Show HN: RTFA, a Chrome extension to hide HN comments until you read the article

I prefer the inverse. Reading the comments from an educated audience first, then diving into the article with a more firm understanding of the landscape.

Hiding the Reply links might make sense if you can't stop yourself from commenting before reading, but hiding the comments themselves doesn't make sense. I find that HN (along with LWN) is one of the few sites with high-value comments, and I often want to read the first few to get context for the article.

I prefer using the comments/discussion themselves as an indicator to whether I'll find the article a worthwhile read in the first place - how often do users actually comment/discuss an article without reading it beforehand? What's the point in that?

Usually the title of an article is a poor indication of the article's content, structure and tone. By skimming the comments I can usually get some idea of these attributes and then decide if it's an article that interests me.

Also, the HN comments often load much faster than the page itself (full of crazy JavaScript, CSS, ads, useless graphics, etc).

The people who need it the most won't use it. But you are onto something.

The next step: Get in touch with Google so that it's included into official Chrome in some way. It doesn't have to be installed by default - just a one time pop-up when a user first visits Hacker News. An offer to install it.

The next step +1: Encourage people to expand the extension to other sites. Write it in a modular way, write documentation.

One thing though, if the site's unreachable, often in the comments there's a mirror or a summary. If you can't turn the a into a:visited, you'd never get the link to show up if the site gets overloaded by the HN effect.

I don't have a preference about which one to read first, for ex. with articles like "I stopped using X and why you should stop too", I find more value in reading the comments first, because usually the top comment will be a counter-argument more worthy than the original article.

But with articles that teaches something new to me, for ex. "Scaling X to a million users", I prefer to read the article first.

This is almost ironic, since the people who install this are the ones who are conscientious enough to need it the least.

I very much prefer to first read the comments because it gives me quality data to determine whether the article is worth a read or not.

I'm looking for a tool to sort and show comments according to time. Specially for Ask HN and Show HN.

I would prefer an extension that stopped me reading the article until I had read the comments.