Comment by georgeck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgeck | Hacker News Reader

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When people hear about AI summaries, this is what comes to mind. And I understand their concern. Wouldn’t a summary strip away the essence of a conversation? Let me explain with an analogy. When we’re overwhelmed with information, we benefit from a system that organizes it. For instance, I might use a tool to declutter my desktop files and categorize them into logical groups. Once the categorization is complete, I can view these clusters and focus on the specific files within those clusters that pique my interest. However, if the summarization process also alters the files, I wouldn’t want to use that tool.

In the context of HN Companion, our objective is to examine lengthy threads and group them into 3 to 4 topics. Within each topic, we present the actual discussion that represents that cluster. We invested significant effort in developing a system that enables you to not only read the actual comments but also seamlessly jump to that discussion and continue the conversation there.

I encourage you to explore a few of the summaries in the app. I’d greatly appreciate your feedback on how we can enhance our service.

> When we’re overwhelmed with information, we benefit from a system that organizes it.

That may be true for something like a HUD or where we're really overwhelmed with info that is fast and reaction time is paramount.

But you can read a hackernews thread one line at a line and never get overwhelmed, right? I literally have never felt overwhelmed looking at the threads (which are also organized into local groups already etc).

I read it for pleasure and engagement, it's not something I want AI to automate away.

And when you say "continue the conversation there", do you mean use AI to write comments? If so, then this is the opposite of what makes HN HN.

Let's look at an example post in HN Companion. This is the post on singularity in the home page right now:

https://app.hncompanion.com/item?id=46962996

This post has 500+ comments with various viewpoints and you see the summary on the right side.

You are right that most of the time threads are organized into local groups. But in the above example, there are many comments that relate to the same topic, but are not under the same parent comment. HN Companion's summary surfaces this into a topic "Limitations of Current AI Models" which shows comments from up and down the post.

You can click on the author name in that topic in the summary panel, it will take you directly to the comment. This is what we meant by "continue the conversation there", i.e you are now in the main HN experience, so you can navigate to child/parent/sibling comments (through the link buttons or keyboard navigation).

We definitely don't want AI to write comments. Happy to elaborate if you need.

Honestly, after checking out the link, seems like something I'll personally never use/want.

I'm okay with crawling through comments and taking in the various viewpoints instead of having an LLM summarize it for me.

It basically kills the entire tone/vibe of the place and makes everything seem like robot-written with no personality. Also it's kind of weird you're taking other people's words and then reframing it for them/others.

Also nowhere does that thread seem to be "overwhelming with information" like you originally claimed. Basically solving a non-problem.

Fair enough. I completely understand that the experience and hunting for gems in the comments is the core appeal of HN for many and AI summaries definitely aren't for everyone.

That said, we are seeing a consistent daily user base who do find value in the summarization, so it seems to be solving a pain point for a specific segment of readers, even if not for all.

Apart from the AI features, we actually built HN Companion as a general power-user client. It supports keyboard-first navigation (vim-style J/K bindings for comment navigation), seeing context for parent/child comments without losing your place, and tracking specific authors across a thread.

You might find those utility features useful even if you ignore the summary sidebar entirely. In the browser extension, the summary panel is something the user have to activate - it doesn't show-up by default.

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