Ask HN: Do you also only read HN headlines and user comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you also only read HN headlines and user comments?

82 pointsherodoturtle41 comments

My usage of HN is guided by my desire to keep up with relevant news whilst minimising procrastination.

I typically only read HN’s front page headlines (on occasion perusing page 2 when time allows, such as when I’m on a comfort break).

Headlines that pique my interest lure me in to the HN users’ comments, where I often learn something.

I seldom read the linked articles. But when I do, it’s usually because the comments demanded it of me.

I find this allows me to strike just the right balance between learning and efficiency.

In my case, being an employer and a dad leaves me little time for exploratory rabbit holes of knowledge!

So thank you, commenters, for giving us of your time, and your wisdom.

And to the lurkers, thank you for your votes!

View on HN

Mostly and I’ve been wondering why. I think there are 2 main components:

1) I know comments loads fast. It’s a crapshoot when a webpage is done loading all its modals and stuff - or if it’s just super slow. HN is fast.

2) I am pretty sure that comments are straight to the point. No scrolling and skimming through paragraphs to find when the part of the article related to the headline begins. No scrolling up and down in an inavigable twitter thread trying to figure out what the hell the context is.

You usually get all this from the first HN pundit explaining everything wrong with the article.

I agree. But of course, whether or not an internet commenter read the article or knows what they’re talking about is also a crapshoot, and HN isn’t an exception to that rule.

Especially if they’re rushing to “correct” some minor/irrelevant point in the article, or even an unrelated thing they inferred from the title. I’ve noticed it happening often enough to question how often I failed to notice.

I always thought it would be interesting for sites like HN and Reddit to give more weight to comments from people who have clicked the link. I suppose that would be exploited for “influence” as soon as it was made public that it wouldn’t really add much.

Clicking the link doesn't mean anyone actually read the content. Unfortunately, there isn't any way to engineer intellectual curiosity in software. If there were, I'm sure dang would have pushed the patch by now.

For most posts the top comment will be a complete non sequitur reaction based purely on the headline of the post. For example, if the post is about C++ the top comment is often some knee jerk comment about Rust or OO or something, even if the article has nothing to do with Rust or OO.

Yes or it will be the same rehashed HN talking points about Google/Facebook, why algo interviews suck, complaining about pay.

I wish the HN rules were a little less explicit about not being able to ask “Did you even read the article?”. I’ve seen some absolute garbage articles get to the front page and create a big discussion based solely on the title.

I try to always read the article before commenting but I do agree with other posters that for casual browsing I often skip the article because I don’t want to deal with web-bullshit in 2022, whereas HN loads fast and doesn’t ask me to sign up for a newsletter/enable notifications/read a bunch of SEO nonsense.

I wouldnt mind if HN used outbound links to track pageloads of links and use that to gate/affect ranking of comments and upvotes, but most people probably think that’s going too far.

1.a) Especially considering the lack of advertising (especially on mobile) making for a consistent experience between the headline vs the comments.

My 2020 new year's resolution was to stop doing that, and it improved my relationship with the news and social media.

Rubbish articles generate rubbish comments from people who just read the headlines, and by only loading the page and skipping the obvious blogspam you can filter 95% of the bad HN discussions.

I come to HN to read interesting articles, not to digest as many links as fast as possible. The discussions are interesting if done between people who read the article they are talking about; luckily you can easily tell when the person responding to you didn't.

Agree with this.

Yes, I almost always go to the comments first. The ensuing conversation often determines whether or not I bother reading the actual article.

There are exceptions of course, where the headline prompts me to click straight through the linked article. But it's not common.

> Headlines that pique my interest lure me in to the HN users’ comments, where I often learn something.

I do something like this, but an important caveat is that I don't trust the comments' interpretation of the article, whether positive or negative - I don't assume that I get any accurate representation of the submission from the comments. I learn things from the tangential discussions that spring up from something the article mentions, but take the comments about the article itself with a grain of salt.

Although, I have to say that my click-through-to-article rate has increased significantly once I started to have Javascript disabled by default on my browser. The marginal cost of checking the link out goes down dramatically without the JS annoyances.

It's all about speed.

Right now there's a post on the front page about "understanding higher-kinded types".

Assuming this is something about certain kinda of people (I'm guessing a play on "high minded"?) I give this maybe 20% chance of being worth a read.

So far I am 2 or 3 seconds invested. It's worth going further.

Click in to the comments. HN comments always loads in well less than 1 second, and it takes me another couple of seconds to read the very first comment and find out that this is nothing to do with people at all - it's about some new higher level semantics about data types in programming languages.

Fascinating and all, but not enough for today.

So with about 5 seconds investment, I've got some mild techno-titillation and have "consumed" that post on HN. Move on to the next one.

Do I want to be like this? No. But I feel HN is probably as highly evolved as possible at surfacing a wide range of technically interesting stuff to a wide range of consumers, and this is the fastest way to consume it.

As another post says, going to the source article is like stepping out of the safe, fast zone of HN. That's every chance I'll wait for many seconds for annoying whirring popups and page renderings. Not all sites are like this (the one in question is actually great, to the point and loads fast). But too many are.

If your time were really that valuable, you'd have a secretary read HN for you and send you a synopsis, and you'd never bother commenting. All you're doing is cheating yourself.

I often only read comments because I usually don't care about whatever the article is about. Just not interested; I'd keep scrolling if there weren't any comments. As another commenter said, it's true that you don't get the full story, but I often don't care about the story at all. Nonetheless, the comments often turn into more lateral discussions which are interesting.

I read the comments first in order to judge if the article is worth my time to read. If I don't end up reading the article, I also just stop reading the comments (and don't leave one myself).

Yes, very much the same here. When a headline interests me, I go in to read the comments and have learned much from them. Most of the time I don't read the article. Please keep commenting.

I too read the headlines, select articles, comments for these articles and try to stop after page 2/3 to avoid procrastinating. The discourse is refreshingly reasonable even for politicized topics (e.g. understandably anything re: Russia these days given the war they are waging and previously re: China). On reddit and online news comments it's just anger feeding off angry group think that leads me to wonder if there are real people involved.

I would just say if you are learning something completely outside your field -- which is awesome! -- try to feel out the biases starting with the general audience here and then the topic. High quality comments from folks with good technical English skills project a lot of confidence which may or may not be appropriately placed. I'm medical so I find occasional discussions about medicine/AI/disruption/collecting-data-solves-everything really interesting, but more to learn about other viewpoints and what drives them rather than the first order of what is actually being posted. As a contrary example, I know nothing about Rust, Kubernetes, and node.js except what is posted here... so hot damn!

I almost always read the article first unless it’s very long (e.g. a link to a free book.) Familiarity with the link makes the good comments better. It also makes comments from people who haven’t read the article a lot more frustrating, though, and some of them are inevitably highly upvoted by others who didn’t bother to read.

Used to not very much, but now I realized that most discussions are more informative than the source material, so I have been more and more. Thanks to everyone for making this such a lively place to debate and avoid social media drama.

Nailed it

Reading the comments to decide if you want to read the article is totally acceptable.

However, people that feel the need to comment without reading the article are the worst.

Sadly there has been an increase in this behavior in the past years.

I often do the same unless it’s an in depth news piece or a tech piece. Otherwise, for short news stories the headline is often a good summary and the comments provide far greater info than the rest of the article IMO.

Interesting. I usually read the articles first, glancing at the ones that look interesting based on the headline and often reading them. Often I clone the tab first so that I can find the post in HN again, but, when I forget, and if I can't go back and find it, I'll copy the URL and search for it -- which brings it up.

Especially when I'm reading `new`, where there usually aren't many comments, reading the article is great and getting back to the post helps so I can vote it up if I like it.

not me. I always read the article if it interests me, I sometimes read the comments on HN. While I appreciate the discussion, with the type of articles I read I want the reported info first before I read a bunch of opinions.

Except if the URL says twitter.com--my brain can't process twitter threads, with their constant breaks, so I never go to twitter for anything. Give me a 10,000 word article any day over a twitter thread.

This website is basically treated as a forum, albeit lacking a lot of the features a forum normally has. Posts are not news, but rather an opportunity for users to hold forth on their pet topics.

This is why it isn’t really an issue when reposts occasionally come up, as it’s purely to generate discussion rather than to be treated as news.

Comments generally inform me about the content value and most of the time are even more interesting that the article, especially with the modern habit of writing 5 paragraphs of flowery prose where in the past we would have had a single informative sentence. So yes, most of the time I just read the title and the comments.

Yes, interesting question. I dont like waiting for articles to load and often want to see the conversation rather than read the article itself. I try not to comment myself until I have at least scanned the article, unless the topic of conversation is quite tangential, as a rule.

Absolutely. Clicks are currency. A headline and domain name is not nearly enough to decide if something is worth giving a click to. I read comments first to figure out what the article is actually about, and get a sense for if it’s really worth it or not. And it rarely is.

I chose this comment, out of many, to add/ contribute...for me, its a 10/ 90% split. Read article/ comments, that is. Too many times, the actual articles are only just bearable (from the presentation of the website to the actual meaning of the words used), whereas the broad discussions and resulting nit-picking they generate leave me feeling so much more informed.

It depends on where the article is coming from. If it's from Medium or Twitter etc.. I just read the comments. Otherwise, if there's sufficient interest I'll read the top comments before heading to the article.

Generally I'm here for ask/show HN.

No. Please read the articles. You aren't getting the full story reading user comments.

I don't have time to read SEO articles, because I have already read a lot of good literature. And most of online journalism is deeply broken. That's why I only visit websites from HN very rarely.

The top comments on HN are usually more succinct, informative, and insightful than the linked article. And nobody dies wishing they'd spent more of their life reading mediocre web pages.

That is exactly what I do!

The headline is enough to spark interest in the article, but often what I am interested in is the discussion and insights from other HN users.

Interesting to read that I am not alone.

Not always, but usually when headline is too good/bad to be true, because few comments explain background of article.

I read most of the stories and then I come back to comments to get some additional knowledge.

Maybe HN would be better if comments were hidden until the user has opened the link?

Yes if it's twitter, varies otherwise. )

PS: voting system in HN telegram channel is broken.

I usually scroll through the headlines list, and unless i know the website being linked to isn’t garbage, editorial/opinion, or paywalled, i check out the comments first to get a sense of whether or not it’s worth my time. Most “news” sites take at least 10-30 seconds to load even on a gigabit down connection, because of all the trash they shove in there. HN is usually sub-second for a big page of comments, so i scroll through those to see if the article is even remotely credible, useful, or worth the effort/time/browser tab memory.

Doubly true for mentions of projects I’ve never heard of. “X software blahblahblah” - well what the fuck is X? Not wasting 30+ seconds and hundreds of mb of memory on some trash article only to find out it’s not even remotely useful or interesting in the slightest. Not when i can load up comments and infer from the context WTF X actually is.

Yes. The discussion is the interesting part so that is why I do that.

Sometimes I even go as far as to comment only based on the headline.

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