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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

On both HN & Reddit, I find the comments more informative and less frustrating than reading the article usually. But I guess YMMV.

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10 years ago Reddit used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. 5 years ago, HN used to be a place where you would get informed opinions and less spam. Neither of them will go back to the same level of quality. Not anymore.

This has been said by every long term user of these sites. And not at the same time. It was always better in the past. It's probably partly true... yeah, quality can decrease as things get better. But it's also partly an illusion of aging in a changing world. Ten years is long enough to completely change the way we write and express ourselves.

It's actually sort of in the Hacker News Guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."

Luckily I am not a LLM and can read and select things rather fast without processing the crap. Both HN and some subreddits still are fine for quality if you know the users and their reputations; just skip the rest. Worse than 10 years ago, still a lot better than mostly anywhere else.

you need to expend resources (e.g. "proof of work") to post, to drive away low effort spam. https://stacker.news/ is an interesting experiment in that regard.

And yet the comments still provide more value than the article, almost always.

You need to read the article first to know that. But most people won't.

If the comments say it's worth it I read it, but often (especially on HN) the top comment starts with a summary of errors/inconsistencies in the article and then I don't really feel the need.

You do you, but hivemind thinking is a real thing. I have seen highly upvoted comments seemingly "debunk" an article where on closer examination it becomes clear they actually didn't read the article either.

It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content.

I get that is easier, but intellectually you are doing yourself no favors by having this be your default.

That is the biggest problem on this website, people want to feel smart by 'debunking' things they don't really understand. It leads to a lot of contrarian views with poor signal to noise ratio, especially when the topic is slightly outside of average user experience (midwit programming)

not to mention walls of text as people argue back and fourth

But often the top comment debunks what you think is true, and then you learn something.

> It quickly becomes this weird bubble of people just acting on what everything "thinks" the content is about without ever having looked at the content.

That isn't an issue though since the important part is what you learn or not, not whether you think an imaginary article is true or not. If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article.

The only issue here is attribution, but why should a reader care about that?

Edit: And it isn't an issue that people will think it actually debunks the linked article, since there will always be a sub comment stating that the commenter didn't read the article and therefore missed the mark.

> If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article.

An argument for synthetic corpi (plural of corpus..esses?) - AI ingesting AI.

Commenter's doesn't live isolated only getting information from other commenters, they have lives outside of HN and use that to inform their comments.

So no, it isn't the same as AI ingesting AI content at all.

The plural is "corpora" :-)

usually the top comment these days is a diversion to push an agenda.

You can read the article after the comments.

They definitely used to be, but haven't been much good for years. At least 8 years in the case of reddit, maybe 3 in the case of hackernews.

Though at this point it's a habit I cannot quite bring myself to break...

It's worse, but there's nowhere better than here imo.

Except very niche topics maybe

I agree, they are! But reading through them, or even worse, engaging with them, is a serious energy drain.

Especially if somebody is being wrong.

Occasionally the article is wrong.

Even more occasionally commenters are too.

But extremely rare for a popular wrong comment to not have sub comments debunking them, they are much more reliable than articles therefore.

I’ve found the more I know about the topic at hand, the more wildly many of the comments seem off base, even the highly upvoted undebunked ones. Its harder for me to judge topics I don’t know much about, but I have to assume it’s something similar.

That is true for articles as well though, I find comments typically have better info than the articles. It is more likely for some of the comments to have been written by real experts than that the article is.

Yeah, but is your mission to correct anything wrong on the internet?

https://xkcd.com/386/

Sounds exhausting.

Yes, that was the joke.

Hard to tell nowdays..

Today is my first day on HN and I came here looking for the comments. I miss intelligent conversations and reasonable interactions and reddit is just a dumpster fire now (and arguably before). Even if you can find a reasonably mature sub you're still exposed to the muck raking of the front page overflowing into everywhere else.

Lmfao you forgot the fact that especially on reddit and hn people tend to say a lot of bullshit especially if it goes hand in hand with their biases

So do the writers of the articles, however, with them I cannot interact.

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