The problem about this is that a LOT of users that seem knowledgeable pull shit out of their ass. I've seen this many times here: I read the article and then the comments and they just end up being elaborate bullshit based on a title and previous "knowledge" (often refuted by the article itself) rather than informed discussion.

This goes both ways. Articles aren't always 100% trustworthy either, and in that case a commenter might just as well offer a valid counterpoint or correction(s).

As with anything, be reasonable. If you're really interested, then use whatever content is available to educate yourself, be it comments, the article itself, or independent research.

I agree, the cases that bother me are the ones where it's painfully obvious the commenter didn't read the article. I enjoy reading counterpoints and is one of the main reasons I read the comments.

The quality of the comments might make me read the article, but that is 1 in 10. I admire the fast groups of subjectmatterexperts who will quickly prais or debunk the content of the articles and post links that are even more interesting.

Further, I use https://theoldreader.com to subscribe to the RSS feed, makes all my "monitoring" a lot easier.

Reading other comments here, it seems that nearly all HN users read the comments and not the article. If no one is reading the actual article, then that means HN users are reacting to an article title and to each other (also reacting to an article title)?

This seems to be a common thing with aggregators in general. As someone who's seen their work posted to Reddit and other sites (or has posted it there themselves), the aggregator topics seem to get a lot more views and comments than the source article does.

I think in many cases, the system comes down to "upvote the topic and comment if I agree with the premise (or what seems to be it), or downvote the article and comment if I disagree with the premise (or what I think it seems to be)"

This is because you are reading comments of people that write comments. People that write comments, (usually) read comments. There are lots of people that read comments that don't write comments and probably even more that don't read comments and click on the links.

For the last group, the votes and number of comments are just signals for how good the link is - they don't care about the comments.

It is not that simple. For one, I only put the first comment under an article after reading it. Which does not happen until I am interested in the topic.

I mostly rely on top level commenters replying to the article content, often with quotes, and then go down into discussion from there.

Same. I use hckrnews.com to have an up-to-date list of recent topics discussed on HN, quickly skim it for headlines that stand out, but mostly focusing on highly-commented posts (50+ when in the morning, 20+ later on in the day), and I read comments first.

I would also add:

http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ (HN daily top 10 links archived since 2010)

https://hnews.xyz/ (HN with thumbnails -> deeper HN skimming)

Normally I don't do this but: third here, didn't expect it to be so common.

Probably the difference for me is that I live in Europe so I tend to catch up to a bunch of posts from the evening/night in the US during my morning coffee and then open hckrnews.com again by the end of the afternoon when some new posts begin to crop up.

I'll read the articles with interesting headlines but always jump to the comments first, some articles that I really think could help me in the future (or deserve further reading or research) I will save to my todo-list or in my Pocket account and then set a reminder to re-read/research in a given day when I'm free.

Woow. I too do the same. But I browse only 1st page in morning (30+) and later I went thr' other pages.

hckrnews.com looks cool. Thanks for sharing.