
Do HN members read before voting? This Reddit study found their subjects didn't - Dowwie
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05267
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mehrdadn
Back in 2014, NPR did some research on why America doesn't read anymore; it
was pretty insightful: [https://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-
america-...](https://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-
anymore)

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CM30
Not surprised that most Reddit users don't read before voting. Most people in
general don't read or watch whatever they're sharing or voting on when on any
social media site, whether that's Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Reddit alike.

It's also pretty obvious if you're a webmaster whose work's been linked on one
of these sites. Note the visitor stats in Google Analytics or what not, then
note how much lower than they are than the stats for the same content on the
referring site.

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jstanley
I generally come here for the headline and the comments, and only occasionally
actually read the linked article.

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tabeth
unsurprising. HN encourages not reading by literally hiding downvoted
comments. one could argue that the votes and the ranking should not be tied,
e.g. randomize the ranking to encourage voting for more things as people are
most likely to read what's closest to the top.

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krapp
Most comments tend to be replies to other comments, in which case it seems
likely the commented never read TFA, since their intent is engaging other
users and not the content itself.

It also seems likely many, if not most, top level commenters never read TFA,
since doing so would require more effort than simply extrapolating from the
title. We can assume that to be the case if the article is behind a paywall,
or uses javascript, or prompts for ad blockers to be turned off, because we'll
get subthreads complaining about paywalls, unnecessary javascript and ad
blockers. If the article is long, or takes effort, users will also feel that
it wastes their time and ask for a tl;dr.

This seems to be a fundamental problem with maintaining quality on forums but
I have no idea how one would solve it, since you can't force people to put in
more than minimal effort.

