In general I am inclined to agree, but I would want to see titles be first before I write it off completely.

Edit: And perhaps boldface as well...

Perhaps visuals would work for a community of graphics designers. But outside of that, it's just not useful. Especially if half of the thumbnail is filled by ads or logos.

http://i.imgur.com/0k4fbc5.png

I think people here are just romanticizing text titles like they're some objective description of the material.

This makes it sound like clickbait is a better option than flashy thumbnails, but it's essentially the same bullshit.

Image instead of text does not work for me. I prefer to read things. Grid layout makes curated content less clearly ranked: does your eye wander horizontally first, vertically, or some random pattern? does screen size affect this?

What could be interesting is to supply 3-5 main points from the article. Doing this automatically is, I suspect, very hard, but if done would give me significantly more information on whether to click the link, go to comments or ignore. Just my 2c.

HN is more about interesting content/discussion instead of posting memes and it is much harder to scan and determine interesting content from images than it is from titles. As a note: when HN has the same target audience as reddit is when i stop using HN.