Re:The Hacker News Habit
by screaminghawk on Thursday August 16, 2018 @03:56PM
(#17777953)
I read the comments first as well. It's often a good indicator of whether or not the article is worth reading. And more often than not there are better references in the comments than the original source.
Would be really interested in that Slack bot if you have the source handy.
Re:The Hacker News Habit
by Swenrekcah on Thursday August 16, 2018 @04:21PM
(#17778130)
I read the comments because HN is a lightweight and quick site and I don’t know how slow the target page might be.
I up voted all of the ancestors of this comment because I agree with all of them. Pretty much hit the nail on the head there. To add to the slow page load bit, I often read the comments to get an intelligent discourse as well as find out of the article is pay walled.
> Simply bookmarking the article itself to read later [...]
I actually send the HN discussion itself to my Reading List. So when I find some time I start with the comments here and then decide whether or not I should read the article. And tbf most of the times I get enough information here and never follow the link to the main reading.
I often click to read the HN comments first, because they are often full of insight and interesting links. (This is also why I read HN from a custom #newsyc channel in our work Slack that posts links once they hit 20 points: it allows time for initial comments to accumulate, and Slack helpfully keeps track of "new" posts.)
Simply bookmarking the article itself to read later would not be as useful to me personally, but I bet there are lots of people who would find your approach helpful.