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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

I understand the urge to summarize, but maybe interested HN users can be expected to read the article before coming to the comments? This seriously degrades the quality of discussion.

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It's fine to bemoan people commenting who haven't read the article, but reading the comments first to gauge if the article is clickbait/whatever is a perfectly valid use-case.

I also cherish summaries like these - if I read the whole article I won't remember more than 2 sentences of it tomorrow. That distillation process is inevitable and good. It's a service to do it well for those who are time/memory-limited.

Thanks! At the time I wrote this, the majority of comments were focused on criticizing the headline [1], and there was little discussion of the article itself.

Now I see there are many comments about the content of the article. I don't know if the summary caused more people to read it or not. I wanted to encourage more readership and on-topic discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20541644

I am often more interested in the comments here than the content of the article so I am happy with the summary.

I can often understand what the article is about and go to the comment section for pros and cons

For reading, maybe, but it's a lot harder to contribute something meaningful if you don't know the context to start with.

There is a popular trend where people will read the comments first and depending on the discussion they move to read the article

I’d call it a tactic, not a trend. It’s been around since the advent of halfway decent comment sections.

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