One of the HN rules, though, is to not accuse someone of not having read the article. Of course, few people read the articles here. (A lot of the posts are people complaining that a linked source is subscription only, then going on to comment based on the title!)
Please read the paper before you comment
261–270 of 341 posts
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.
This is exactly what I’ve noticed lately. Is it a known/named phenomenon? Do you have a reference?
Dunno if there is a name for it. See https://www.quora.com/Why-are-newspaper-headlines-written-by... (although this is incomplete; it omits the narrative pushing).
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
NRK Beta, the tech lab of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, make you take a quiz about the article before you are allowed to comment. I really like that idea.
Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them. You can create a comment section,…
> no comments posted without approval
This is a popular opinion - that there are some things that people should just not be allowed to say, anywhere, ever, and while I (sort of) understand the impetus behind it, every proposed cure is worse than the disease.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#264Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…
> Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article I WANT to read the paper. Most of the time the article gives no link to it though.
Same with articles about legislation. They rarely give the actual name or number of a bill or law.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url. In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or…
You hacked the crowd to get them to rate headlines ! Can it be monetized ?
With recent advancements in ML, a comment thread from people who don’t read TFA could be used to back-generate a plausibly looking article.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url. In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or…
Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough” topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link posts and only allow text posts.
I recall that as standard practice on Slashdot in 2000.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#267I wonder how many of the comments here right now have been written/discussed without having read the article.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#268Twitter is much worse than HN or Reddit about this. The author hits the nail on the head that Twitter in any news- or article-sharing context is about dunking on headlines. Read the headline, tweet a one-liner reply or quote.
I don't think users are entirely to blame; this is what the app incentivizes. So for Twitter I don't think there's much hope in asking people to read articles. It's like wondering why people aren't reading your 8 paragraph Instagram caption- that's not why people use the app, and the app does not encourage using it in that way.
However I do empathize with authors who dedicate years of their life on academic work, only to have someone post it to Twitter with a 1 sentence jab and that be the most common level of familiarity with the work their "readers" have.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them. You can create a comment section,…
> Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool A bit offtopic, but when YouTube first added comments, they quickly got into cesspool territory, exactly like you describe. However, these days, I find myself really enjoying YouTube comments quite often. Is this just me? Am I just watching more happy happy joy joy videos these days or did YT comments go from "the internet's awfulest" to "pretty neat" somehow…
Don’t forget countless horrific things content moderators have to read and see so that you can enjoy your experience.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> view / subscribe / communicate You can still comment and subscribe on a blog, can't you? RSS is dead is only a figure of speech. You can still have a blogroll on your site, can't you? Remember FOAF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology) My point is that we don't need to wish for a "Social network with less features". We just need to embrace technology that already exists and that has been ignored by big tec…
Totally agree, just think that we're talking about the same thing. The technology exists, but it's making it super easy to sign up for completely tech illiterate users that's the problem. I actually think tech-literacy on a wider scale is probably worse than it was 10 years ago because people stopped using the wide web and starting logging onto facebook and nothing else.
I really don't think it is a problem of "being difficult for non-techies".
I think that techies gave up on it. Even techies want to chase metrics, taking whatever shortcuts they can to build an audience, "growth hacking" and that includes playing the game by the rules of Big Tech.
As an example: I am working a lot with the blockchain/web3 community the past years and every company/project uses medium for writing their articles, have a strong Twitter presence and rely on Reddit for forum announcements. Nowadays it's getting worse that a lot of projects are adopting Discord for group chat. If even the uber-techies and supposedly defenders of decentralized are giving up on fundamentals of the web, why would the non-techies?