This almost feels like voting based off the results of voting. Read the article, if you find it interesting, up vote. It seems like a pretty simple system. I don't think that other people's comments should play a part in determining whether I feel a story is interesting, but that is the great thing about a vote. You get to determine the criteria for distributing it.
Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#22http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#23I don't see a problem with this - this is a classic problem with systems where people can vote - it becomes a popularity contest, almost by definition.
So all it really is is a popularity contest, it has nothing to do with validity or value...
(insert some political rage about politicians not being leaders her)
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#24How about not upvoting the article if you haven't read it and verifying its sources? Reading the comments, specifically, has little to do with it.
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#25You're assuming that I am not capable of making my own judgement on how credible it sounds. For example, I just upvoted the Bad Astronomy takedown of that article based entirely on reading the first page - I think it should be upvoted independent of what other people think. Now, sometimes I will check the comments before upvoting. But not always.
The important thing is not what the other people think, but what information the other people add. In that article, some of the first comments were something like: "The authors published recently another paper [link 1] that bas soon debunked [link 2]." That is information that is interesting to judge the plausibility of the new claims, and that information is not present in the original article.
Sometimes the post is very clear and came from a credible source. But in the other case, it's better to read the post and read the information/links provided in the comments and then make your own opinion.
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#26Of course I had to read all the comments here before deciding whether or not to upvote this submission.
I didn't think the story you mention needed an upvote (it was getting plenty), but I also didn't think it deserved a flag, because the story source is (usually) a reliable source, and the story itself had some balance. I thought the best response to that story was to look up some other information on the same topic and to post that in a comment, and to upvote all of the other comments that were well informed about the topic. (I try to upvote every good comment I find in any thread. The single best way we can improve the quality of HN is by upvoting the good stuff more.)
Because I have read all the comments that were here as I posted this comment, I should perhaps respectfully disagree with some of the ideas expressed in the comments. I asked once soon after I joined HN (probably about early 2009) whether stories should be submitted for disagreement. The consensus then was NO, if a submitter of a story thinks the story is dubious, the story shouldn't be submitted at all. Submitting a story is an endorsement of some aspect of the story's content and its treatment of the topic. I flag stories that are low-quality stories. In my experience, such stories rarely produce good threads of comments. (As above, I thought the story asked about in this thread was good enough to discuss, coming from a reliable source, and I discussed it.)
Other participants here on HN have over the years identified a set of sources that consistently produces lousy stories that generate low-quality discussions. Those are press-release aggregation sites that are just part of the science hype cycle.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174
PhysOrg appears to have been banned as a site to submit from by Reddit. ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. I learned from other participants here on HN that there are better sites to submit from.
Comments about PhysOrg:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869
"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249
"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/ (press release),
http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/ (video),
http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien... (paper).
"PhysOrg: just say no."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888
"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857
"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."
Comments about ScienceDaily:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206
"Blogspam.
"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):
http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...
"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...
"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:
http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603
"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.
" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."
Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185
"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529
"Original source:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...
"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).
"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361
"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766
"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.
"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#27You're assuming that I am not capable of making my own judgement on how credible it sounds. For example, I just upvoted the Bad Astronomy takedown of that article based entirely on reading the first page - I think it should be upvoted independent of what other people think. Now, sometimes I will check the comments before upvoting. But not always.
The important thing is not what the other people think, but what information the other people add. In that article, some of the first comments were something like: "The authors published recently another paper [link 1] that bas soon debunked [link 2]." That is information that is interesting to judge the plausibility of the new claims, and that information is not present in the original article. Sometimes the post is…
We are in violent agreement on your second paragraph - my point was that sometimes I will check the comments before upvoting, if I think the submission smells fishy. But I'm not going to follow a "always check comments first" rule, and nor do I think everyone else should.
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#28Downvote this story. The discussion shows that it was wrong to post it.
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#29http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
How is this germane?
Re: Ask HN: Please don't upvote stories before reading the comments
#30When I upvote something I'm just giving my approval for the content being on the front page, it doesn't mean I believe or agree with what is written. I missed that submission but if I had seen it and the comments were good, that would be a reason I would upvote it. Even if I agreed that the article was bogus. P.S. I just upvoted this even though I disagree with you ;)
Me too, It's nice to have a good skeptical vetting filter. Some of the best discussions I've seen are cases where the OP's link (or the subject of) was eviscerated by commenters here. Maybe I am doing it wrong, but I don't equate the upvote to friendface's "like" button. I often upvote replies with which I disagree as a show of appreciation for a good discussion. I also don't put a lot of stock in the top post. There are a few commenters here who have a knack for getting their comment to the top of the page, often by making a contentious almost trollish post and then I guess, getting the benefit of the shitstorm that follows in the replies to their post.