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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this comment at all.

First of all, the first paragraph is about a suspicious plane fire - the plane literally burned in half sitting in a hangar. That should provide you some hint about what the fraud scheme is going to be. There's even an animated image of a plane on fire! Did you need the author to print "this is a story about insurance fraud" in big bold print at the top of the story?

Secondly, comments like this are really worthless on HN, it adds nothing to the discussion and as you point out, you didn't even read the article. Why even both writing a waste of a comment?

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>I don't understand this comment at all. [...] Why even both writing a waste of a comment?

I understand where the op's reading frustration is coming from. For some urls that point to pdf files or racy content, we might put informal warning tags such as "[pdf]" or "[NSFW]". But there really isn't a meta tag such as "[human_interest_story]" to warn readers of this type of article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-interest_story

There's nothing wrong with human interest stories (and even long form texts of it) but it's tedious for many who aren't expecting it. (I.e. some global readers aren't familiar with TexasMonthly and its editorial focus on long-form human interest articles.)

One type of reader just wants the mechanics of the insurance fraud explained. Thus, the human names -- whoever they are -- are not important -- because they will be forgotten 5 seconds after finishing the article. If it's the "wildest" insurance fraud, what makes it more wild than other insurance scams? Unfortunately, many articles "trick" readers with a compelling title about some <situation> but the actual article is mostly about <person(s)>. Some readers care more about details of the insurance deception than the escapades of Mr. TR Wright.

Another example of this mis-alignment between some readers and the author is the "Why it's so hard to find dumbbells in the US (vox.com)" article that was on HN front page today. The actual article starts off with human-interest stuff by mentioning people like like Andrew, Logan, Fread, etc and goes on like that for many paragraphs. But the HN top-voted comment extracts the relevant explanation that actually answers the question put forth in the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270770

> One type of reader just wants the mechanics of the insurance fraud explained.

Exactly me. And I was not familiar with TexasMonthly, despite having lived in the US (California) for the last 8 years. (I am originally from Europe)

Then go to Wikipedia and look up "insurance fraud".

I think it's an expectation mismatch. It's jarring to expect to read a concise, structured news article, and instead start reading "It was a dark and stormy night..." We don't just have news articles here, but we have no way of tagging links as [long reads].

> Why even both writing a waste of a comment?

Because now the top reply of his comment is a summary of the article. So, not that useless of a comment

The article fails to explain and make a case of why it is worthwhile to read this long an article. The article seems more interested in weaving a narrative than reporting the salient facets in a succinct form.

> The article seems more interested in weaving a narrative than reporting the salient facets in a succinct form.

Yes, that is what the article was intending to do.

Apparently, HN is this user's version of book club. Rather than discussing the merits of the article, they'd rather discuss the style of the prose.

For you, my comment is worthless. Perhaps it is not for other people.

The fact that I did not read the entire LONG article is precisely what made me comment on how lengthy the article is, without providing enough context to know how the fraud scheme was perpetrated.

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