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.

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.

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.

It is known.

And I am guilty of this in this thread as well.