I see this question asked at least once a week on reddit.
Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
41–50 of 88 posts
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#42I'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 mista…
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.
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#43All 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.
Usually I have a quick scan of the article, read the comments, then return to the article if it sounds worth reading.
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#44I'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 mista…
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.
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#45Be careful with this. You'll start out reading the comments first. Then you'll begin ignoring the links entirely and we end up at .
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#46I'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.
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#47I'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 mista…
I just read the new comments page.
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#48This 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?
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#49I'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 mista…
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.story { display:block; }
a.story:hover { text-decoration:none; background:#fff; }
Re: Ask YC: Do any of you find yourself reading comments before the actual link?
#50Yes, 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.
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.