Ask HN: Have you commented on HN about a court decision without reading it? Why?

[dpifke]

Inspired by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32876982

I'm curious how many people actually take the time to read primary source material—not just news articles about it—before writing a comment here.

In this case, the decision is long—113 pages!—so I can understand why someone wouldn't have read it in its entirety. But if someone doesn't have the time to read the decision, I don't understand why they think they're qualified to opine about it here, and why they think its fair to make other participants in the discussion waste time wading through their uninformed speculation. It's akin to writing a review of a film you've never seen and have no intention of seeing.

Is there something HN could do to discourage this?

(One idea that comes to mind would be banning news articles about court cases in which the article does not link to the actual text of the decision.)

[codingdave]

How many people here would be able to fully digest a 113 page legal decision even if they did read it? There are some lawyers here. But most people are not. It is not reasonable to tell people there is a barrier to commenting unless they are fully educated in all details of the topic. It is probably better to see what people have to say, and point them to clarifying information if you see them speaking from incorrect information. You also always have the downvote option, and even the option to flag if comments are particularly problematic.

That being said, I find it particularly ironic that in the context of this specific court case, your suggested fix to the problem is to ban certain content.

[peyton → codingdave]

Rulings are written to be digestible by the public. The public must be confident the judicial system gets things right.

[bjourne]

Comments are ranked based on the number of upvotes they receive and when they were posted. This unfortunately means that the first comments posted have a tendency to receive upvotes and down out all others even if they are completely wrong. HN could alleviate that effect by rewarding more recently posted comments more. After all, if an article takes 30 minutes to read, the comments posted in the first 30 minutes are probably not very useful.

[fragmede → bjourne]

I've noticed that HN tries to fight this by putting new comments at the top for some users, in order to see if a particular comment would garner upvotes if it were also posted earlier.

[beerandt → bjourne]

Just because a post (on HN) is new, doesn't mean the linked article is new.

And especially for mid to high profile court cases, there are likely hundreds to thousands of people that will read the opinion before a reporter is able to get to the first news story about it pushed.

[brudgers]

Is there something HN could do to discourage this?

User flagging of articles is the existing mechanism.

It works pretty well unless, perhaps ironically in regard to the Fifth Circuit ruling, the moderators deliberately disable flags to allow the submission leeway.

Or unless users who dislike that sort of thread don’t flag it.

As an aside, a few years ago during the political silly season, HN tried banning political articles completely.

That lasted less than a week.

Anyway, the nature of that type of topic is to spark dumpster fires in the comments.

The simplest thing that might solve your immediate displeasure is avoiding the temptation to walk down the alley.

Good luck.

[fragmede]

> It's akin to writing a review of a film you've never seen and have no intention of seeing.

Even without seeing the movie, if comment A says the director X has a history of doing Y, someone who's not seen the film can still talk to director X's history with Y.

To discourage this, HN could provide a more complex rating system than simple up and down, like /. has. Then you could hide all comments rated "uninformed speculation".

Reading the primary source material itself isn't some back door to being insightful, either. See comments about the new California law regulating the Internet for minors. A charitable read of the words in the law sound fine. Unfortunately, that charitable reading isn't how the courts are going to approach the issue, so comments taking that charitable take aren't really worth reading either.

[tarakat]

Perhaps they've read a summary of the decision that they trust?

Also, the decision is based on a single-paragraph long part of the constitution. I tentatively disagree with the decision*, consider this hypothetical: a one-thousand page long decision that ruled the government was allowed to censor all anti-war speech, based on the 1st Amendment.

It would be bizarre to expect only people that read through the whole thousand pages to comment on such an on-it's-face misguided decision.

*But I don't consider it entirely unreasonable, and I think the law behind it addresses a very real problem that we shouldn't ignore by sticking our heads in the sand and yelling "1st amendment".

[peyton → tarakat]

> Also, the decision is based on a single-paragraph long part of the constitution.

I mean, if you read the ruling, it’s based on a bunch of stuff. Your comment seems to me like a case in point—correct me if I’m misunderstanding your point.

[tarakat → peyton]

I didn't mean to imply that was the only thing it was based on. But it is the main thing placing limits on laws such as this.

[m1gu3l]

A lot of people are more interested in processing their feelings via commenting, and the dopamine hits that come with it, more than reading/listening/thinking about anything external to this process.

[Bostonian]

It's my impression that few people who commented on the Supreme Court Dobbs abortion decision, especially those critical of the outcome, read Alito's majority opinion. They objected to the the result -- that states would be able to ban abortion -- and were not interested in the majority's reasoning.

[bombcar → Bostonian]

It’s doubly sad because Supreme Court decisions are exceptionally easy to read. You may not be able to get all the legal references but you’ll be able to at least describe the arguments, if not steelman them.

But the reality is nobody really cares (and perhaps never really cared) as the outcome matters most and justifies anything.

[beerandt → bombcar]

I read most SCOTUS opinions, and even relative to them I found this 5th circuit opinion to be an easy read.

Which also makes it even more obvious who has or hasn't read it, or even the first few pages.

[remarkEon → beerandt]

I set aside time every summer starting in June for SCOTUS season, and read the cases themselves. This last season in particular was the worst for journalists violating my rule about primary sources: if the actual opinion isn’t linked, the journalist is pushing an angle. And boy were there’s angles pushed. It’s unfortunate because beyond the opinions themselves you can actually go listen to oral argument at Oyez. They even sync up the transcript with the audio.

[muzani]

I don't expect anyone to read the whole thing. But samples are good enough. If everyone hops around the document, someone is bound to find something interesting.

They can post snippets of particularly interesting parts. If out of context, other people can also post other interesting snippets that counter it.

[iudqnolq]

I read court decisions, but only as a way to idly pass the time. I don't meaningfully understand them.

I agree HN is too quick to discuss things they don't understand, but wouldn't consider this a significant portion of that problem.

[paulcole]

I don’t read any post I comment on, including this one.