Hacker News Reader

Comment by efdee | Hacker News Reader

Yes, how dares he provide an interesting service while pitching his startup on a startup related news aggregator.

This isn't the only time s/he's done it, and it reads as unnecessary ad spam—which is frequently looked down upon here. The same thing was downvoted in another thread. And if this user is going to continue doing it, it's going to become very annoying very quickly.

Hacker News would be immensely more valuable and useful to me if a poster such as abhi3 posted such a well-written summary on every story.

And that would be fine—as an ad-free TL;DR, as so many other HN members offer on many long articles.

I'm not sure I'd call that summary well-written or particularly valuable, but I also don't think that's the poster's fault. Journalism is fundamentally contextualizing information, and stripping the context back to information is like playing telephone.

I say this all the time, and I'll say it again: you and I can both write a passable story relaying a world event, but contextualizing it and adding illustration around the event is what journalism is about. Distilling that back to a summary is the antipattern. Simply start with the information and don't add context, because stripping out that nuance can change the context of the story (and did, in this case, particularly in the "even smaller" summary-of-summary).

Even beyond that, the summary is a bit error-prone, but again, not the poster's fault and probably due to English being a second language or rushing it. I'm less concerned about that.

I don't want summaries in the discussion. I want actual discussion.

A summary is not very big, and doesn't exclude other posts. If ten people posted summaries, you would have a problem, but let's not worry about something that isn't happening.

It's not that they posted the summary, it is that they put the link at the end advertising the product. The summary was appreciated.

I was not complaining about the summary, of course.

HN threads are supposed to be conversations, and summary comments don't fit with that. Reciting a summary into the public record is a boring addition to conversation in its own right—imagine someone doing this in person—and makes the discussion more shallow, since it's no longer grounded in people having read the story.

HN readers can, should, and do read articles, find out what's interesting about them for themselves, and bring the insights they've harvested to others. That's how good conversation works. Not only do we not need a quick-fix substitute for that, we need not to have one.

(This is not a comment on whether a startup of this kind would have value, just on how HN threads are supposed to work.)

Oh, I definitely agree, dang. I was just trying to clarify that I wouldn't have left such a comment for a summary only. I get that people sometimes unfortunately want to have a Reader's Digest abridged version of an article so they can, I guess, distill key points without investing the time to read. But I spend every day on HN because it's usually not the regular thing that happens. Sure, some might find it valuable. But I commented because I don't want to see that kind of thing posted into every article thread here, and I especially don't want to see it with a promotional link for a startup. I obviously don't have a comment history of complaining about people offering summaries. I'm sure I've done something similar here or there. But I really want to see thoughtful, insightful discussion. That's what's made HN such a great place to spend hours a day for years. I (thought obviously) only commented because this particular thing was done on two articles I hit consecutively, and I really didn't want the OP to think that was a good practice here. I guess next time I'll take the time I should have to provide a less reactionary comment, since I seem to have bothered a number of other readers with the way I spoke.

> imagine someone doing this in person

This is the only part I take serious issue with. In casual conversation with people, they sum up stories in a couple of sentences all the time, and I thank them for it.

And not every conversation thread requires a complete understanding of the article. Most of the comments on this story are about a deficit of basic journalistic fact-checking in many news outlets. That doesn't require knowing anything about recycling programs.

I don't think that discussion is shallow or bad just because it's somewhat tangential. Some of the most detailed comments where I learn something new are somewhat tangential to the story they're posted on.

What people do in conversation bears little resemblance to the mechanical summarizing we're talking about here. You'd lose somebody's attention a few seconds after you started.

As for tangents, there are good ones and bad ones, but (suitably enough) I don't see what that has to do with the point.

That summary was short enough to work fine verbally, and to keep my attention.

The point about tangents is that it is often not necessary to have more than a summary of the article. Reading the article is useful for some conversations but not others.

The idea of providing a summary was that many people are busy and knowing what an article is about will enable them to better allocate the small amount of time they can spend in a day on casual reading - on stuff that they are really intrigued by and feel the need to get deeper into and then they can "read articles, find out what's interesting about them for themselves, and bring the insights they've harvested to others."

I was no way suggesting that summaries are a substitue to actually reading a detailed quality piece. The point of this service is not to replace actual self-reading; but rather - Give people some idea of what the article is actually about so they can decide if they can/should invest time to read it.

Most people don't have time to do all the reading they want to do and having more info than just a clickbait headline will help them allocate their time in a more productive way.

Example this is how Vox.com is showing new articles on its "new" page:

"Big Marijuana is coming — and even legalization supporters are worried" (An activist explains why he left the movement."

The headline and snippet gives you no information what the article is about. You have to actually read 2500 words over 50 paragraphs to know what it is about, in the end you might like it, or be dissapointed, its a gamble.

But by reading a well written analysis you can have a fair idea of what you are getting into before you invest 15-20 minutes of your time into it.

Do this for 10 articles a day and 300 a month, the time you save adds up quickly.

But I get and completely respect your point about why it doesn't belong in a HN discussion. I will do this no more.

I appreciate all the users to supported this and apologize for any inconvenience caused. :)

Unlike Reddit, HN welcomes self-promotion when it is on topic.

Not always. I've been on HN long enough to see quite a regular rate of complaints against those who self-promote, even when on-topic. I don't think anyone wants to see self-promotional summary comments like this one regularly showing up in what are supposed to be discussion threads, all linking back to an Apply HN post. That's going to drive the quality of discussion down.

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