Ask HN: How do you remember comments you read from Hacker News? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you remember comments you read from Hacker News?

7 pointsaquajet8 comments

I've realized that it's hard for me to remember many of the comments I have read on HN, or Lobste.rs.

I can remember the articles and that are linked, but not the discussion about the articles. This sucks since the discussion adds nuance and background to the article that is helpful.

Have other people noticed this, and if so, why do you think it happens? Is it a UI issue (maybe mental energy is wasted keeping track of where we are in the comment tree)? Or is it a cognitive issue (just pay more attention)?

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I favourite them - as simple as that. It keeps things contained on HN and connected to HN and that's how I prefer it. Also I have them handy when I'm on the site and can look things up when writing my own comments. When I'm not on HN I don't need the favourites and should HN ever die I'll probably not need them anymore anyway. I think you can easily fetch them as JSON with the API should you want to have them offline. Only downside I can think off is if you want to remember a comment privately for some reason, but that never happened to me so far.

Thanks for the tip, but I meant more as in a general sense. I find it easier to remember things I learned from long-form text rather than comments (across many sites so it's not something only on HN). For example, I can remember things I learned from a book I read in 5th grade but I can't remember an interesting comment I read last week about irrational investors (at least not without looking it up) even though I think I gave the same amount of attention to both.

That's interesting, I forget a lot of things, but what you describe was never a problem for me. I have no real explanation but a vague idea: It needs time. If you've spent some time here and got to know folks it is unavoidable, for better or worse, to connect comments to people. Things connected to people you know, even only casually, are easy to remember.

thats because repetition is key. a book will repeat the same idea over and over many times, an article 3 times (introduction, body and conclusion), but a comment is usually terse and hastily written. So the solution is to read the comment a few times, preferably in 7 minute intervals

My upvotes are automatically saved in Histre (which I built) and a few of my friends follow me so they see my upvotes https://histre.com/features/share-hackernews-upvotes/

I use Histre to save and tag useful comments if I think I'll need to refer to them again.

Usually I don't remember them because deep down I know don't need the information I just fed my stupid dopamine driven monkey brain with. I don't have to remember what a random person (or bot!?) said on the Internet about a random topic so it gets filtered in that manner and thrown away by this same brain. Sometime a message is so strong it gets through this filter, that is all.

I use bookmarks.

anything interesting I save to Pocket

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