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Comment by OldSchoolJohnny | Hacker News Reader

We need a short pithy term for people who comment on the title link and don't read the article, it's a modern plague.

I'm sorry, but that's against the HN guidelines.

>Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

It's annoying that pointing that out to the didn't reader is against the rules, but derailing the discussion by not reading is perfectly okay.

But what do I know? Am shadowbanned most of the time.

But firing comments from the hip derails discussion even worse by making everyone discuss whatever obvious knee-jerk reaction there is to the article. It's regularly the top comment thread where people are essentially arguing a straw man. And people have to scroll through hundreds of comments to get to the next thread so they receive far less attention.

It's HN's worst aspect.

> But firing comments from the hip derails discussion even worse

The proper response, then, is to downvote the derailing comment, not to respond with an attack. Downvotes are HNs tool for maintaining S/N ratio, attacks making ascribing what you presume caused the poster to post in a way you find less-than-worthy don't deal with any problem, they just exacerbate it and fill HN with toxic noise.

You can also, if you see a particularly bad example sitting at the top of an active discussion, email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We moderate the threads to try to prevent shallow dismissals from sitting at the top, but we don't see everything.

I agree.

>derailing the discussion by not reading is perfectly okay

Is according to guidelines, not me. My fault that wasn't clearer.

Would be fun to write a content aggregation site where you had to answer a question about the article before commenting like some sites are doing with their own internal forums.

I read the article.

Some suggestions:

1. Skimmer 2. Scroller 3. Titlefiend

Titlefiend. I am often guilty of titlefiending.

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