Ask HN: Why is it so hard to read comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is it so hard to read comments?

24 pointsk74trgn23icg411 comments

So radurls.com doesn't have comments and that's fine.

However, I clicked on their link to http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2015/03/08/startups-lets-talk-about-depression/ and let's say I read the article and now I want to read peoples' comments about the article (okay, I was going to skip the article and read the comments/[aka reviews] before investing my time in the article).

thenextweb.com provides me with little social icons to click and share the article on facebook, twitter, g+, reddit, HN, but it shows that 295 people have already done that. There are probably several lively discussions occurring out-there, somewhere. With every share, that discussion becomes further fragmented.

Rather than starting my own discussion about the article, I want to find, read, and join the conversations that are taking place and they're clearly not in the Disqus box at the bottom of the article. So... As a user, how do I do that?

I suspect you're in a minority for wanting to read all those threads together. My feeling is that people usually will only read discussions that fit their expectations.

Depending on the service, the average commenter's profile will be very different. On Facebook, it's a random man-on-the-street. On Twitter, a besserwisser posing for her own followers in cryptic abbreviations. On HN, an autist who believes he deserves to be a billionaire. On Reddit, someone who lives in a basement. On G+, either a Google employee or Linus Torvalds because nobody else uses it.

Personally, I'm firmly in the autist-with-billionaire-delusions camp.

My guess would be that they want you to share the article but not to leave their site for some other just to see the discussion. Or maybe it's just how the widget was implemented and no one gave it much of a thought.

It would be a cool browser addon or maybe a service that tracks articles online and shows you comments about it from other sites.

I also thought about this. Something like Hypothesis (chrome extension) but more focused on public commenting.

The reason why they provide icons for sharing is not to foster discussion but to generate pageviews. They probably have zero hopes for in-depth discussion but rather want their links spread to many places. Ad-driven websites work on pageviews, not community or quality.

Or, less cynically, because people want to share the article and having little icons there makes it easier.

To answer your question for this specific article: dump the url into the twitter search box(there is a lot of activity there and not a lot elsewhere).

Though in general people have selected to have such discussions off site because they want to talk with people within their chosen communities. To facilitate this it is not always in the best interest of the network to invite outsiders into the discussion.

Just look at Twitter for an example of what happens when you don't do anything to insulate communities from outsiders. If you post an article to have a conversation with people in your network, an influx of outside voices can just show up and make that extremely difficult or unpleasant.

> Though in general people have selected to have such discussions off site because they want to talk with people within their chosen communities.

This, in a nutshell, is why the tech utopia that we imagined in the 80s never materialized. We thought that democratized publishing and having access to all information would make everyone better informed and politics would function better. But instead we just getting virtual tribes warring with one another at the edges.

If you figure out a way to mix facebook discussions with HN discussions I will actively avoid your "solution" like the plague.

I'm on HN solely for the comments, and it's an oasis of intelligence in a vast, arid desert.

What I would do is search reddit for the article URL, if there have not been any submitted yet, then I would submit it to the appropriate subreddit and hope a discussion forms.

Unfortunately, with the way reddit works a lot of times this fails for larger subreddits, because your submission gets burried, but it works just fine with smaller subreddits.

I've been using the bookmarklet from here for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8583275

Basically when there is an article I get to from elsewhere and I want to check if there are HN comments I simply click it and it takes me straight there.

Seekr[0] was posted to HN 2 months ago. It is described as a Reverse Search Chrome Extension, and it supports Reddit / Hackernews / Twitter / Facebook / Google+ Discussions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8854712

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