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

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

#11

Post by russell »

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.

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

#14

Post by shafqat »

pg wrote: post #4

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.

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.

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

#15

Post by rgrieselhuber »

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.

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

#17

Post by timr »

pg wrote: post #4

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.

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.

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

#18

Post by DanielBMarkham »

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.

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

#19

Post by tdupree »

joshu wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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

#20

Post by rw »

vaksel wrote: post #8

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

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