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Comment by m_eiman | Hacker News Reader

Having a synopsis like this in a mouseover on every article on HN would be insanely practical.

@pg: make it possible to vote for a comment to be awarded 'representative for article and comments' and show the 'best' comment as a mouseover!

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@m_eiman: and/or allow users to subscribe to other HN users' synopses, such that I would only see my favorite commenters synopsis. And why use mouse over? Simply place it to the right of the link, taking up all that space that is not being used yet; put the synopsis in a more transparent color than the other text- like the <0 down-modded comments.

Putting on the right would mean it can't be more than one line (give or take), and I think that's too short to be really useful. At least a few paragraphs are needed if the article isn't very short.

A mouseover might not be the best way, maybe a hidden div beneath the current metadata?

Ok. So the space is too short ( for a full synopsis ). But we ( as synopsis authors ) would invent shortcuts for rating and summarizing the content that would fit to the right or be truncated. And when a user clicks on comments, the full synopsis is always at the top of the comments.

And maybe the descriptors that different users would implement ( like their own tags/ratings for the content ) would become unique to that user, eventually, and have contextual meaning to that author. Each synopsis author would have their own tags that they could reuse. Only people who subscribed to that author could see their synopsis so their silly or cryptic or worthless synopsis descriptors would not clutter HN readers' experience unless they subscribed to a particular s-author ( synopsis author ).

So each user could have a customized right-hand HN site by subscribing to other synopsis authors and each synopsis author would have their own ways ( tags, most likely to start ) for communicating concise summaries/likes/dislikes of the content posted on HN.

But wouldn't a feature such as this take all the mystery out of HN headlines? Or would it add more mystery :) ?

Or would it add too much sub-culture HN? How much would be just enough? ( I hope I am not too off-topic by now )

Opinion on these synopses seems to be strongly divided. Sometimes they get lots of upvotes and "that was helpful" replies. Sometimes they get snide comments about what a waste of time they are and how their authors are just looking for cheap karma. There doesn't seem to be much correlation between which of those happens and how helpful the synopsis actually is.

I think having two different voting mechanisms would cause more confusion than the benefit would justify. What about showing the first bit of (1) the original author's text, where present, or (2) the highest-rated toplevel comment, as a mouseover? Even when the highest-rated comment isn't "representative", it probably gives some idea of what the article is about.

Having multiple voting systems would be confusing, true.

Scraping the beginning of the article wouldn't be as useful as a summary, I think. It's often just a longer version of the title.

Maybe put up a Mechanical Turk system and pay someone with too much free time a dollar to write a summary/synopsis that way? :)

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