague as to be practically meaningless to those deciding whether to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948008
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Was that link supposed to make a point? I think it needed a summary from you. ;-)
As far as I can tell, HN receives a new submission on average every few minutes. Nobody can possibly click all the links and read all the articles. So, HN readers need some way(s) of determining which articles are likely interesting and which are likely not.
Imagine if HN submissions included only the URL and not the article title. That would be silly, right? But why would it be silly? Because then you'd have little idea what the article is about, unless the URL itself encoded words that explain it.
If we admit that HN readers need some kind of guide to the vast number of articles submitted, then I don't see why it's so far-fetched and seemingly unholy for the submission to add a brief summary.
I actually want to read interesting articles. I'm perfectly willing to "work a little", as it were. There are interesting articles that I miss, that I would read, if not for the uninformative article titles, and that's unfortunate, I think.
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> I mean, you kind of asked for a response from mods by asking me to speak to the guidelines
I was requesting that you literally quote the relevant passage(s) from the guidelines or from other sources, which is simply copy and paste, not speaking for anyone.
You claimed that something was in the guidelines, but I read the guidelines and didn't find the thing you claimed, so direct quotes would seem to be the natural next step, not emailing the moderators, which feels like overkill.
> I don't think it's fair to call what I originally said an accusation per se, because I don't think it's necessarily up for debate what I was reminded of, as I am an authority on my own state of mind.
You can be reminded of anything you like, in your own mind. When you publish it, as a reply to me, it becomes for all practical purposes an accusation. I have thoughts about various people, including you, that I refrain from publishing.
> You yourself said you weren't finding it very entertaining, which to me seemed sarcastic and flippant
No, I was quite honest and sincere, about that and about the purpose of HN itself. The HN guidelines say that on-topic is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting", "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." That's more or less entertainment. Highbrow, perhaps, but still entertainment.
> If users and mods acknowledge your point as being worth discussing, yet disagree with your desired course of action, where would you like this conversation to go from here?
I understand disagreement, which is fine. I also understand that summaries are subjective (which I also think is fine). What I did not understand was your comments about "bad actors", "charlatans", and "sophists". This is a threat model that does not seem very applicable or realistic in the context.
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>To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors.
This reads as if you're confusing HN the site (and its goals) with HN the community (and the behaviors of those people). The ideal is that the site goals and the community behavior would be identical. We know that's not how things unfold in practice.
I'm not confusing them. But I would say, for example, that the HN guidelines and moderation, which come from the top, are focused more on encouraging commenters to respect each other, much less so on encouraging commenters to respect the article authors, who I guess are assumed to be not reading the comments.
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