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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> I simply open the comments and am able to deduce the gist of the link through the unfolding arguments.

Hold on, the HN comment section is sometimes a tire fire of people who don't know what they're talking about giving their uninformed opinions.

You need to read the articles to see whether the comment section is addressing points made in the article.

(This is why I disagree with mods about posting links to paywalled content. Some of those paywalls are now hard to bypass so the comment threads are full of people who haven't read the article.)

View on HN

Did you read the whole article?

  After all this I noticed a reduction in critical 
  thought, my ability to form my own opinion on topics, 
  as I had a) stopped reading the damn links, b) would 
  skim what I needed off of the most upvoted comment, 
  c) would then take that comment as gospel.

This is also why I'm against negative reputation. The number of people who can down-vote and do so emotively rather than because something is factually inaccurate is just plain depressing at times. Add to that people who "drive-by down-vote" - in that they'll mod something down but then fail to provide a rebuttal - really does nothing to keep those experienced engineers motivated to keep coming back to the comments section. Thus you end up with more uninformed drivel posted and more people arguing unsubstantiated bullshit.

I used to come on HN daily. Now it's a couple of times a week (and even that feels too frequently at times). Simply because I can discover content without HN and the comments section is increasingly adding little value to HN's aggregation.

I have added "tire fire" to my lexicon for when "dumpster fire" gets old. Thank you.

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