Why? What do you look for?
And 2nd question: do you read the original link before or after the comments?
And why..?
(I'm just interested for reasons I won't share yet as I don't want to influence the answers!)
This thread shows that "reading the original link" has more nuance than rolls easily off the keyboard.
There's nuance.
How far does due diligence require wading into the swamp of a Twitter link? How many bullet items of Github Awesome List must be read? Or is scrolling down enough? Must I inspect the source of a linked repository?
Or there's not nuance if comments are a thing in themselves. Like any box on the internet, most of the text typed in is mostly unrelated to the article. The article or just the headline trips the floodgate and what someone was inclined to say yesterday gets said today.
The thinnest excuses to type are enough to start typing.
Case in point.
Yes, and that's how a forum ostensibly full of intelligent, creative people who want to satisfy their intellectual curiosity ends up with so many garbage threads wallowing in shallow mediocrity and bullshit.
But at the very least if you're going to attempt to comment on the TFA, you should be willing to put in the minimal effort to RTFA. I don't think that is an undue burden. There's nothing more frustrating than seeing an interesting article go completely ignored because everyone just riffs on the title and goes off on some political tangent or rant about the site's layout or something.
I've seen enough people defend not reading the articles on general principle to realize that they put effort into not putting in effort.
Clicking a random link is a barrage of ads, paywalls, and intrusive noise. If not that, the long form writing has been engineered with frontmatter to optimize SEO. So often the actual meat is a few sentences that require scanning paragraphs to find. Not to mention the general issues with web apps: poor progressive loading and bad design.
Hacker news is simple and fast. The comments offer a consistent, easier to read experience with the comments usually more insightful than the usual noise in the article itself.
Maybe the new motto of the web should be “Whatever you do don’t read the articles”
At least half of the time, I write out a long comment, then delete it, as it doesn't really help the conversation after all.
I read my threads at least once a day.
Mostly, I read the original link first, because I want to form my own opinion before seeing anyone else's opinion. I'm old and I got online because of Usenet. Usenet was particularly pugnacious, and I occasionally still like to argue with people who hold moronic opinions, like creationists, or 2020 election truthers. If the original like is inflammatory enough, I can prep my arguments before seeing anyone else's dumbass takes.