I Stopped Reading Hacker News Comments | Hacker News Reader

I Stopped Reading Hacker News Comments

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55 pointsbehnamoh85 comments

I read HN precisely because of "this".

The article criticizes that too many comments are about related context and not strictly about the article. In my opinion, that's very valuable because I could have read the article by myself without HN. But I only get shown other people's associations through the HN comments. So them being slightly off-topic widens my horizon of knowledge.

This is 100% why I often read the comments -- possibly without reading the article. The article might be talking about something I already know or might have even read already. But the comments often just veers off and I learn about something new but slightly related. For me comments is about discovery and exploration with the original topic as a starting point.

Some comments are worth reading. Some aren't. Reading the latter is the cost of reading the former.

Same here. The comments are the gold. When panning for gold you have to filter through a bunch of stuff you're not interested in. Sorry, you're not going to find gold every day and there's no motherlode to mine - unless you consider HN itself to be the motherlode - and you still have to mine! But those nuggets of gold can be extremely valuable when you find them!

Also addictive; it's more exciting to read through the comments because of that chance of striking gold.

Partway through an article, I tend to get bored and start skimming (or just stop reading) because I already have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to find in the rest of the piece.

With comments, I never know what I'm going to find next, so I keep reading just in case I hit something good. Even really bad comments way down at the bottom can have good responses.

I wish I didn't read in such an endorphin-seeking way, but functionally this is how it goes for me unless I put in a lot of deliberate effort to do otherwise.

I like reading HN more than Reddit because the low bar for content is a lot higher. I don't encounter as much noxious waste in my search for the gold.

Absolutely. Comments are sometimes critical around here and could maybe arrive softer but this is one of the few remaining spots on the internet to read largely civilized, high-value discourse on a topic and related context.

Most articles on blogs are just hackernews comments posted in a place where criticism won't appear there.

What does this even mean? The average blog post I read on the front page has much more effort put into it than the average hacker news comment.

Maintaining a comment system on your personal self-hosted blog brings a number of annoying issues such as spam and security vulnerabilities.

This is not a good thing but I read HN comments as a way to outsource my critical thinking. The author of a blog post or article is speaking from a single perspective and set of biases. Reading through the comments gives me a sampling of thinking that comes from different perspectives and biases.

Increasingly, I won't even read the article itself, but the comments, because the topic is one of interest and I want to soak in the adjacent commentary and percolate some new thoughts before doing my own reading on a subject.

Sometimes I start with the comments then go back and read the article pre-conditioned by the commentary. It usually enriches my experience.

HN isn't intended to be your blog's commenting system though. If you want a dialogue between the author and their audience, have the discussion at the source. HN is for HN'ers. And as a fellow commenter noted, quite a few people (myself included) frequently just use the article title (or maybe a small quote from the article) as a "writing prompt". And there's nothing wrong with that unless your expectations are out of whack in the first place.

And probably half of the time an HN comment leads to a discussion that is tangential to the original topic, and that thread becomes the most active sub-thread of the discussion. And I would argue, again, that that is totally fine. Nothing is written mandating that all (or even any) of the discussion on an HN link be pertinent to the point that the author of TFA was trying to make. It's nice when it is, but as long as the ensuing discussion is interesting, then it's useful to the people who are participating. For people who don't like that, then yeah sure, you're free to choose not to read HN comments. shrug

I think the "title as a writing prompt" approach can be frustrating in some cases, as an HN participant. Essentially every article about general interest SWE topics (remote work, job interviews, etc.) gets dominated by the exact same viewpoint and complaints, no matter how specific the focus of the original article.

Paraphrasing: "No one appreciates the hard work that went into my medium blog, which I hope to monetize at some point, and to top it off, anonymous people leave mean comments"

Are you new to the internet?

(the author doesn't read comments so I'm in no danger of offending him)

Yeah, exactly how I felt. They say, “we all know writing a blog is hard, it can take at least an hour”

The quality of blogs varies wildly so this makes no sense. Gwern seems to take a long time to write their blog and do research. Sometimes a blog post is literally a teenagers stream of consciousness. Both are OK, but it really depends on the blog whether I consider writing it both 1) a lot of work 2) valuable to me.

I just found this tone offputting. It was peak wordcell behavior IMO.

I had look up "wordcell" and found a fascinating definition that leads to "nerd traps", "abstraction ladder" and "theorycel" in regards to crypto

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wordcell

Incel terminology is so horrible to try and explain. But yeah, for anyone confused, basically any word can be affixed with -cel (from celibate) and it “works” — e.g., numbercel, wordcel, gymcel, heightcel, narutocel, ycombinatorcel, etc.

Typically these would’ve been used by the incel community to describe why someone is an incel (e.g., “heightcels” supposedly being too short to be attractive and so on). Now, I see the terms being used not only unironically by actual incels but also ironically, usually on the fairly leftist/chapotraphouse-adjacent parts of twitter and such.

https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/pkpqzb/ok-wtf-are-wordce...

The argument here (which I may have misunderstood, but take to be essentially that articles are likely to be of a higher quality because they're harder to produce than HN comments) makes sense, but it turns out not to be true in practice (at least from my experience on HN, which is mostly limited to certain technical topics).

I understand where the author is coming from, but the fact is (unfortunately) that the quality of HN comments is typically better than the quality of online articles, blog posts etc.

I think it's a combination of the fact that there are a lot of smart, accomplished people on HN, and also the overall low quality of what's found elsewhere on the internet. Most of what's out there is just pants, but even when it's good, a discussion with smart people is almost always more interesting, and I honestly doubt that it stops me from reading worthwhile stuff. You can generally tell when the person commenting has read the article, and you can usually make a good guess at what the basis of their opinion is.

Yeah; if anything this article is a good argument to stop writing comments, not stop reading them. However, the time commitment for that is high, and the most insightful folks tend to have day jobs.

Comments tend to be a good filter for which articles are worth reading.

Not sure why the author is complaining. Commenting on a blog and writing a blog have never been confused. No one has ever compared commenting to writing a blog.

Commenting has it's own place. If you don't like the comments, maybe you shouldn't post on HN. I don't know how ignorant you have to be to literally pass by the very purpose of a site like HN. It's literally built to hold discussions. Commenting is the _only_ thing you do here. There's no chat, no fancy reactions, no groups, no "pages", nothing. Just an input box and a button to express your opinion.

The UX could be better but that's an excuse for the lazy. You don't want to scroll? That's on you, not the website. You wrote a very long blog and I can't scroll past the first paragraph. Is the fault yours or mine?

With that said, not every link gets 3000 comments. The example given is an exception. Most of the time the comments stick to the point with a lot of constructive opinions in them. You can't silence the crowd, you can't control the crowd, and you certainly can't own the crowd. So just let the crowd be. If you don't like that, refrain from posting stuff here.

The author made it very clear why he's complaining. The entire post is an explanation, whether you agree with it or not.

30 second comment, followed by 10 second comment, followed by 10 second comment (my own).

Author's point made.

That's self fulfilling. You can skim the article in seconds. Most is blabla.

It's like there is no barrier to entry to write a blog post -- anyone can do it!

Remove the long bulleted list about the travails of writing and publicizing a blog post, and you are left with a dozen short paragraphs whose thesis boils down to:

>> You can read an article written by someone who went through the difficulties I mentioned earlier and spent quite some time creating a content that he found important enough, or you can read the comments made by several other people who took like 10 seconds to write something (often mean and critical) about the title of the article.

Doesn't really require a lot of careful reading and consideration.

> If you don't like the comments, maybe you shouldn't post on HN.

Anyone can submit a blog post to HN, not just the blog author.

> The result is a …dialog—not between a commenter and people who replied to his comment—but between different commenters who steal the focus of the discussion to their own opinion.

I struggle to see what’s wrong with that. If I watch a movie with a friend, should our post-viewing discussion be restricted to certain subjects? The wide ranging discussions in the comments can be irrelevant to me or quite fascinating and more relevant to me. The original article deserves no priority either way.

Also, the author talks about the effort of selecting photos. I’m glad they footnote. But please, if you want me to read your article don’t go to this effort. If there’s a photo it should be germane and often easy to to get, like the picture of the HN front page. But an orange box with the HN logo and an inkblot, or the embedded video with some rando talking? That crap is just visual junk that interferes with reading and gives me at least the impression that the author isn’t serious. I understand Medium requires a junk photo or more and it’s one reason I rarely bother to follow a link to a Medium post.

BTW this comment took longer than ten seconds to write.

"You can read an article written by someone who went through the difficulties I mentioned earlier and spent quite some time creating a content that he found important enough, or you can read the comments made by several other people who took like 10 seconds to write something"

Can't I do both? I'm pretty sure I can, because that's what I do.

"You can read an article that is at least somewhat cohesive and informative, or you can read countless opinions that often do not add anything to your knowledge."

Again, I'm pretty sure I can do both. And opinions in comments often do add something valuable. That's why I continue to read them.

"You can choose to read a piece of article that took 1 hour to write by one person, or read the comments made by 360 people who took 10 seconds to write their opinion about the article. In the end, you end up consuming the same 3600 man-seconds. The difference is that the article author went through the steps I mentioned earlier to give a better experience about his content, and the commenters did not."

Three different paragraphs all to say the same thing. The article should be more useful, so you should read that instead of the comments, which are almost certainly not useful.

I guess my experience is not at all similar. Most of the time I find the comments more useful than the article. The article in question is no exception. The entire thing can be summarized in one "ten second" comment with nothing useful added by reading the full article.

Here's the thing - 360 comments is not written by 360 people. 360 comments is written by 36,000 readers only 1% of whom decide to comment.

It's not the time it takes to write the comment, it's the time it takes to accumulate the knowledge. With the comments you are consuming way more than 3600 man-seconds. I'll take the comments most of the time.

> Here's the thing - 360 comments is not written by 360 people. 360 comments is written by 36,000 readers only 1% of whom decide to comment.

You could make a similar argument about blog authors though. And the % of people who become blog authors is much lower than the % of people who become commenters, because of the vastly different barriers to entry.

I am largely in agreement with this. I have a love/hate relationship with HN comments because of the "yeah, BUT..." flow of so much of the dialogue. The "misappropriation of context" funnel lens on display feels more intense here than on other platforms.

I still get a lot of value from HN, but possibly more from the submissions than the comments. Sometimes there's gold in the comments, but it's questionable if the signal/noise ratio, and the time to dig for it, is worth the effort.

That's how discussions are. They move from thing to thing which is what makes them so interesting. If HN always stayed focused strictly on a single topic, you'd only find replies like "yes, I agree."

The fact that people come out and take time to share their own experience is very valuable. There are not many places like HN. Most of the rest of the internet is filled with trolls, maybe that's what people prefer?

I don't get your signal/noise ratio statement. Comments are not only for you. They aren't a blog post. They are opinions, thoughts, experiences, of a lot of people. You can't apply such a thing as signal/noise because what to you seems as noise might be very valuable for someone else.

That is a good point about the misappropriation of context. To often, the discussion consists of people misunderstanding each other or responding to minor points rather than the main point of the parent comment.

Plus any reply that's not the top reply is not shown adjacent to the comment it's replying to, which can make the discussion hard to follow. (Not sure there's a solution to this since we read linearly but a group discussion like this does not have a linear structure.)

I still read and enjoy the comments but it's a "choppy" experience in terms of context and that can leave me feeling dissatisfied when ideas don't have a chance to develop or really go somewhere.

> The topic must be pretty important for him to justify his devotion, otherwise why do it?

I wrote a blog so I could put it on job applications.

Yeah, blog posts take more effort than comments but they also tend to have more of a payoff for the writer. So there can be more ulterior motives at play in terms of trying to sell something or get attention.

The fact that someone has put more effort into a blog post doesn't necessarily translate into more value for me, the reader.

As the author said, they're not reading this but I couldn't help but try to verify what they're saying is their truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=behnamoh

Edit: Actually, just filtering for their website: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=medium.com/parttimebe... This post is the highest comment count and point count that the author has ever received.

I found an Ask HN with 6 comments and one that the author objected to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32242160

There's an article on Electron terminal apps (and Microsoft Terminal?) that got some corrections/objections, but nothing obtuse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360227

One article sparked a lively discussion on the security of python -m when the author advocated its use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156581 (this one was just their submission, not their story)

and the author has asked for personal/career advice, to which I saw nothing obtuse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32130535

I'm not sure what comments the author is talking about that are "hateful". People on HN can be a bit "difficult" at times, especially if perspectives or experiences diverge significantly. In general, I'll give this advice: When I post, I read the comments but don't engage. Engaging is unhealthy for me and it detracts from the current state of what I wrote (I am the kind of person that will go change my blog posts over time). For others the rule is "Don't read the comments". Personally, I think the author falls in the latter category - and that's not to say anything bad of it, it's just the way some folks are.

I stopped reading this blog post well before the end. Guy writes blog. Blog gets comments on HN. Guy thinks there are too many comments on HN. So what? HN is not his blog, and has no obligation to be what he wants it to be. If he wants to manage the comments, he can implement comments on his own blog and do that.

It's an interesting phenomenon for HN in particular. The quality of comments tends to be higher than other platforms, so I feel more comfortable (and more fulfilled) reading the experiences and opinions of those who do so.

I imagine a meatspace analogue where a presenter works for a period of time on a slide deck and a presentation, only for most people who come to stand in the back and chatter - or at best, for many people after the presentation, to be discussing things entirely beside the point you made. "Why are they caring more about their own chat instead of my insights?"

I get it, but that's the rub. And as someone said, HN strictly speaking has no obligation to be any site's commenting system. Install and manage your own, use a 3P tool, or even manage your own personal subreddit if you feel like it.

---

Off-topic, regarding HN comments: I believe Slashdot to this day has the most useful and effective balance of "free speech" and of quality control of any forum on the Internet. It doesn't require oligarchic mods to filter out undesirable or rash comments; the community does it just fine. Rationale for the comment's value is put in a few buckets such as funny, troll, low effor, insightful, and so on.

Having a metamod system, reducing the number of dead/shadowban comments, and a few minor UI tweaks would be amazing for this site IMO.

I agree with your point on Slashdot's moderation. In the 25 (ow) or so years I've been reading Slashdot it's been very rare to see genuinely bad comments remain at a 4 or 5 or genuinely good comments buried at -1. The semi random distribution of mod points and meta moderation have been highly effective.

Slashdot didn't really ever fall prey to the sort of manipulation that destroyed Digg or has made Reddit's major subreddits a cesspool. HN seems to skirt by on being slightly more niche and dang's tireless moderation efforts.

The minus button makes it really easy to sift through comments. Much easier than finding the interesting paragraphs in an article actually. A blog post might have required some deep thought, as the author says not as much as a book, but probably more than went into a comment. But it's deep thought that went into a single idea, by a single person, in a single circumstance. Deep thought can only go so far.

When you're using the minus button you'll go through all sorts of thoughts and responses. Sure, if you're easily offended by dumb reactionary comments, then you'll often find a couple at the top. That might hurt your ego, but if you just let it go, hit downvote, and then the minus button, it can be out of sight out of mind in an instant. You'll get to the good parts of the comments soon enough. Those comments might not have been worked on for hours or days or weeks, but the authors might have deep knowledge regardless. And if not deep knowledge, different perspectives stemming from different backgrounds, circumstances and personalities.

I usually read the comments first, and depending on the topic and how engaging the comments are to the topic I might read the article. In the example post of the news of Elon's bid on Twitter, no way that I'll read the article, no way that Bloomberg put any deep thought in their article, and guaranteed that there's people on HN with way more interesting perspectives than that can be stamped out in the couple minutes an overworked tech journalist has to make sure their article attains maximum reach.

This comment took more than 10 seconds to write, and many comments on HN did. I'd just as much enjoy 36 hundred second comments, as I would a one hour article.

Honestly I love to see something I worked on or wrote and then read the top 3-5 upvoted comments on HN. They help me do better the next time. I usually focus on objective critique and not cynicism.

Top-rated comments can be hit or miss though. Toxic snark under the guise of "wit" can still get upvoted (even when the community rules specifically discourage it).

It does get upvoted. That's a weakness of the upvoting system, unfortunately. We downweight it when we see it stuck at the top of the thread, but we don't always see it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Daniel, my hat's off to you! Thanks for pushing for civil discourse. +100.

> Moreover, HN does not notify users about replies to their comments, so it is your duty to always check your own comments to see if there is any activity there.

Public service announcement: you can sign up to HN Replies (created by dang) to get an email notifications whenever someone replies to one of your HN comments. I only found out about this recently and I really like it!

https://www.hnreplies.com/

Dan Grossman isn't Daniel Gackle. Easy to be confused, though.

Good to know, thank you! I shouldn't have assumed.

I skim the comments to help me decide whether an article is worth reading.

I didn't read this article.

As a blogger whose articles occasionally become popular on HN, my main complaint is that HN commenters don't apply the same guidelines to article authors that they do to each other. There's a double standard. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Of course HN commenters don't always follow the guidelines with each other either, but it's at least an aspiration, and the moderators will step in if there are major violations. But there seems to be no such protection for article authors.

I've found that the best way to keep HN commenters from becoming too dismissive and/or vicious is to step in and reply myself to comments on my articles. It shouldn't have to be that way, but that's the way it is now.

[Edit] Example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32401086

We definitely try to moderate the same way. For example personal attacks on authors are no more ok than personal attacks on fellow commenters; shallow dismissals of other people's work are not ok (regardless of whose work it is), and so on. The limit on this is just that (many) people don't follow the guidelines in either case, no matter how often we repeat them.

I do think you're right that there's an tendency to be harsher on authors, though—because it feels like they're not "in the room". It's like gossip: we're all looser-lipped when someone's not around. That would explain your observation that the comments change once you show up as a commenter in the thread about your article. Gossip mutes itself when the person being gossiped about walks in.

The trouble, of course, is that on the internet this is an illusion. The author is "in the room", or soon will be after they track the referring URL of all the traffic. Then they show up and get to hear all the things people were saying when they "weren't there".

And you're doing a fantastic job at moderating this place. Even when I got flagged, I had to concede that it was well-deserved.

What's surprising is that you managed to do this without fueling a constant meta discussion about how bad the moderators are. You somehow manage to please everyone. As a former community mod, I'm impressed.

HN Comments are kinda like Twitter. They have all of the same attributes:

- every now and then there is a fantastic tweet

- many of them are bad

- there's a lot of them, more than you could ever read

- they are all consistent: you're used to the format, the rules are simple to understand

- there are some ads and some ulterior motives, but for the most part, it's just normal people posting

Of course they aren't special! This article is kind of a "category error." No dig at the author with this, seriously. I genuinely think it's a good post, worth sharing (that's why I'm commenting here!). BUT, this article is kind of like:

Why I don't expect my dog to cook me breakfast any more

Breakfast is great. It fills you up, it tastes good, and after you've been sleeping a while you get pretty hungry, a problem that breakfast solves handily. Occasionally, I have had breakfast cooked for me; it is wonderful!

But I have noticed that my dog never cooks me breakfast. This is because it's a dog. It could be because it doesn't share the same love for breakfast that I have. It could be that it does not have opposable thumbs, or perhaps the lack of prefrontal cortex development. Either way, I've noticed that my dog has never ever cooked me breakfast.

For this reason, I've stopped expecting my dog to cook me breakfast. It seems like every time I expect this to happen, it doesn't happen.

---

What I have noticed about HN comments is that HN commenters are usually very intelligent people, and they usually comment "for fun." This is in contrast to nearly everywhere else on the internet, where people are either not very bright (so their comments aren't very clever or even fun to read) AND/OR posting comments or articles with the motive to make money. By volume, I'd say most stuff on the internet does not exist "for fun" but rather because it is self-promotional for some reason.

Did anyone else come straight to the comments before reading the article? I feel attacked.

I stopped reading Medium because of this article.

I should probably set a filter rule for medium. The quality of all recent articles I skimmed was subpar.

Feature: anyone can have a blog!

Bug: anyone can have a blog.

I don't remember last time I read the OP (when an external link), before browsing some comments, mostly top of threads, across a few pages (if avail). I then go and read the intended OP linked article.

I’ve frequently found the HN comments to be more valuable than reading than the articles themselves - the context & community that’s being nurtured here is (emoji sparkles) ;)

Reading the comments is a great way to figure out if an article is worth reading carefully.

I do find myself collapsing comments a bit so I don't have to read all the replies to the top comment, but I find comments overall to be immensely useful. If HN were just a place where articles/posts were upvoted/downvoted, I would have stopped visiting a long time ago. The comments are what create the community, and the community is why I'm here.

The comments section needs a page level [+] and [-] control. If you hit the [+] then all comments on the page are displayed. If you hit the [-] then only the top level comments are displayed. You are then free to drill down into (or collapse) any comment thread independently. This is a shortcut from having to scroll down and collapse every thread if you only want to look at direct comments to the article and none of the replies to them.

There is already a “next” button that will scroll past a comment’s thread.

Flagged for clickbait headline

Winston Churchill once said that: “HN comments are the worst form of online dialog – except for all the others that have been tried.”

I have learned or got nothing by reading this - just lost time.

The only reason I skip HN more and more is because of stuff like this floating on top.

I have found that I can greatly increase the signal to noise here by simply collapsing the first comment ([-]). The first comment to a Hacker News article is usually, almost but not entirely, unrelated to the ideas in the article. It will be an idea that can be comprehended with little thought. As a result it attracts a lot of low effort responses.

Comments have a ""social"" value rather than a ""intellectual"" value. You get a feel for what other opinions about a topic might be, and a grasp for how people argue about it. Don't come looking for oranges in the apple aisle of the grocery store.

It's both actually. I read the comments on various sites for both reasons, but why I read the comments on a particular site has everything to do the community.

I read the comments here for the social value, but as well, because this site attracts a lot of experts in the fields where articles are being posted from. The same is true of a few other sites I read. A story posted about flight recorders a while back on another site, saw a few people in the threads pop up, "I have been a professional pilot for 30+ years now", and then someone else weighed in, "I design flight recorders, and am familiar with the internals of the one mentioned in the article", and they had a great debate! The readers of the comment thread learned something they could not have from the article.

I read the comments on partisan political news sites because it's a quick way to get a read on what the views are on that side of the spectrum, particularly when it comes to mainstream vs. fringe.

I am subscribed to this RSS feed that shows recent, highly voted comments from across HN: https://hnrss.org/bestcomments. It relieves me a bit from the FOMO that might arise while browsing the site.

> Do you think it is humanly possible to always check for any new comment? How would you even locate them (HN does not tell you which comments are new)?

That's why I use a HTML->RSS script on my profile comment page and get standard RSS feed of new replies sent to my email! Easy peasy.

> How would you feel, then, if people started writing mean comments down your post in less than 10 seconds?

Happens all the time. People have said mean things about me since 2nd grade. Doesn't bother me at all.

> At the end of the day, I believe the barrier to entry says a lot about the content.

Does that mean that blogs hosted on Medium are not as valuable as blogs that are self-hosted on their own domain?

> Does that mean that blogs hosted on Medium are not as valuable as blogs that are self-hosted on their own domain?

Yes. I do wonder why technically capable people choose Medium.

Lets give people a prize for reading the comments in a story about why you shouldn't read the comments.

Dan Grossman wrote hnreplies which will notify you via email that you have a reply to a comment https://www.hnreplies.com/ with a link directly to the reply in question.

Personally I like to enjoy both the articles and the comments and I often find value in each but lets be real I don't care about the optimal use of time because time spent on hacker news is inherently down time and entertainment. It's not goal oriented in the first place and it doesn't NEED to be optimized.

I love the comment section! I find a lot of potential clients through this website, but then I go to the comments to understand the issue, and ways I can engage.

I only read HN comments (sometimes I read the actual linked post if the comments make me curious)

In small doses the comment section is funny. I like it when someone tries to hawk their app.

You Won't Believe THIS Reason to Stop Reading Hacker News Comments!

There is articles on HN? I am only here for the comments.

I often only read the hacker News comments.

I glossed the first few paragraphs of this whiny note and can understand why the author does not read the comments here. He needs to get to the point much quicker. Whatever it was. Tl:dr.

Good for the author on stopping reading the comments on HN.

I don’t think anybody reads hundreds of comments on HN. Most people would read some top comments, collapse the comment thread, check the next comment thread, etc. If someone really wants to read all comments, they’d be better off reading HNDaily or something after a day.

I do have some serious issues with this author’s claims, allegations and sense of entitlement. So here we go with my tirade on some points. Where I’m being snarky, it’s only because I see the author’s view as one sided.

> Comments are not intrinsically bad, but the fact that nowadays anyone can leave a comment at the snap of a finger makes them less special.

The fact that nowadays anyone can put up a post online on Medium or elsewhere at the snap of a finger makes them less special.

> Just because you can hide behind online anonymity does not mean that you should find it appropriate to be rude, mean, and harassing.

News flash: banning anonymity isn’t going to make people nicer online. We’ve known that for nearly a decade and a half now on social media. Plus, the HN guidelines do allow flagging comments and alerting the mods for harassment, name calling, etc.

> Obviously, no one has time to read all those comments (if you do, please get a job). Moreover, HN does not notify users about replies to their comments, so it is your duty to always check your own comments to see if there is any activity there.

Obviously nobody has time to read the millions of articles published by people everyday (if you do, please get a job). To catch up on comments, just check HNDaily or another site where you can read through comments in a much better interface without having to worry about replying or voting. The fact that HN does not notify on replies is a feature, not a bug. I doubt if the majority here wants HN to become another Twitter or Reddit or Facebook or Instagram or what have you that wants to suck up all your attention and time. Let’s stop trying to keep up all the time!

> The crazy thing about HN comments is that they seem like a decent conversation to follow, but that often leads to addictive situations in which you read the comments instead of the article itself. It is like reading the article through the lens of people who supposedly read it.

The author complains that there are no reply notifications (which increase addiction), then complains that it’s already addictive. Ok, I get that it’s about different situations, but I visit HN to check the comments and then decide if the post is even worth my time!!! I’m sure many regular readers here do the same. Just because a small part of HN’s hive mind upvotes an article doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good or doesn’t have deep flaws.

> You can read an article written by someone who went through the difficulties I mentioned earlier and spent quite some time creating a content that he found important enough,

> …

> You can read an article that is at least somewhat cohesive and informative

> …

> The difference is that the article author went through the steps I mentioned earlier to give a better experience about his content, and the commenters did not.

These points have very little to no relation to the quality, accuracy or veracity of the content. That’s why I visit HN to check the comments and then decide if the post is even worth my time!!! And I’m also thankful for the people who take the time to comment and help me decide whether the post is worth spending my time on (and many a times even knowing what the post is about).

> At the end of the day, I believe the barrier to entry says a lot about the content. If something can be easily and quickly written by anyone (like a comment), it is often not worth reading as it could be a knee-jerk reaction to some news or some passing thought.

The same is true for a lot of articles on Medium. Pushing readers to go through the bad user experience of Medium doesn’t say much about the writer’s effort in making the writing more accessible (and with fewer or no annoyances). I would’ve been more polite if the author had chosen a less hostile platform.

This article is paywalled. So I use HN comments to decide if it’s worth getting access to the original post.

Unfortunately I have to say that honestly some of the comments on HN are way more well-thought-out, insightful, important, etc. than the article. Sometimes the article is written by someone who doesn’t really understand what they’re writing about, and the 10-second comment is written by an expert in their field.

IMO there are 2 types of “negative” comments:

- Constructive criticism: if you don’t like this, don’t read it. But personally I really want constructive criticism for whatever I post. HN is good because commenters give everyone constructive criticism, they won’t “beat around the bush” and even if your post is 99% good, they’ll focus on the 1% bad part. This is really good to the writer, as constructive criticism is how you improve.

It’s also really good for commenters, especially if the article is promotional (which many are). Nothing wrong with promoting something but I want to see the benefits and drawbacks. In fact, hearing honest flaws in a product from HN commenters sometimes increases its value, because I know where it falls short and where it doesn’t, vs. having to guess the flaws myself (which I tend to overestimate, having seen too much BS).

- Non-constructive criticism aka “mean” criticism. I agree with the author and I’d like to see this go away or be downvoted. Unfortunately HN does have a lot of mean criticism, even some of the most highly-upvoted comments are mean. This includes: criticism of the author, criticism of something unrelated, criticism which doesn’t offer solutions or justification (e.g. “this sucks”), pointing out some hard-to-fix flaw while completely ignoring why the flaw is hard or impossible to fix (e.g. criticizing a company from doing something when they legally have to, without even mentioning how the company could satisfy the law another way - e.g. criticizing GitHub for taking down repos with genuine DMCA violations). Overall, any criticism which the author can’t improve from, especially criticism which uses particularly harsh words.

I really have to emphasize the last part. Nobody should ever be saying “X sucks”, “X is garbage”, “X is a failure”, “X is completely useless” towards a post or it’s author. It’s way too unnecessarily harsh and no solution, you’re not helping someone improve with these words, you’re just putting them down. And nobody should ever tell someone to “die in a fire” or “jump in front of a bus”, but I occasionally hear those things even on HN. These types of comments should be flagged, they just shouldn’t exist.

But the constructive criticism, that is a very good thing. It helps remove bias which is so prevalent in this world. And there are many cases where it actually caused the author or company to fix a big flaw, which didn’t just not exist when people didn’t mention it.

The author is fine not reading HN comments to avoid reading criticism. Nobody should be forced to themselves read harsh feedback if they don’t want it. But personally, I really think it’s essential to HN I don’t want to ever see it go away.

The result is a pseudo-dialog—not between a commenter and people who replied to his comment—but between different commenters who steal the focus of the discussion to their own opinion.

Yes! In fact, this is how I ended up fixing my paradox of choice whenever I want to learn something new. For any topic you choose, there are millions of comments, thousands of online articles (mostly blogs), hundreds of websites, tens of online courses, and a handful of books (in any form). Which one do you think was harder to do? (Hint: the books). Which one do you think really went through some rigor and thought-plan to make their content as accessible to you as possible? (Hint: the books, then MOOCs). Which one can you read casually to get an intuition about a subject? (Hint: maybe blogs written by those who got that intuition). Choose wisely.

It’s a trade off, like most topics, those who are extremely knowledgeable don’t always have time to write whole books and reach large audiences by creating content in smaller form factors.

Massive amounts of voluminous text that add little to no value. Difference is once you have written it off, it feels like you just saved a bunch of time, but you didn’t, since the goal is to learn, not to save time.

Good post.

I have already noticed that people have stopped reading posts & comments before responding, they just react to them. They are just writing prompts.

Finding good comments and receiving good responses is becoming so rare that I think this is perfect opportunity to stop writing comments.

The end.

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