Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429802

by shafqat • 18 years ago

71 86 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

joshu• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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.

DTrejo2• 18 years ago

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.

carlosrr• 18 years ago

I thought something similar when reading this thread and thought it would make a nice bookmarklet.

http://code.cohitre.com/snippets/hackernews.html

It opens the comments and original article in side by side iframes for easy previewing.

shutter• 18 years ago

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.)

pg2• 18 years ago

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.

shafqat• 18 years ago

I guess it's a good method of second-level quality control. The fact that its on HN is usually a good primary check, so supplement that with good comments and the resulting link is usually a great read.

timr• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

> 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.

staunch• 18 years ago

I think I do the opposite. If it sounds like it's going to be ridiculous/controversial/unusual I like to read it myself first and see what my unbiased thoughts are. If it sounds like something easy to agree with I usually just want to see if anyone has a unique perspective on it.

DaniFong• 18 years ago

That pretty much describes what I do, yes.

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

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

revorad• 18 years ago

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.

vaksel• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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

The_Sponge• 18 years ago

The RSS feed directs me directly to the link.

dpifke• 18 years ago

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.

timcederman• 18 years ago

The RSS feed also has links to the comments.

transburgh• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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

russell• 18 years ago

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.

BigZaphod• 18 years ago

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

wd40• 18 years ago

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

rgrieselhuber• 18 years ago

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.

jayair• 18 years ago

Always, HN comments are my filter.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

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.

epi0Bauqu• 18 years ago

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

sachinag• 18 years ago

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.

jasonlbaptiste• 18 years ago

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.

jyothi• 18 years ago

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.

endlessvoid94• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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

lacker• 18 years ago

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.

pg2• 18 years ago

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.

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

I think it's fine as is. I often scan the comments (not just reading the first one). I'd bet most of the comment readers do the same.

reitzensteinm• 18 years ago

One feature I've always liked is when forums set the mouse over text to display the first n lines of the post. Makes it much faster to figure out if you want to read a topic if the title doesn't contain enough information. Also doesn't clutter the display of the page, because visually it's no different. Of course, given that editors can edit the titles of submissions on HN this is less of a problem.

awt• 18 years ago

I too check the comments on suspiciously titled stories. I think it would be a worthy experiment to try to label linkbait.

I find I often check the comments for stories first if I think the article might be long (from a magazine site like The Economist), if I can't figure out what it is about from the title, or if a title is designed to be a hook -- i.e. it leaves out information intentionally to make you curious.

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

Well, if you show enough of the comments to be useful, then the front page will be really long and cluttered. If you only show the first 100ish chars like gmail does, then it probably won't be enough to be useful, since HN comments tend to be long and well written.

So I guess I'm trying to say I like it the way it is. It would take just as long to read mouseover/preview text as it does to open the comments in a new tab and scan them.

rms• 18 years ago

I just read the new comments page.

blasdel• 18 years ago

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.

iigs• 18 years ago

I'd actually like to try that -- maybe the first paragraph or so included.

The value of the clean look (to me) is only it's service in providing easy access to the information, and I think leading comment blurbs might be a big win in that regard.

From the mobile PoV it saves having to click (and suffer a mobile experience http+render round trip) on each interesting sounding link to get more information (wherein I might decide the thread wasn't worth it, or the title was too vague and I've already read the comments before).

jmtulloss• 18 years ago

You could compromise and just add an expander to each story. If a user is suspicious of the story, they can expand the first couple comments and see what people are saying without going to a new page.

IsaacSchlueter• 18 years ago

At the very least, it would be nice if the "n comments" link were a little bigger and easier to click. I think that would greatly improve the comment-reading, without cluttering up the display too much.

AndrewDucker• 18 years ago

I read from the RSS feed - and I was rather surprised that the main link leads to the other site, and not HN. My main habit with RSS is to go through a feed, opening the interesting links in new tabs, and then read them - I keep forgetting and ending up with a bunch of links rather than the HN comments!

Angostura• 18 years ago

I would argue that people often read the comments because the headline-only format of YC leaves them guessing what the article is actually about.

If you are considering putting the leading comment text up there, please consider getting submitters to include a one sentence summary of the article instead.

Goladus2• 18 years ago

That would be interesting, although in addition to clutter it will give the highest-ranked comment even more weight than it has already. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I click comments first because I know what I'm going to get, vs. clicking on a link that might not even finish loading before I get back to work. As far as that goes, having a preview wouldn't change much.

Harkins• 18 years ago

Any time you're surprised at how often people read the comments, go read a few YouTube comments.

I like that I can be wrong or disagreeable here without getting called names. And that folks who know way more than me will show up and say stuff on the topics I'm curious about.

zepolen• 18 years ago

There is another problem, you can't really go to the comments /after/ going to the article, but you can go to the article after the comments.

Unless you add a toolbar option like reddit has.

presty• 18 years ago

I usually read the comments because I'm slashdot-hooked. One /. meme is to not RTFA. :p

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

Leading comment as a tooltip?

pasbesoin• 18 years ago

Paul,

I'd like some (low-key) visual indication for the text of "comments" links that I've already visited, as a reminder that I've already looked at the comments.

Although with the HN page's clean design, I'm not imagining right now what specifically would fit unobtrusively.

With HN, my memory is better as to what I've examined. Actually, I've commented on reddit a time or two on the desirability of this feature. There's so much clutter over there these days, that I'd like a reminder for those links where I examined the comments and decided to go no further.

kirubakaran2• 18 years ago

> 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.

This is a great idea.

Also, it will help if we can see the sum of comment points on the front page.

  1. Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors (mitre.org)
     14 points by petercooper 1 hour ago | 10 comments [20 points] <<<<<

Comment link can be bigger.

dfranke• 18 years ago

/. uses tagging for this and I think it works well.

anamax• 18 years ago

I'd like to see the plus and minus votes (or the total number of votes), not just the sum. There's a huge difference between an article/comment that only 3 people voted on vs an article that 103 people voted on.

kirubakaran2• 18 years ago

Of course! Always actually.

Even crap articles have good comment threads.

I wish the comment links were more prominent.

hs• 18 years ago

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)

tptacek• 18 years ago

50/50.

alecco2• 18 years ago

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• 18 years ago

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.

diN0bot• 18 years ago

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".

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

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.

alecco2• 18 years ago

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.)

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

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.

ambition• 18 years ago

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.

dc2k08• 18 years ago

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

jrp• 18 years ago

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>.

fub4r• 18 years ago

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.

ratsbane2• 18 years ago

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?

DTrejo2• 18 years ago

Let us know.

ratsbane2• 18 years ago

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

poub• 18 years ago

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

ashleyw• 18 years ago

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.

narag• 18 years ago

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.

c1sc0• 18 years ago

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.

known2• 18 years ago

The quality of comments are excellent in HN and Slashdot.

whatusername• 18 years ago

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

known2• 18 years ago

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

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

nihilocrat• 18 years ago

On Slashdot, I find that the comments often immediately debunk the article or point out some glaring flaw in the headline / post. I'm so used to this that I'd rather be let down by someone telling me that the article is bogus up front, than to get pumped up about it reading the article then read the comment that debunks it.

almost• 18 years ago

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

atog• 18 years ago

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

Goladus2• 18 years ago

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

dominik• 18 years ago

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

cpach• 18 years ago

This is my default mode when reading HN.

xenophanes• 18 years ago

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.

code_devil• 18 years ago

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.

matthooks• 18 years ago

I almost always check comments first.

Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?

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