Ask dang: How many HN comments per day do you read? - andreygrehov
======
crusso
While we're at it - thanks, Dang. You do a lot of hard work keeping HN a place
worth visiting. I even appreciated the time or two you corrected me
personally.

The comments sections of most online forums are about useless and I know that
places like HN don't stay this way by accident.

~~~
thucydides
The quality of the comments here is so high that I often preface my Google
searches with "site:news.ycombinator.com" when I'm researching technical
stuff.

------
dang
I'm not sure. Probably a few hundred.

~~~
ethbro
Do you feel reading that many random comments has an impact on you? Hopefully
we keep the experience net positive.

~~~
dang
Yes, because the comments I read are not random: they're disproportionately
problematic. That skews my view in an unfortunate direction.

~~~
ethbro
Understandable; that was unfortunately my experience with volunteer community
moderating.

You should add a script that gives you a random highly-voted comment with
positive language to your toolbox. In the interest of balance and sanity.

PS: Thank you for all you do for this community. You encourage our aspirations
to be more civil humans.

------
maxxxxx
I sometimes read only the comments and not the article. I think that's a bad
thing :-(

~~~
jeffwass
I do that too at times.

Sometimes I'm more interested in the tech scene's opinion on an article than
the actual article itself.

Other times, if an article is excessively long, or is a video, I look for
someone that summarised the gist.

On that note - am I the only one who would prefer to read transcripts of
videos than watch videos themselves? Specifically news sites that only have
the video report and not any accompanying text.

~~~
nibs
I would like this too - I can read way faster than I can listen. Listening is
awful.

------
jnpatel
also: do you use any special tools to help monitor comments, or just
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments)
?

~~~
dang
Lots of special tools. I'm working on revising them so we can open-source the
parts that are useful for general reading.

Right now it's a Chrome extension, but I'd love to serve it as plain JS.
Anybody know if you can give a web app privileges to open and close tabs
without making it a browser extension?

(Don't worry, btw; if we ever publish this it will be entirely opt-in.)

~~~
zuck9
You can open tabs using `var w = window.open()`, and close them using
`w.close()`

Only thing is users must disable popup blocking for HN, in the unlikely case
that you want to open more than 2 links at once, or open links when the user
doesn't click something (like onload).

~~~
dang
That sounds promising. Is it possible to send messages between the tabs? My
Chrome extension does that like crazy.

Forgive me for hijacking this thread into technical support territory, but
I've found documentation on this stuff hard to come by.

~~~
pcmaffey
>Is it possible to send messages between the tabs?

Save objects to local storage:

localStorage.name = "dang";

alert(localStorage.name);

~~~
jakub_g
yes, the localstorage is the way to go

You save stuff to localstorage in one tab, and in other tab you listen to
"storage" event:

    
    
        window.addEventListener('storage', function() {..})
    

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Storage...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Storage_API/Using_the_Web_Storage_API)

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Events/storage](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/Events/storage)

Another option is shared web workers, though I never used it.

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12107424/communication-
be...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12107424/communication-between-
browser-tab)

[3] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/SharedWorke...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/SharedWorker)

I confused things in my other comment (I deleted it)

------
Reedx
A _lot_.

I actually optimize for the comments, heh. I open HN links in new tabs and
then wait a day or two for the discussion to complete before reading through
them. So I don't end up refreshing for new comments or re-reading the same
ones.

There are a couple downsides to this though: One, I generally miss the window
for participation. Two, my browser is perpetually filled with dozens of HN
tabs.

~~~
Kiro
Good comment but I think you missed an important part of the question. Unless
you're dang's alt account.

~~~
sdegutis
I don't know who dang is, and I don't go on HN enough for it to really matter
to me. I'm not really part of the HN culture, I just come here for the
occasional new software that might be of interest to me. It's likely there's a
lot of people in the same boat including the person you responded to.

~~~
joemi
Not sure why your comment's light grey, but dang is... a/the moderator or the
guy who runs HN or? I know it's something like that, and I just tried to look
it up so I could tell you definitively, but I can't seem to find it stated
explicitly anywhere here. Seems fair that a casual site user wouldn't know, if
I'm not even entirely certain, and I'm on here every day.

edit: OK, I found [https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-
hac...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news)
which says he's "in charge of the HN community". (I kind of wish I didn't have
to turn to a 2 year old blog post to see that stated.)

------
lexhaynes
I often read the comments first, and then read the article. I love comments
sections in general (Gawker, Gothamist, NYT come to mind in terms of decent
commenters), but I've never learned as much as in the HN comments section.

I probably read ~500 comments a day on HN.

------
CM30
Depends if anything controversial has been posted that day. Some topics I read
get hundreds of comments, some get about 3. So I guess it depends on whether
there's a political war going on or some giant controversy in internet land,
or whether anyone's staying reasonable for a few days or so.

------
probinso
O(n)

------
CaiGengYang
Depends on my mood ... probably about 10 per day

------
askafriend
Millions, or so it feels that way.

------
tgb
He reads only one HN comment per day, but it is always the correct one.

~~~
dang
A 'best of the day' feature has been on our minds for a long time. We really
need a way to collect the amazing stuff this community produces.

~~~
cperciva
This is something (perhaps the _only_ thing) I miss here which reddit has:
/r/bestof. Comments, no matter how good, never end up on /news and so anyone
who isn't reading the rest of the discussion in question will never see them.

Come to think of it, is there any _technical_ limitation on having comments
submitted as stories? Maybe it's just a cultural issue (i.e., there is no
culture of submitting comments as stories here).

~~~
s-phi-nl
I trust you are aware of
[http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments](http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments)
?

~~~
alister
Is it possible to implement features similar to the above without being a
ycombinator insider? Since upvotes aren't visible on comments, other than
comments you made yourself, how could you calculate it? (Are the upvotes on
comments available through an API for example?)

------
smeyer
From the guidelines:

>Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions
about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to
say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

This may not specifically fall in that category, but you may still want to
email if you don't get your answer here.

~~~
dang
Come now, let's not punish smeyer for a good-faith comment, even if people did
turn out to like this thread.

~~~
rquantz
Is it good faith? It comes off as either pedantic or trolling to my eyes.

~~~
libeclipse
See why is this downvoted? This is what causes self-censorship guys. It's a
valid opinion.

------
anon987
Less and less.

Too often comment chains devolve into nitpicking, pedantry, and into off-topic
discussion where two people fight tooth and nail for Internet Points.

From a technical perspective I get little or nothing from them, and from a
discussion standpoint there's little reason for me to spend my time watching
people nitpick each other over things that nobody in the community cares
about.

~~~
ep103
I get the distinct feeling we're getting more and more of reddit's overflow.
If anyone knows any other websites like, HN, I'd love to hear about them.

~~~
kbart
I'm here for almost 4 years now, and I see this comment probably once a month.
For such large and diverse community as HN, it is doing exceptionally well.

