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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that comments on news sites were mostly to divert the readership from directly contacting the author or the company through channels that are listened to; merely a solution to keep the wacko segment of the readership occupied and satiated. At least in practice, this is how it appears to function; they're almost exclusively 3rd party plugins and nobody that works for the news organizaion seems to ever engage with them.

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I'm admin for several news sites. We chose a third-party plugin for comments because it offers easier account management for the user and better spam filtering than anything home-grown, and like any third-party plugin, we don't have to update that piece of software ourselves. We do read the comments and engage when appropriate.

Not the case for all publications. Ars Technica for example often has the author of the post interacting in the comments.

I find the comments most of the time more read worthy than the article.

Try YouTube or Fox News comments.

But on good sites, absolutely! I'd consider comment sections more valuable than the news content, which is often an AP repost with a couple more sentences.

>I find the comments most of the time more read worthy than the article.

What news site is this? For general news sites, I've found them to be of very low quality. I can't remember the last time I gained anything from them.

I'd consider HN to be a news source, I typically check the comments on articles first. I'd say I've found this to be true.

Ah, but HN often doesn't link to general news sites - most of them are dedicated to certain disciplines.

If you're in the US, as an exercise, look up the news site of your local newspaper, and read the comments there. They're often of higher quality than the larger state/national news sites, and even then they're mostly crap.

It's a news aggregator, not a source. In fact, it's only really got two primary functions: allow users to post arbitrary links, and allow users to comment on them.

Most news sources however have three primary functions: Identify, Write, and Publish news.

Commenting in HN is key to its existence; Commenting in news sources just happens to be a thing available.

Saying that comments works in HN is like saying comments work on reddit; it's trivially true, assuming the site is in any way functional/popular. But that doesn't mean comments are useful on NYT; take away comments and there really wouldn't be much lost from its primary goals.

On point. I would add that this is a false sense of the commentor getting their two cents in so they no longer care to participate any further.

One might say the same for elections every 4 years.

My pet theory is that the purpose of the USA 2016 do was to keep a large disaffected segment inside the tent.

(Inside pissing out instead of outside pissing in, as the phrase goes. Until they go away or whatever, that's another day's problem.)

It split the tent. A ten thousand year old idea. Now poor screwed over urban dwellers and poor screwed over rural dwellers are fiercely blaming each other for messing everything up. Setting up a cycle of blame among the powerless disenfranchised groups is so old and still works so well.

It works well but it does not always end well. Civil wars have been started in this way.

I think those are called "revolutions"?

Revolutions to me indicate regime change rather than the population fighting itself. France went through a revolution, Yugoslavia through a civil war which led to its breaking up.

What is happening right now pits one fragment of the population against another aka polarization, that's a harbinger of a possible civil war, not of a revolution.

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