Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

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> Summaries are subjective

Yes, so what? The comments on a submission are subjective too.

I still don't know who you think the "bad actors", "charlatans", and "sophists" are, how they can "invisibly rewrite history", or what you think "gamed" means, aside from getting people to click the submitted link.

The entire point of my proposal is simply that a summary of the article, longer than the article title but still relatively brief, can frequently be a better guide than the article title alone as to whether the article is worth reading. That's it. So the histrionics about rewriting history and such just seem bizarre and inexplicable to me.

> the objective nature of the original content

Objective in what way? The submitted article may itself be an opinion piece, and often is.

Anyway, nobody would be stopping you from reading the article. Quite the opposite: the point of the summary is to explain why you should read the article yourself!

Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966 The article title is "What could have been". The article title is so extremely vague as to be useless. I have no clue what it's supposed to be about.

By presenting the summary at all, it is presumed to be accurate by good faith readers, but bad faith summarizers will take advantage of this knowledge gap to invisibly rewrite history, that is, they will present the summary as accurate and not tell you that they’re selective with the truth. The fact of the matter is the original content says what it says. Any summary is inherently subjective in comparison to the objective reality of what OP wrote when they wrote it. In this way, subjective summaries of the objective reality of the original subjective statements by OP have extra subjectivity due to the summarization. It has nothing to do with whether or not OP was making objective statements themselves, though that is also a factor in how much objectivity the summary can work with, but that is kind of a side point and not related to my original comment.

You're practically making this into a life or death issue, when in fact the issue is relatively trivial: should I bother to read the submitted article or not?

When a HN user submits an article link, the intention is that people will click the link and read the article. A "bad faith summarizer" is just shooting themselves in the foot, because if the summary inspires people to read the article, then they'll immediately discover that the summary was bad. So what's the point of the bad faith summary? Your hypothetical scenario doesn't even make sense. The URL is still there. The article title is still there. Everything that's available now would still be available.

Moreover, there's nothing now stopping any commenter on a submission from giving a bad faith summary of the article.

It's just like the TV guide. You've got a long list of channels, and you've got a bunch of show names, but you don't necessarily know what the show is about, whether it's worth watching, so you read the summary. Are you going to complain about the existence of the TV guide, because it's "subjective"? Hacker News is more or less entertainment, although this conversation is not very entertaining and getting less so as it goes on.

>The entire point of my proposal is simply that a summary of the article, longer than the article title but still relatively brief, can frequently be a better guide than the article title alone as to whether the article is worth reading. That's it.

Here's the line in the guidelines that seems to be eluding you in this whole discussion:

>It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

The fact that an article has been submitted is the "better guide" the site uses to indicate "whether the article is worth reading." Tomhow's comment says why HN has not seen this to be something that should change.

It's implicit that the submitter of an article thinks it's worth reading. It's not implicit that other HN users think it's worth reading. Again, HN receives a new submission every few minutes. Not every article is worth our time; there's not enough time even if they were.

Thus, the point of the summary is for the submitter to explain to other users why the article is worth reading. Moreover, HN submissions are on a very broad range of topics, so even if an article is worth reading on a specific topic, readers are not interested in every topic. Some article titles are so vague that you can't even discern the topic!

>It's implicit that the submitter of an article thinks it's worth reading. It's not implicit that other HN users think it's worth reading.

This is what tptacek was noting in the search results he posted: Dang has made clear that HN is okay with having its readers "work a little."

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