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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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