Hacker News Reader

I need to get in the habit of reading HN comments before I click the links to read articles like this.

They shouldn't be able to make money off of pushing crap like this, but with every click they do.

Sometimes I have a tendency to read the top comment before clicking on links. Most of the time the top comment is a contrarian comment if it's a news article or blog post. So that makes me view the article in a different way, which can be good but might also be a self-fulfilling prophecy that causes me not to form my own opinion. On the other hand, regardless of what I read first I side with the HN commenter's point of view over seemingly uninformed articles.

I think we can trust HN commenters to produce a contrarian viewpoint for anything thrown their way, unfortunately.

At this point, HN might be better off without karma at all for comments, or just a "flag" like for submissions.

Be careful. Many articles submitted to HN are just fucking awful articles, and we actually want contrarian viewpoints to counter the bollocks pumped out.

Banning Techcrunch, ExtremeTech (such a terrible website full of dreadful garbage), MotherJones and so many other shitty websites would do more to help HN than any karma modifications.

No we can't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com