Hacker News Reader

Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.

An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run. That's just noise that detracts from our community.

HN isn't structured to handle programmatic participation the way Twitter/BlueSky/etc are. It maintains its distinguishing character by being a community of people talking to people instead, and it's appropriate to vote/flag in accordance with that.

View on HN

Ideally, people posting a video link will include a short summary. HN is heavily text-based and unlike text links, you can't skim/scan and decide whether it's worth to spend 10 mins. It doesn't help that most videos are pretty information-sparse and should properly be a 2-3 min read.

Anyway, I don't mind the downvotes, but it'd be nice if people started including summaries with video links.

I disagree: I think it's a decent summary and it's convenient to be able to read it inline with the rest of the discussion without having to go fiddle with some LLM.

And I don't think everyone has an LLM just sitting around that can summarize a video from a link.

Having wasted 10 minutes of my life watching the video, it's also an accurate summary - "no, shipping has not stopped completely". I would not be happy if they'd just pasted it in without checking that.

Videos that take forever to get to the point are something I find incredibly annoying. Maybe you all have a lot more time on your hands to listen to people spend 5 minutes explaining simple charts.

Better yet, let’s just add LLM summaries of all articles and links on Hacker News directly. Now I never have to read the linked article.

This seems really obvious to me but:

With a written article I can read a bit at the beginning, skim the contents and still get an idea of what it's about and decide whether I want to read more.

Videos are much more difficult to skim or glance over and the beginning is often some boring intro or music or some dudes asking each other how they've been or something equally wasteful of my time.

> Now I never have to read the linked article.

I think you’re saying this jokingly but it would be an improvement. Most people don’t read the article. This is partially laziness but also has to do with consistency: I know what a Hacker News thread will look like and how it will perform whenever I open one, whereas a lot of the submissions are from sites that are borderline unusable without an adblocker. Posting the full article in the thread would be a vast improvement, but I can’t imagine it would be feasible owing to copyright issues.

You might consider using Sponsorblock. It has a highlight feature that often allows you to jump to the main point of the video as determined by user-generated submissions.

> An HN user that shares their own summary is providing a unique perspective that only they could offer. That's a great contribution to the site that reinforces community and gets encouraged.

A user shared a link. Another user provided a summary of that link. I don’t need the second user to provide his own unique take on the link.

> An HN user that shares an LLM summary is cluttering the site with the output of a program that anybody could have run.

You could make the same argument about throwing paywalled links into the Wayback Machine. It does not add a unique perspective to the discussion and anyone could do it themselves, but those links are almost always at the top of the thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com