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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep doing this now? Just posting quotes from the article on their own as comments? I cannot see any conceivable point to it. You could not get closer to noise unless you posted bytes from /dev/urandom.

Please stop. I've read the article. I don't care in the slightest which part you found most amusing.

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Many people use HN backwards from you. They first check the comments then decide if they want to read the article.

A one line summary or representative quote serves the same function a secondary title would in a newspaper or magazine article, or whatever those large, bold, extracted sentences are called in print articles. (Edit: they are called pull quotes.)

In this case the title, plus the source, plus this quote let's me know the tone article.

Yeah, but I don't think many people check the comments for what can be read from the story. It's mostly a way of seeing what other people think about the article before going to read it. The more sensationalist the headline, the more important the comments are to checking for bullshit before investing the time to read it.

Personally I'm usually interested when others extract key quotes from the article. So I do the same.

I wouldn't call this a key quote, nor an obscure quote since it gets its own little "paragraph" (and the third for that matter). I agree with the GP, this is too youtube-comment-esque where people quote something from the video (often accompanied by "lol") and get upvoted for it.

It's nice when people quote from the article and then discuss something, but just quoting...

then at least add some of your thoughts on that quote.

I got several downvotes for responding here. Another response pointing out why my comment was useful got a bunch of downvotes and has since been deleted. Both of these posts futhered the conversation and were within site guidelines. To me this looks like people are downvoting based on whether or not they agree with somebody, rather than the official criteria. How does it look to others?

Voting on HN is, and always has been, used to express approval or disapproval.

What it looks like to me is that you are getting clear and unequivocal evidence that what you posted is not very valuable, yet you are trying to blame it on everybody else, rather than yourself.

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