HN feature request: "I read the article" checkbox | Hacker News Reader

HN feature request: "I read the article" checkbox

4 pointslapcat19 comments

The idea is to add an "I read the article" checkbox, unchecked by default, next to the "add comment" button.

Even better would be an account setting to allow you to hide comments with the checkbox unchecked.

It would save me time and frustration to simply ignore and avoid responding to comments by people who never read the submitted article. I don't wish to interact with such people.

I realize, of course, that commenters could mislead by checking the checkbox even when they haven't read the article. However, over the years I've seen a lot of commenters who are quite open and honest about the fact that they're here only for the comments, not the articles. Indeed, this feature request was inspired by my recent interaction with such a person, who admitted (after the fact) to not reading the article.

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I do not believe this idea would obtain the desired results despite being a good intention. People would just create an addon or find a way for uBlock or userScripts or greasemonkey to check the box.

The only way to know someone read and understood the article would be to require them to submit a short summary in their own words and have an LLM validate it to be at least 85+% correct or let people vote on their interpretation of the article and then prefix their comment with their score. That is too much friction for a website like this in my opinion.

> People would just create an addon or find a way for uBlock or userScripts or greasemonkey to check the box.

Again, that's a lot of effort for people who won't even make the effort to read the article.

To be clear, checking the checkbox would not be required to add a comment. The checkbox is entirely optional.

> The only way to know someone read and understood the article

I'm not even expecting understanding. I can deal with people who misunderstand something they've read. Many issues debated here are complex. What's not helpful is for someone to just read the headline and then start spouting off about whatever comes to the top of their head, without reading anything.

What's not helpful is for someone to just read the headline and then start spouting off about whatever comes to the top of their head, without reading anything.

This problem is prolific throughout all sites that permit comments. Youtube is probably the most egregious. I do not believe this could be solved adding UI or UX changes or without adding a lot of friction. People will continue their habits that feed their endorphin and adrenaline addictions. On HN people quickly scan through articles and to your point fire off a comment and move onto the next thing unless the topic is interesting enough to keep them engaged with the community. So I think this is not just changing the commenters habits but also changing the journalist or bloggers style of writing to keep titles short and hard to either misinterpret or get an emotionally charged response as many authors try to do for engagement. I am skeptical that this level of changing global human behavior could be accomplished without some risk+reward system and those systems become gamed or risk killing off a popular site. Every site would have to implement the same changes on a global scale to keep authors honest and tone down the commenter replies.

> I do not believe this could be solved adding UI or UX changes or without adding a lot of friction. People will continue their habits that feed their endorphin and adrenaline addictions.

Again, I'm not trying to solve the problem. The proposal of an entirely optional checkbox is an admission that the problem can't be solved. I fully acknowledge that people will continue to write comments without reading the article. This feature is for me, not for them. I'm not trying to change people's behavior. I just want a rough way to identify and ignore the laziest.

You can always email Daniel dang and see if they are open to it. hn@ycombinator.com It may be a while maybe a couple days to get a response. Link to this thread so he has context.

Well, this submission has received only 2 upvotes, so I suspect the idea is DOA.

I don't wish to interact with such people.

You might be on the wrong website, global internetwork or species-of-autonomous-sentient-social-beings-highly-adapted-to-operate-with-incomplete-information for that.

Unfortunately, there is no "right" website for that.

Sort of my point along with the fact that very few users of this one are likely interested in filling out a form to indicate their qualifications for interacting with you - it just seems like an inconvenient and impractical hassle.

Inconvenient? Yes. Impractical? No. It's just a checkbox, not that hard. My view is that it's fine and good to filter out the commenters who won't make such a small effort.

And whether or not people check the checkbox, the existence of it right next to the "add comment" button is a nice reminder that you should read the article before commenting.

It's just a checkbox, not that hard.

I think you're greatly overestimating the appetite for (if not the ease of) filling out forms. The appeal of 'fill out a form so lapcat will talk to you' is very limited, even for an actual lap cat.

you should read the article before commenting.

This is aspirationaly right but it's not a realistic requirement for any kind of real messageboard. People can title-check, glance at, skim, read, carefully study, learn-by-heart, etc any article and respond to it in ways that, to you (or me, or whoever), appear dramatically at odds with any of the above. The checkbox, like the proverbial goggles, does nothing. You'll have a forum that works like open internet link-discussing forums already work except with an extra irritating, space-wasting checkbox.

> I think you're greatly overestimating the appetite for (if not the ease of) filling out forms.

I'm not. I'm perfectly fine with a minority of users checking it.

> This is aspirationaly right but it's not a realistic requirement for any kind of real messageboard.

It's not a requirement. You can comment without checking the checkbox. It's just an indicator to anyone who sees the comment.

> space-wasting checkbox

How does it waste space? There's currently empty space.

I'm perfectly fine with a minority of users checking it.

That's generous of you but most people are not fine with a 'click here for laptcat to not-ignore you' checkbox.

How does it waste space? There's currently empty space.

That seems to assume empty and wasted space are the same thing and the fact we have different words for them alone suggests otherwise.

It's not a requirement.

As I mentioned but you didn't seem to consider/reply to - it's already not a requirement for people to absorb the material on the site to your or anyone else's personal standard and that appears to work reasonably well without any additional ui or features.

> most people are not fine with a 'click here for laptcat to not-ignore you' checkbox.

It's not just for me. That would be silly. It's for anyone to see, and do with that information what they will.

> As I mentioned but you didn't seem to consider/reply to - it's already not a requirement for people to absorb the material on the site to your or anyone else's personal standard

I did already reply to that point, though in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42095040

In other words, it's not about absorbing the material. It's just about doing the bare minimum.

It's not really a response because there is simply no telling what 'the bare minimum' is so encouraging it doesn't do any of what you suggest it does. For instance, you don't have any idea whether the people you think haven't read the article actually haven't. The whole thing is based on effectively unknowable assumptions about comments you find annoying.

We can't nerdsolve our way out of annoying comments. We do know of a great and highly effective way to improve the quality of threads, though - write a good comment yourself.

> We can't nerdsolve our way out of annoying comments.

That wasn't the purpose. I fully realize that annoying comments will arise in any case.

> there is simply no telling what 'the bare minimum' is

You may be equivocating on this phrase. I'm not proposing some definitive specification of the one true bare minimum, but I'd say that reading the article is a bare minimum, so to speak, for commenting on an article. Don't you agree? Or do you think that commenting on an article without reading it is in fact great and useful? If the latter, then we fundamentally disagree, this entire conversation has been a waste of time, and I wish you would have just said that at the beginning.

> you don't have any idea whether the people you think haven't read the article actually haven't.

Again, I'm ok with false negatives.

It won't work. People will ignore it by default, simply because it takes more effort to check the box than not, and most of the people who do use it will just do so to spite the system, because they find the premise that they should read the articles to be an insult to their intelligence and an imposition upon their personal liberties.

There's no way to engineer this problem away. You just have to accept that many commenters here are aggressively ignorant about much of the topics being discussed.

> it takes more effort to check the box than not

I'm actually fine with ignoring people who won't make the effort.

> most of the people who do use it will just do so to spite the system

I don't agree with this claim, for the reasons I already stated. Moreover, the people who don't read the articles tend to be the laziest and won't make the effort to check the checkbox either, so in a sense your argument is self-defeating.

Make a userscript that adds the checkbox and inserts a marker in the user's comments. Add the option to hide anything that doesn't include the confirmation marker.

That way you only have to interact with the best, most diligent users of your script, and you don't have to endure the horrors of having to deal with the scum who are too lazy (or stupid) to install the script.

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