To make matters worse, I frequently see people who say they come to HN because of the quality comments. There's a Dunning-Kruger effect happening, where people don't read the submissions, so they don't know that people aren't reading the submissions, so people think they're becoming more informed by reading the comments when in fact the comments are just as uninformed as they are. There are exceptions of course, but they are becoming more and more exceptions, when they would ideally be the rule.
I think we can do better.
The commenting guidelines say:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
While it certainly avoids some conflict, I am beginning to see some benefit to this sort of conflict, if it pushes people to actually read things before they opine, instead of just sharing uninformed opinions.
Are there any other ideas for what could be done about this?
> when in fact the comments are just as uninformed as they are
What's your basis for this?
(As a small practical suggestion towards your goal, don't allow paywalled stuff to be linked, or stuff that involves to much nonsense before being able read it).
It can also be interesting to see discussions deviate from the exact topic of the article. I enjoy reading personal anecdotes and related information (with sources).
How could you even enforce reading the article before commenting? People could have skimmed it, misinterpreted it, intentionally disagree with it.
Have you seen the comment sections on the rest of the internet? Youtube, Twitter, Reddit.... I think we're relatively informed here
A user would need to answer all of them correctly before being able to comment. An incorrect answer would add a delay of ~1h before they can comment (without needing to do the quiz again).
Even though it’s fairly easy to cheat or work around, it might be enough to tilt the incentives towards just reading or at least skimming the article.
I always browse HN by the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest link, so I get the latest articles at the top. Every time there's a story of note afoot, it shows up numerous times in the submissions. I've seen the same news story submitted up to a dozen times in the space of a few hours.
If the HN site isn't capable of flagging up the fact that an article someone is about to submit has already been submitted by several other people; and if people are too lazy [or too desperate to earn upvotes] to bother to check whether a story has already been submitted, before submitting it themselves; then I think expecting them to hold back on commenting til they've read an article is extremely optimistic.
PS: Hope this reply is relevant. I couldn't be bothered reading what you wrote, before responding. :-)
For example, someone recently brought up that the solution model in the article is unfair, but misunderstood it. I quoted the part of the article where the author put in his definition, and the Wikipedia article on how this problem is fixed. It's a quick conversation that solves a common misconception, but someone has to raise their hand and bring up the misconception.
One problem is that a lot of people do read the article, but misunderstand it. The better and more information dense it is, the more people don't get it, even after reading it. So simply asking people to read it first might not solve the problem. HN is a good place to "raise your hand" on difficult reading material.
The problem is that people commented without knowing what the fuck they're talking about.
I just replied to a comment on the HAProxy 2.2 release. I haven't read the article yet, what I commented isn't related to changes in 2.2 - I was able to comment in a meaningful way (i.e. it's an opinion but it's an informed opinion) because of previous experience and knowledge of the topic.
As with many problems, better "voting" of comments would likely solve this.
If HN adopted reasoned voting (i.e. not just down votes, which lead to an echo chamber of whatever koolaid is flavour of the week) you could easily have a "Incorrect" or "Hasn't read TFA" downvote 'reason'.
Combine that with better handling of downvoted comments (i.e. don't just fade them to oblivion, due the aforementioned koolaid circle jerk) and I believe people would use the voting system more effectively.
Right now I simply refuse to downvote any comment, because it's just completely broken (and yet "working as intended" according to the PTB).
Well that's hardly news; and it applies to pretty much all text both online and offline. If you really want someone to comment on what you think is the main point of a submission write an executive summary and do an Ask HN instead.
Do the summarizing work once instead of expecting ten thousand people to do it.
I don't believe there is technical solution to this, all feasible solutions are likely social, and have diminishing returns over time. Donwvote poor comments, upvote good comments. Correct misinformed commenters as civilly possible, and know when to disengage from toxic threads and people. The culture has to encourage engagement the way that it does civility, or seriousness.
People that comment without reading the article or maybe even without clicking into it will likely make comments that just don't make sense. I think in engineering circles the corrector/completionist personality trait is more prevalent.
People that did read the article and spark conversation will get more up arrow clicks. Uninformed comments will float to the bottom most of the time on HN.
That should be able to weed out bad comments that are bad because ppl haven't read the thing. (first child comment will call them out, than people will downvote)
I wish HN had at least snippet previews for submissions (like in Twitter, WhatsApp or Facebook) so that I could look at them without following a link and decide whether to open them or not based on more information than just the title.
Readership could choose to reward TLDR summaries of submissions. In general, discussion would then be better informed about the content submission.
Personally, I have found interesting discussion to sometimes be not so much about the content of a submission, but about the topic of the submission. A tedious pattern for content-focused stuff is that "what the author didn't do ..." post; a more engaging one is essentially "yes, and here is related or parallel work..." Elaboration is more interesting than negation for this reader.
Up or down voting is a big signal of relevance for the reader but not the only one. Really what I would like is some agent that can read HN submissions and comments for me, extract topics from submissions and interesting comments and links from discussions, and allow me to browse that digest first. Again, not a fresh idea.
Speed readers can spend more time ruminating, since they are probably thinking too fast also.
For example, some time ago there was an article about why dynamic linking was worse than static linking along supported with a set of benchmarks. Many people posted highly upvoted, snarky, derisive comments about how the author was wrong and questioned his benchmarks. No one tried to reproduce his benchmark figures (had they tried to they would have found some bugs in them).
I'm confident that if someone were to post an article about why static linking is worse than dynamic linking it would be met with the same kind of snark. So it's not the subject.
You might try to find a way to soften the influence of people who are badly behaved voters, and causing those comments to float to the top. A lot of review sites seem to suffer from the people who give well thought out ratings being drowned out by a majority who only ever give the minimum and maximum rating. That's made some sites give up and only offer thumbs up and thumbs down, but if you can detect those users, you can always try to reduce the influence they have on the final rating.