same here. it's great that some people still do. otherwise we'd need to hire an AI to read the articles for us and post the proper comments

You're operating under the presumption that rhaps0dy is not an AI.

That's because his username doesn't imply that he is one.

Would you prefer r.haps0dy?

Why would r.haps0dy imply that I'm an AI?

(let me out of the HN-box dammit)

I think it's because of this[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Robot_series_character...

"The "R" initial in his name stands for "robot," a naming convention in Asimov's future society; all robot names start with the initial R to differentiate them from humans which they often resemble."

Me too. Sometimes I wish there was a tl;dr under the title of each submission.

What an amazing design idea that would be for dealing with clickbait though.

A crowd sourced subtitle could be added to the link and possibly voted on for accuracy (an expanding list shows alternate submissions or allows you to submit your own)

Since headlines can no longer be trusted, we could turn to the crowd.

So a service that provides metadata for URLs. Caption, description, user ratings, review.

A browser plugin could respond to hovering over a link by querying the service and displaying the response.

Being crowd-sourced, there would have to be some form of contributor reputation tracking.

  YouTube link -> Cats react to bananas [83%; funny, cute]
  Clickhole link -> Infinitely recursive self-parody of clickbait articles [71%; funny]
  Kotaku link -> Gamers overreact to accusations of sexism [43%; news]
  NYT link -> Anticonvulsant drug found effective against Alzheimers [91%; news, advertisement]
  Vimeo link -> Police arrest Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis [43%; news, violence, NSFW]

This is already in effect as the top comment on HN usually ends up being the tldr, and the creator gets the karma.

Right, but consider the impact if there was a crowd sourced summary on Facebook (for example)

"this jaw dropping thing that happened will make you weep for humanity" `baby drops ice cream, dog eats it`

"Carrie Fisher destroys good morning America" `she throws out a few lighthearted quips, has a one-liner about jabba`

I think it really becomes effective on video content with extreme linkbait.

Personally, (and as a card-carrying crochety old man) I don't follow those links on principle. I'm carrying on my own little "boycott of one".

By instituting platform change though, to solve for linkbait inline (not requiring a page load to comments) would change the value proposition of headlines and I think it would be more likely to reward for quality content.

A TL;DR summary is not the same as "top comment" and TC is not always a TLDR ... One line, under the headline, crowd sourced and voted. I think it could fundamentally change behavior, and if the platform doing it was sufficiently large, the composition of the internet.

> Personally, (and as a card-carrying crochety old man) I don't follow those links on principle. I'm carrying on my own little "boycott of one".

Me too, so that makes it at least a boycott of two. I'm not even a crotchety old man yet (early 30s), but it seems to be coming on fast ;)

This x1000. Biggest pet peeve of mine is people's unwillingness to give a valid, time saving summary. Seriously, if you just ready it and your mind has absorbed it, what the heck is so hard about giving a short recap based on that summary?

Btw, TvTropes gives the kind of summary you describe under the "laconic" button, and it's a godsend.

Would be better if we were allowed to add text and a url when submitting.

There's a lithuanian chrome/firefox plugin for that. It's pretty awesome

And so, all news sites approach the design of slashdot - from non-moderated comments to (user)moderated comments (we're still waiting (on the need) for meta-moderation here on hn), to presentation of stories? :-)

You could hook into https://twitter.com/savedyouaclick?lang=en for the most clickbaity of clickbait.

There is tldr.io, with somewhat still buggy Chrome integration, that will display you a TL;DR below Reply box on HN (and in an expandable-on-hover box next to the link on HN main page) iff someone has already written a TL;DR for the article in this service.

I wonder if this is how that same trend started on slashdot too (or meme, even: "You read TFA, are you new here?")? Then again, slashdot has always (as far as I know/remember) provided a summary in addition to the link, similar to how the page looks today.

This, actually, is much better; the Slashdot summary is often wildly inaccurate, alas.

Thanks intelligent commenters!

I do exactly the same thing.

yupp