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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I suspect it's because they didn't/don't want people to comment in the usual way - you can highlight text on an article and leave short comments in the relevant place if you want to do that.

I think the comments section at the end was intended more as a place for lengthy reaction posts. It's why comments have "recommend" rather than "like" as a button. I might "like" someone saying "great post!" but I'm not going to "recommend" it.

It often feels like Medium has made a product for what they want online discourse to be, rather than what it actually is. I don't hate them for trying.

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> I think the comments section at the end was intended more as a place for lengthy reaction posts... It often feels like Medium has made a product for what they want online discourse to be, rather than what it actually is.

That's exactly it. Medium was developed to solve online journalism, and instead of ranking articles & comments by clicks & pageviews (leading to clickbait), their metric is Total Time Reading, on the assumption that people won't keep reading an article they don't enjoy or find useful.

There's a bit more info on the Business Insider interview with Ev Williams: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/inside-the-meltdown-of-ev...

“The state of tech blogs is atrocious. It’s utter crap,” he told Bloomberg’s Brad Stone in 2013. “They create a culture that is superficial and fetishizing and rewarding the wrong things and reinforcing values that are self-destructive and unsustainable.” .... His idea back then was an algorithm that recommended high-quality stories not based on clicks, but on how much time people spent reading them.

Total time reading is a funny metric because the unintended consequence is that people who read faster are placed at a slightly discounted value to those who read slower.

Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. Comments rarely add much to the discussion from the article, and they're often hard to follow. There's no reason to leave a comment saying "great post!". It's spam. It's unnecessary.

Blogs are a wholly inappropriate place for back-and-forth discourse to happen simply because if I have a blog, it's my blog. It's not a discussion board. I inherently have the advantage, I control the conversation, and it's all about me. I have the ability to delete comments I disagree with. That's not discourse, that's an echo chamber.

I completely agree with Medium. Just because blog posts have historically had comments doesn't mean it's the right choice. The minute people accepted "pingbacks" as a valid form of comment was the moment comments died. V!AGR@ and P3N15 type spam sealed the deal.

> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win.

But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform without too much spam or trolls.

That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

Visit your HN profile then set "showdead" to "yes" to see some of such comments.

There's some stuff that shows up there, but surprisingly little.

I've been browsing "showdead" for quite some time. My main complaint is that there's no obvious way to tell if an account has been shadowbanned or not. I'll report questionable instances to hn (via email), and on something like 3/4 of cases, the account has been, though it's not clealry evident.

I'll vouch for some flagged items. Flag others. Generally I think the comment ranking is pretty good. There's a tendency for somewhat fluffy comments to be excessively highly rated, but as compared to other systems (say, Reddit), HN compares favourably.

There's also a slight tendency for the hivemind to punish critical, but valid, comments. But again, compared to most other systems I've seen, not particularly, and the situation often evens out.

I also recommend a visit to the new submissions section. There's a lot more there too.

It's heavily stepped up lately, folks are just good at policing it. I have dead posts turned on and I usually see at least 2-3 "work from home" scam comments per article.

If you have showdead on, lately has been awful with comments about “I make $$$ from home” or some shit. I regularly read dead comments, because HN has a tendency to downvote even valid comments from time to time, but lately has been rough -.-

There's a lot of self-policing here. If a comment or submission is obvious spam, I am very quick to flag it (as are many others, apparently).

HN has several moderators. If you're willing to add eyeballs, any system can work.

Blogs belonging to software tend to be very valuable. People will share insights or tips long after the blog post has been written, often extending the shelf life of the code or software.

I disagree. There are lots of different kinds of "comments" on blogs. I agree that pingbacks and one word reactions are awful. However, comments that are a few sentences, or a few of paragraphs, of good thoughts are fantastic. Often people can provide additional info on a topic, or they don't have a blog themselves but want to contribute to the conversation. Besides, as a sibling pointed out, HN comments are basically off-site blog comments, and I think a lot of HN readers enjoy them.

I'm sure moderating comments is hard. But when it's done well comments are great.

>Blogs are a wholly inappropriate place for back-and-forth discourse to happen simply because if I have a blog, it's my blog. It's not a discussion board.

That's, like, your opinion, man.

I personally enjoy engaging in discussions on blogs and on my (now defunct) old personal blog, and have seen great exchanges (Just see Lambda the Ultimate for an example).

Sure, also bad ones, that's just life. Articles and posts can also be as bad, if not worse, than comments.

I hate reaction posts in comments section. I see this mostly on reddit with posts simply saying "I agree" or "well said" and if your lucky quoting some interesting part of the article. I get the feeling these are up voted by people that just want the important quotes to save time and those that agree so much they want to drown out other conversation. Intended or not these comments kill all conversation. They add absolutely nothing to the discussion and leave no room for more discussion.

If Medium is successful in separating reactions from actual content then I have to side with them. The fact is most discussion happens on reddit and HN so there's little real loss of intelligent discussion.

> I see this mostly on reddit with posts simply saying "I agree" or "well said" and if your lucky quoting some interesting part of the article.

That's not what "reaction post" usually means. That's just "reactions" (which I hate just as much as you).

A reaction post is something like "I disagree - here's ten reasons why" or "I basically agree, but here's a different perspective on this particular point".

So a proper blog article, not just one sentence or one paragraph.

GOOD point.

I agree, well said.

> The fact is most discussion happens on reddit and HN so there's little real loss of intelligent discussion.

HN has the opposite issue. There is no want of sophisticated dialog here, but it borders on discussion for the sake of discussion.

One of many such exercises in futility that has overcome this specious neo-hacker culture.

>>> It's why comments have "recommend" rather than "like" as a button. I might "like" someone saying "great post!" but I'm not going to "recommend" it.

No.

Sites replaced the "like" button because it was found to be inappropriate in too many circumstances.

For instance, you don't want to "like" an article titled "328 people dead in a train collision" and have your feed show "untog liked 328 people dead in a train collision".

FYI, Facebook allows publishers to pick a few names for the like button instead of like.

I don't hate them for trying either but it doesn't work and it's not really how conversations work best online.

If the purpose is meaningful responses then a much better strategy is to write meaningful essays which means don't write them for the audience write them for yourself.

My personal experience is that you will get lots of meaningful responses if you write about things you care about and therefore don't care about the length.

I'd be alright if they offered both, a comment section, and a response feature, which allows more elaborate replies.

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