Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about.
As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.
Whether comments are valuable very much depends on the kind of people you have writing them, and I believe it's worth trying to maintain a good commenting community.
But that was kind of my point; by looking at the way a response to a piece of content is written, you can judge its merit somewhat accurately.
For example, on a video about the way the Suicide Squad movie was edited, you might see:
- "BRILLIANT 100% agree!"
- "While I think you're right, there might be a couple of things you missed out on [...]"
- "FU M8 DA MOVIE WAS AWESUM!!!1@2"
Each of these comments tells you something different. And yes, some say more about the audience than the content ;)
Would just as soon not give armchair phd a platform. There's some research (don't feel like pulling it up - bullshit?) that talks about how the decline of valuing expertise has had some negative social consequences, but that's probably obvious.
At Slashdot, chances are that I haven't read the article. I go straight to the comments and read those.
Curiously, I can't do that as often here on HN. Here, the quality of article is often higher and the comments are usually more on-topic and, often, more specialized. I do end up reading many more threads than I comment in.
But, yes... I learn a lot more from the comments (frequently) than I ever do from the article. HN is particularly good at this, and it's one of the reasons I visit.
I think "forums" like reddit and HN are fundamentally different from inline comments on news websites.
We have already seen examples where people run the same story on extreme left and extreme right web sites to get clicks and rage views and their toning, and changes are fairly algorithmic. That makes me wonder if you could build an echo chamber of one. So that what you read was always something you really agreed with, even if it wasn't written that way for anyone else. (same data and facts mind you, just slanting it toward the reader's preferences).
I'm similar. You could think of articles as one giant comment from a single person. I'd rather read comments from several people as it's much easier to spot bias and get a variety of viewpoints.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reade...
> ...we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.
I've taken a different approach, which I don't think is superior to yours, just more enjoyable for me... I intentionally watch openly biased news aggregators. For left wing commentary I will watch The Young Turks or Jimmy Dore. For right wing commentary I like Ben Shapiro. The truth usually lies somewhere in between.
Oh, I notice it. I think it's a fun game to root out the bias in the Times. It's really how the news is meant to be read (i.e. confrontationally).
I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them. If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it.
But I don't need it when I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.