
Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link? - shafqat
I find the comments on HN to often be much better quality than the actual link. As a result, I've been clicking on the comments first, and then decide whether to read the full article. A somewhat strange reading habit - just wondering if others do this too?
======
pg
Sometimes. If the headline sounds preposterous, I sometimes check the comments
to see if it has been locally debunked before clicking on the link to the
article.

~~~
timr
I also do this for situations where the article sounds like fluff or link-
bait, but involves a subject where an intelligent conversation could occur
amongst smart people. There are lots of times when the comment threads are
more valuable/interesting than the links.

~~~
brandonkm
> There are lots of times when the comment threads are more
> valuable/interesting than the links.

I find this is the case most of the time here. I enjoy reading engaging
articles being 'hacked' apart.

------
pg
I'm surprised how many people read the comments first. Should I pull the
beginning of the leading comment text up onto the front page with the link,
like Gmail does with the beginning of the message body?

Or would that mess up the clean look, and fill up mobile screens too fast?
There are other possible solutions short of that. E.g. I could add a button
people can click on to say that an article is linkbait, or mistaken, or
whatever, and display icons to indicate this.

~~~
blasdel
Please make the "discuss" / "N comments" anchor have a distinguishing property
when :visited -- maybe a faint underline or weight change instead of a
different color. Currently there's no way to see that I've looked at a story
unless I visited the link.

It'd be nice to have the thread anchor target be larger, maybe by having each
story encapsulated by something like this:

    
    
      <a href="/item?=id=XXXXXX" class="story"> ... </a>
      
      a.story { display:block; }
      a.story:hover { text-decoration:none; background:#fff; }
    

That's probably incompatible with the WTF way you're using tables (TRs in flat
series for the link, byline, and spacer) -- you'd have to switch to having
each story be its own table. The result would be that the whole story's "row"
(minus the anchors inside it) would be a link to the thread.

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shutter
The _comments_ differentiate good links from bad. I rarely read a post without
checking the comments first.

(Though I do read the links before voting, of course.)

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fallentimes
Almost always. While the links are great, the discussions are what make Hacker
News.

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BigZaphod
I almost always check for comments first, actually. If they are good and
interesting, _then_ I click the link.

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joshu
Yes, frequently.

I kinda wish there was an "open in frames" option, putting both the comments
and the page in one tab. I go to reddit/hn/etc and open many links in new
tabs, then the "next" page in a tab. Then I just work through till I get to
the end and process the next page.

~~~
tdupree
joshu, you could give the greasemonkey script "HN OnePage" a try.
<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512> It may not be quite what you are
looking for, but it will let you easily view the comments/article for any
given submission. There are some other good greasemonkey scripts out there as
well, such as HN Splitview, that address this issue.

~~~
DTrejo
A split view makes one more likely to comment and upvote/flag etc because it
is right there, and no effort is necessary to navigate back to the article's
HN page.

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jayair
Always, HN comments are my filter.

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DaniFong
That pretty much describes what I do, yes.

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sachinag
As HN has grown, stuff on the homepage tends to change too frequently for me
any more. If there isn't a comment modded up to 10, I'll rarely click the
link.

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revorad
Yes, most times. Sometimes I feel that reading the comments first skews my
opinion of the article but mostly it's useful to filter out the less
interesting links.

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russell
Usually I read the comments first. if the comments are good, I'll read the
article.

If there are no or few comments, I'll read the article to see if the topic is
worth getting a discussion going. If so, I post a summary or comment to start
things off.

------
poub
Great question. I usually visit the link first then come back to the comments
on Hacker News. It’s like enjoying more seeing a movie you don’t know anything
about than reading critics first.

Reading the comments on hackerNews is the main reason I do not activate
comments on my website. For me if a discussion needs to happen, it should be
where the people found the link. So if you post your link on reddit,
HackerNews, Digg, etc. you end up having focused discussions. Each one having
a much better quality than mixing every point of view in one place (the
comment thread of the website).

Have good day. Thibault

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epi0Bauqu
About half the time on a laptop/desktop; almost all the time on mobile.

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vaksel
I usually don't even read the links. There is no sense to read a big
article...when you can get most of the story from comments...in addition to a
meaningful discussion

~~~
rw
Often, the discussion will focus on a few sticky points, and skip much of the
interesting or least-debatable content in the original article.

------
transburgh
All the time. I even tell myself to read the story first so I have a base on
what is being discussed but I always end up in the comments first.

~~~
jscn
Usually I have a quick scan of the article, read the comments, then return to
the article if it sounds worth reading.

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jyothi
Yep mostly.

1\. comments if more than 4-5 would most always reflect the thoughts and
opinions that I myself would be going through if I do read the article.

2\. Checking out comments is quicker (in terms of load time and reading time)
and less clutter on the flow as you have remained on a familiar website with
only selectively moving out to a new website or web page.

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jasonlbaptiste
all the time. i find hacker news to still be the only community that im truly
vested in, with no trolling, and overall good content.

a lot of the time i might have seen the article, but want to read the
comments, so ill come here. If i haven't read the article, ill read the
comments first if i want some backstory/alternate framing of the story.

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endlessvoid94
Yes. Actually, this is one reason I like the socialite firefox plugin for
reddit. Letting me access the comments directly from the link is exactly what
I need. Going back to the main page to find the comments link after I've read
the link is a pain in the ass.

Maybe I could hack this together for HN....

~~~
chromakode
Socialite is designed with a modular structure, making it possible to support
other sites. It would be feasible to write a Hacker News module to exist
alongside reddit support. If you'd be interested in hacking on it, I'd be
pleased to work with you.

-C

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rgrieselhuber
I do this almost all the time. So far, I've been able to trust the HN
community with filtering out dumb stories and I can decide whether it's worth
my time to read an article by the first few comments. The exception is when
the article has a known URL such as oreilly.com.

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lacker
Depends on the link. Often the title is something like "Five reasons Ruby on
Rails is dead" that just indicates what area the discussion is going to be in.
Then I'm often interested to see the discussion, but not so interested to see
the blog post itself.

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code_devil
I actually use the HN comments to get a feel of what the article is all about
and if I see a lot of +ve vibe I venture out to read the article. I also find
scanning over the comments as a way to get the gist of the article without
reading it.

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narag
When I want to read both the article and the comments, or I don't know if I
want to read the link at all (for the reasons others have said) the comments
page has the link in it, while the linked page hasn't a link to the comments.

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kirubakaran
Of course! Always actually.

Even crap articles have good comment threads.

I wish the comment links were more prominent.

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ambition
I've found the ratio #points:#comments to be very correlated with story
quality. So I'll read only the comments if #comments > #points, because that
means an interesting controversial discussion about a boring article.

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fub4r
I'm about half and half. I look for the submitter, if they usually submit good
stuff, or if I recognize the source I'll usually click straight to the
article. Otherwise I just read the comments.

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c1sc0
Almost always, the links are only an excuse for discussion, really. HN blurs
the line between social news and traditional forums, and because of the
quality of the comments that is just fine.

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xenophanes
If you click comments first, then link, even without reading the comments, now
your browser back button is more useful and you won't have to find the story
again.

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jrp
Be careful with this. You'll start out reading the comments first. Then you'll
begin ignoring the links entirely and we end up at <other news site>.

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known
The quality of comments are excellent in HN and Slashdot.

~~~
whatusername
The quality of the best comments at /. are good. The quality of the average or
mean, not so much.

~~~
known
Yes. Setting comment Threshold to 4 will fetch best comments from /.

<http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm>

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ratsbane
This postings is now showing 45 points and 45 comments. A few minutes ago it
was 44/44. I wonder - what is the significance of the comment/point ratio?

~~~
ratsbane
Now it's showing 50 points for the (parent) article and 50 comments posted...
this is very strange.

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Goladus
I sometimes read the comments first if the link looks looks like something
that will be slow to load or full of annoying advertisements.

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michaelneale
Yes - but generally only on HN due to the quality of the comments. If I was to
do it at reddit or digg, it is purely for humour value.

~~~
alecco
Funny, I became an avid /r/programming reader after reading all this
groupthink bashing. There are very valuable discussions on Reddit if you
ignore the obvious trolls and jokes.

I found Reddit's programming significantly more technical than HN, with most
people talking from experience instead of guessing. Compare recent discussions
on the same technical story on HN vs. Reddit.

Also HN gets to me because it harder to find reasonable arguments with
completely opposed views without massive up/down-votes [by the masses backing
their side]. Reddit [discussions] [often have] opposed but very insightful
comments together and both [have] hundreds of up-votes.

The traditional HN bashing of other sites lowers the discussion and actually
it's very typical of, er, Digg/Reddit (pun.)

~~~
michaelneale
programming at reddit used to be good, but the noise ratio got a bit too high
- but I should check it out again (I was specifically referring to the rest of
reddit, which is rediculous - so much so that I find it hard to take any
subreddit seriously). I am sure there is a lot of brilliance there, but who
has time for it with all the noise?

I prefer the tone of HN - there are certainly less arguments, but I don't
think that's a bad thing - there are plenty of other places on the internet to
have an argument.

There is no need for HN to become /r/programming when it already exists. HN
was previously startup news - so I guess it keeps a bit of that flavour.

I haven't really noticed any website bashing from HN.

------
ashleyw
Always; in fact I often skip articles entirely and just read HN comments, if I
already know the gist of what the article is about.

------
tptacek
50/50.

~~~
alecco
Same here, it all depends about the target domain.

For example I'd never click a Seth Godin, Zed Shaw, or any other self-
promotion writer link but the HN discussion tends to be very constructive. I
always click links to Wikipedia, New Yorker, Wired, and many other good
sources (from experience.)

Perhaps a feature could be a Agree/disagree vote for stories to distinguish
from up-voting the HN discussion.

~~~
nihaar
I agree. I use the comments thread as a secondary filter if I a. am not
already familiar with the domain of the link, b. the story has a very
sensational heading or c. feel it might a self-promoting link.

------
dominik
Almost always, as the comments let me decide whether I should bother reading
the actual link at all.

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hs
always, especially when there's 0 comment so i can be the frist!!!

just kidding, seriously, i check the people and how deep the comments' tree is
first

if it's too deep, there's high chance of two person fight or grammar nazi in
action

if it's too shallow, the article is not interesting

i like 3 levels deep (5 at most)

------
almost
Often. I also find myself waiting until articles have comments before
bothering with them.

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atog
Comments first, always. Most of the time I don't even read the article.

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wd40
yep - click on 'comments' in gReader probably 9 times out of 10.

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dc2k08
I see this question asked at least once a week on reddit.

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diN0bot
sometimes i get worried that i'm not as good at thinking for myself as i used
to be before the web2.0 "voices in my head".

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The_Sponge
The RSS feed directs me directly to the link.

~~~
dpifke
It would be nice if this were an option. I often end up making two passes at a
story, reading it first via the RSS feed and then finding it again on the home
page to read the commentary.

------
cpach
This is my default mode when reading HN.

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matthooks
I almost always check comments first.

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DanielBMarkham
Yes.

I have limited time, so I mostly browse the comments page. If there's an
interesting discussion going on somewhere, then I check out the link.

If I have more time, then I'll go to the main page and check out the articles.
If I'm bored, I'll dig through several pages of new articles and click on the
ones that I find interesting.

I want to read things that are provocative, and if people are having a good
discussion, I'll bet it's worth my time to read. The "score" of an article is
secondary.

