I always check out the HN comments first. The HN comments don't assault my browsers with popups, ads, awful styling and who knows what else. I may learn what the article is about (not always clear from the title of the submission) and be warned of other people's reactions (like "WOW that giant flashing thing on page 2 can trigger a seizure!" or "Site hijacks back button!" or even more importantly, "Article is a waste of time, author has it all wrong. Here's an authoritative source which explains why").

I may or may not risk a click at all if there are no comments.

I do read the article before commenting though. (Well.... not this time, but it's kind of a meta topic)

I, for one, often glance at the comments first to check if an article is valid. If not, there's probably a highly rated comment explaining what's wrong with an article's facts or reasoning.

Saves me not just a click, but lots of time reading lesser quality articles too.

I always check HN comments before the article. The comments play a big part in deciding whether I even want to read the article.

Sometimes I have the arrogance to have an expectation of what could I read there on the article, so I read the comment section on HN first to find unexpected insight or a POV I wouldn't find boring, for better or worse.

I have automatic PDF downloads configured as the built-in browser PDF viewers are often subpar. So for sure I will check the comments before deciding if I want to click on a PDF link (in this case: I don't).

tbh i rarely click on the tfa