Hacker News Reader

Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care about the comments of the JS folks.

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That's pretty dead on to how I read HN. Full articles when I am curious about the subject matter, straight to comments when I am more curious about how others view the material. Sometimes the comment threads will prompt me to go back and read the source.

Yea I do almost exactly the same. I am trying to make more of an effort to read the article as well though, as a part of me feels like going straight to the comments is lazy and/or a bad habit.

Same and I've thought about this a lot. I so often only read the comments without reading the actual article. Surely the fact that so many people do this must mean there's an untapped opportunity somewhere?

Yes, I thought that, I have a note in my sketch ideas: "Extract comments from HN", normally I value them more than the actual article. They are important, like reviews.

Going along with "reviews," in this era of blogspam, I like to read the comments first so I start out a skeptic, if I should be. Very often, the top comment for an article is a rebuttal, if there is some misinformation in an article, or perhaps a poorly-done study.

Basically, people who are smarter than me usually get to tell me why the journalist is wrong.

I also do this, but I'm not sure that it's unique to hacker news. The immediate example that comes to mind is that while one might not watch something like a Presidential Address, or for that matter a White House news conference, one is more likely to watch the evening news or read a newspaper where people dissect the information and TLDR it for them as well as provide some contextual commentary.

Yeah, it would be cool if someone made a bot to extract a summary from the article and post it as a comment to help those who have not read the article.

Someone did. Or faked one. IIRC it was active for a few days but was told in clear terms to stop or be banned.

Somewhat related: I have been using the HN bot on Telegram. That way I could even catch a glimpse of wildly popular stories that have been flagged of the site :-)

A TL;DR service could maybe be made as a browser extension that pulls it from some external source instead. Not visible for those that don't want it, and also removes the problem from having to hunt for the TL;DR comment when there are many replies.

There's a bot like this on Reddit that works surprisingly well.

The one I've seen (and been impressed with) uses http://smmry.com/ to condense articles to a tldr.

Same for me, with one additional piece: I'll almost always read the article before writing a comment.

Exactly the same. By reading comments, you do get the community idea on that particular article. To be frank, I felt comments gives more information than the article it self, atleast IMHO.

I just read HN for the comments.

same here

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