The top comment is often a poor quality one, expressing some controversial view that gets replies, starving the lower top-level comments of upvotes, and cementing its place at the top.
It would be better to collapse replies to all top-level comments, and allow people to expand the replies to the comments they find interesting.
Although I do agree that built-in comment collapse functionality would be great; I'm using a Chrome extension right now.
I hadn't thought about it when I started writing this, but I'd be curious what comment ordering results a points/time value function would produce. Although a fuzzy random ordering would still be needed to ensure that lower comments got enough viability. So maybe points/time/position-at-vote-time
PS: That said, collapsing comments to promote more equality between highly rated level 1 comments would be an excellent idea.
You have just saved me so much scrolling :D
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...
The discussion here is more dynamic, from multiple parties, providing different views, sometimes correcting errors and filling in any omissions of the article, as opposed to the source piece which is static and written by a single, usually biased, individual.
More simply, most people are lazy and do not have the time to read each article. They also go to aggregation sites like HN or Reddit to get all their news in a single format, and temporarily navigating away from that format can be sort of uncomfortable, especially with the ads and whatnot on most linked articles.
Of course this is not a good habit; the articles should be read, at least before you comment on them. Commenting before reading only increases irrelevant noise and defeats the purpose of the news. Yet, the reasons for why people don't read articles, remain.
Maybe HN and Reddit could balance this by providing a preview of the link in the comments section? Some subreddits already have a bot which provides summary, but it really should be a feature of the aggregation site itself.
It is known.
And I am guilty of this in this thread as well.
Yup, seems that way. Kind of depressing, isn't it?
My highest-scoring submission so far, and almost no one seems to have actually read it.
To me it makes a lot of sense, because I didn't want to wake up when there was not hope for happiness. What the author says is that adding the duty of waking up early does not help when your life is already bad, it is only one more source of remorse.
Every depression is different, so this may not be true for others, but I'm one data point that learning to wake up early is an integral part of learning to deal with a serious depression.
Coincidentally this very active discussion on another article is taking place and likely a good resource for anyone seeking a more relevant conversation with regards to depression: