Ask HN: How should I read comment threads? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How should I read comment threads?

3 pointscoryfklein3 comments

Coming from Reddit, I am accustomed to being able to collapse comments to skip over lots of low-impact discussion. I haven't found a way to collapse comment threads on HN. This appears to lead to the result of having very long first-comment threads, while the ones below get less attention (and less votes).

Combine this with the fact that comment scores aren't shown, I don't have a good idea of whether the community values the bulk of the comments that appear in the first thread or not, and so I usually skip over them.

I am really enjoying the content and discussion on HN, and I'm sure that is due in part to being different from Reddit, but I'm just not sure how to use the system. Can I get any advice?

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comment scores used to be shown, but that resulted in people being influenced to vote up or down based on how many other people voted it up and down, or if someone fell below zero, they got piled on.

HN tries to encourage judging something by its content, and hence has removed or de-emphasized things that are used as proxy, such as # of points, the seniority of the user, whether user has high ave points, etc. So in some ways, you have to read through most things.

If it's up high, then that means it's a combination of being very new and it being upvoted. Generally, by the time a convo has settled, the most upvoted threads are up top.

There is a nice comment collapsing extension for Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

I tend to read HN like so: * If the article and the discussion look interesting and I'm not too familiar with the topic, I read the article, then read the discussion. I usually read the whole thing, skipping over trolls/derails. * If the article looks good but the discussion seems likely to be bad, I'll save the article for later and check the top couple comments to confirm I'm not interested. * If the article is something I've read before or know well, I'll quickly skim the discussion to see what I can learn from it. In this case I can move very quickly because I have a lot of context.

Over time I've learned to skip or pay attention to certain usernames, styles of writing and word choices which makes this all fairly quick.

That said, the best way to read, and one to which I return from time to time, is to subscribe to a "best of" digest like HN Weekly and avoid HN between issues. That way, the filter is very high-level, and you avoid ever looking at threads before they're completely settled.

My account is new but I'm a long time lurker. From personal experience it gets easier to skim over the low-impact parts after having spent some time using the site. It just happens naturally: you will soon be able to gauge a comment thread's usefulness in seconds.

To be honest I am glad the comment scores are not displayed and that there is less attention given to usernames. This prevents the hivemind-style comment ranking that is probably the single worst flaw of Reddit.

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