Hacker News Reader

Comment by ademup | Hacker News Reader

I admit; I don't read most articles. I prefer the HNer snippets like this. I generally find HN comments to be more cogent and provocative than most editorial nonsense. So, thank you parent, for choosing and posting a snippet which you considered worthy.

View on HN

I also don't read most articles posted on HN, although I voraciously read the comments. And that's because the comments are better and more interesting than the articles in most cases.

How would you know, the article is worse then? ;)

I used to read the articles more often. And sometimes I do click through.

Yes, it's pretty obvious that lots of HN readers don't actually read the article.

At this point, it should be an official HN rule: "do not read the article, go directly to the comments and speculate what the article is about based on the character-limited title"

Well, TBF, thats the generally normal forum behaviour when you 'know your audience'

For example, know that most HNers are fairly informed individuals in tech. Thus, I trust that I am going to find a good deal of content and insightful comments without reading the article - because I can typically glean the gist of the article and the tidbits that would have interested me anyway, from the HN community.

> For example, know that most HNers are fairly informed individuals in tech

Ha. If that were true, why are there hourly front-page articles about "facebook is leaking your info!!!" and "google is evil!!", or my favorite "bitcoin {is,isn't} a great thing!!" ?

At the risk of angering folks and being downvoted/flagged, I think either there is a major disconnect between the types of people on HN that upvote articles and the people on HN who comment on articles, OR folks here are, on average, not as informed as you think they are.

Because if youre also well informed you should be able to filter those super easily!

For many of us, submitted articles are just social objects for provoking a discussion on particular topics. Also, sometimes the articles are really worth a read, other times they're garbage; usually they're something in-between. Going straight to comments is the fastest way to discover which is which.

Commenting without reading the article is fine. Speculating about what's in the article without having read it is a problem.

so we're reddit, just without the memes?

that does seem a bit disappointing. I think anyone simply quoting the article needs to explicitly show that that is the case because it was very misleading.

still this article was fascinating to me, from the idea that someone would go to the effort to the results of such effort. then top off my fascination with the idea of trying elsewhere in the country should there be more than one manufacturing point or trying to buy up a production lot as seeing the results of that as well.

Now how many packs of M&Ms? There are six colors there. If you go with the peanut version it probably is worse because they you have the variability of the peanuts which would make the chances of encountering packs with more variation in just the number of candies.

>> so we're reddit, just without the memes?

HN has memes. Turning unlikely things into SaaS, Rust/Crystal strike force and bikeshedding are all too real here.

And now apparently not reading source material has that potential as well. Which is kind of hilarious.

> so we're reddit, just without the memes?

Kind of? And with slightly higher average standards of discourse? And I believe this is actually a compliment.

In my experience, HN comments under article are almost always more useful and more informative than the original article. The same is the case with various subreddits. When I read, say, /r/SpaceX, I also immediately jump into comments, as there is better quality info there.

This applies to mainstream news stories in particular. On HN, there's a good chance you'll find someone who was - or knows someone who was - involved in the topic first-hand, and who then proceeds to debunk various nonsense a typical news story contains. That's a huge value-added.

> I think anyone simply quoting the article needs to explicitly show that that is the case because it was very misleading.

Sure, I think making it clear what text is quoted (and from where) should be an obvious rule. And it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not others read the article; it simply saves brain cycles trying to understand the comment.

It's weird to me how often people try to shoehorn aspects of the site into reddit/not-reddit. It has always been common to talk about some piece of tech that's related to the article, in a way that's not touched by the article itself and doesn't need it to be read first. That doesn't make those comments shallow, and I wouldn't put it in a list of distinguishing factors of reddit either. I agree with the idea that it's not a problem until you're speculating on the article, or raising a point that the article already addressed.

>so we're reddit, just without the memes?

There are memes here too, just not in the form of image macros, so the faux-intelligentsia here pretends they're better than those boorish rubes that frequent reddit

Plenty of other sites exist that link to content. I don’t come to HN for that, I come to HN for the forum and their take on the content. Which in my opinion just isn’t matched by any other place these days. (Though if anyone wants to share a contrary oppinion I’d love to hear about those!)

I will go out on a limb and speculate that even more don't read the directions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com