Well, I don't comment on Reddit without reading the article, but I notice that, on contentious topics, by the time I've read the article there are 2000 comments already and there's not much point posting a comment after that. If you want somebody to read your comment, you have to post on something nobody cares about, or post REALLY fast.

That's a great point. I guess people are really just looking to play the status game by showing up first.

The true GPT-3 was us all along.

Your comment is underrated

Happens here too, as others have pointed out.

Just yesterday an article that went in depth on all different kinds of atmospheric water harvesting was filled with comments on how this was 'debunked', despite some of the methods being used in practice (notably fog harvesting).

Moreover, the article was discussing emerging changes in the technology and the hurdles they would face (it's almost always energy!) but none of the comments seemed to discuss that at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24241529

Most of the discussion today is buried under "reactions". People just state their shallow opinion and fight over them. I hope new more coherent way of discussion emerges again.

In the Usenet there was custom of writing summaries. Article writer would direct the discussion.

> Authors of articles occasionally say that readers should reply by mail and they'll summarize. Accordingly, readers should do just that---reply via mail. Responding with a followup article to such an article defeats the intention of the author. She, in a few days, will post one article containing the highlights of the responses she received. By following up to the whole group, the author may not read what you have to say.

>When creating a summary of the replies to a post, try to make it as reader-friendly as possible. Avoid just putting all of the messages received into one big file. Rather, take some time and edit the messages into a form that contains the essential information that other readers would be interested in.

>Also, sometimes people will respond but request to remain anonymous (one example is the employees of a corporation that feel the information's not proprietary, but at the same time want to protect themselves from political backlash). Summaries should honor this request accordingly by listing the From: address as anonymous or (Address withheld by request).

https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_6.html#...

HN would need to make a significant number of changes for it to restore its signal ratio, including:

1. Flagging sources of information that are known to use clickbait tactics, stupid popups and generally low effort content. Paywalls can also be labeled as such.

2. Niceties like showing original title next to the updated one, or page title next to the submission title. I want to know what the original title was so I can appropriately shame the individual into trying to clickbait a boring topic onto the front page.

3. Downvotes should need to be justified and reviewed. A “I disagree with this comment because it offends me” is not a valid reason to bury good commentary. Happens too frequently. Remove showdead etc altogether.

4. Limited number of new seats for posting/commenting. Read-only for general public. Remove accounts that are regularly submitting garbage to the front page (happens more frequently than you think).

This community has degraded over the years and it’s easily seen in most high volume commentaries. A lot of it is emotionally charged nonsense with people being “convinced” of things with nothing to show where they obtained such strong convictions.

Dan shouldn’t moderate, he should outright ban, and in the process push the low effort armchairing to Reddit and other sites.

HN is first and foremost a vehicle for YC ventures to post their stuff anyway.

While I can understand people are optimistic that this site is somewhat more “intelligent” or “knowledgeable” about particular subjects compared to other sites, the range of that subject matter is so narrow that in majority of categories you’re more likely to find higher quality, insight and volume of posts elsewhere. Namely Reddit.

Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough” topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link posts and only allow text posts.

I see HN in the same way. It happens so often that HN discussion is much better that article itself that I go there first, and RTFA only if the discussion makes me want to read it.

For this article, I tried to read it after reading a few comments, but got bored.

The readability of lot of web articles tend to be quite poor as they are written from viewpoint of SEO rather than readability. I rarely can read complete web article unless it was published in a paper magazine or newspaper.

HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on controversial topics. The HN quality of discussion is not that different from themed serious subreddits.

Give Reddit a chance, find subreddits in your area of interest.

I would have given Reddit a chance if they were not constantly screwing around with the UI. The new UI is sluggish and really affects the reading experience negatively.

I love that HN has not made any changes to its UI for a long time and a fast and convenient reading experience remains top priority on HN. If there are more HN-like forums, that would be something I would be interested in.

It's frustrating, but utilizing old.reddit.com / Reddit Enhancement Suite (https://redditenhancementsuite.com/) goes a long way in making it a more enjoyable experience.

Heh, I remember maybe a decade ago, some e-magazine in spanish which marketed itself as a truly cultural experience, with long articles on interesting cultural topics. It was so badly formatted for SEO that it was so painful to read which probably made people think that the cultural themes were more difficult than they actually were.

Correction: _commenters_ think of Reddit titles as discussion prompts. I think that's a pretty important distinction to make. It's possible that there is a sizable group of people who actually do click the links, but they don't also go back to comment.

I recall that as standard practice on Slashdot in 2000.

At least there you could yell RTFA. This is forbidden here.

Yes, but getting a spate of RTFA was a badge of honour. Also responding RTFA meant that you didn't get it either. To a flood of RTFA you got to be allowed to be quite pithy in response with outrageous indignation and generally still be onside.

My /. id (JSG) is ~18K but is only so large because I lurked for a few years before signing up. sigh

Even back then I have always used identifiable IDs on forums, those are my initials and here I use surname + initial and do so on everything internets these days.

Am I mad?

You hacked the crowd to get them to rate headlines !

Can it be monetized ?

With recent advancements in ML, a comment thread from people who don’t read TFA could be used to back-generate a plausibly looking article.

Or just do it from the other end and have GPT create comments from submissions by GPT, the result is kinda scary in its realism [0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/

I feel like a closer approximation of what’s going on is that there are perennial discussion topics that people want to participate in when they see an opportunity (e.g. “battery technology continues to improve, but it’s rare that we see the results trickling down to consumer electronics.”)

But just having a forum with “evergreen threads” where people talk continuously about perennial topics, doesn’t seem to work out very well, as people tend to get bored of topics when nobody’s saying anything new.

People might want to participate in them, but they won’t bother if there’s no expectation that their comment will be seen, let alone replied to. Nobody wants to post to a “stale” thread; it’s a waste of effort. And, in a vicious cycle, nobody wants to read other people’s posts on a “stale” thread either, because “thread necromancy” is almost never done by someone with something of value to contribute.

“Post a link and comment about it” sites have stumbled upon a fix for the problem of perennial discussion topics becoming "stale": by having individual threads focused on news articles relevant to these perennial topics, rallying points are created, giving people an excuse/justification to resume the larger ongoing topic of conversation within the comments of the individual news item, with the expectation that others will also be doing so.

The news itself is important to this process, as it offers a promise that fresh content (i.e. comments with a novel thought backing them) might be injected into the ongoing topic due to the news; thereby giving people a reason to check out this particular resurrection of the topic, even if they’ve read previous threads “about” it before.

But it really only has to be a promise that someone else is going to contribute novel thought to the conversation. Most people don’t want to be the source of the novel thought themselves. They want to participate on one of the existing sides of the topic, using what they already knew about the topic going in. They want to try out a “famous” debate for themselves. (And, if there's something new to know, they seemingly want to learn it by being told off by someone who has read the news, and so now knows something they don't.)

So the news article itself has about the same effect on the volume of commenting on a site like this, as public news regarding a company’s value has on the volume of trading in a market. A dose of “the real thing” certainly causes a surge—but so does the expectation of it, whether you actually end up getting the real thing or not.

And, just like speculating on a stock doesn’t require any insider knowledge, commenting under one of the “traditional” positions on such a perennial topic doesn’t require that you read the news that prompted the resurrection.

You can't have a stock market without real signal; and yet the market will always be composed mostly of traders with no access to (or desire to access) real signal. You can't have a perennial discussion without news; and yet the comments will always be composed mostly of people who have no desire to access the news.

Further thought:

Many people seem to mistake the social purpose of these “post a link and comment on it” sites as actually being purely for discussing the content of the link. It’s possible to use such sites this way, but it’s not incentivized by the UX compared to the alternative discussed above. You usually need stringent community moderation if you want people to focus on the news itself.

A free UX design idea: if you want to build “a discussion forum for news topics in a domain”, then rather than endlessly cloning the Reddit/HN model, try building a hybrid of Reddit with a traditional discussion forum. I.e.,

1. start with a traditional discussion forum (thread-list view with threads sorted by last-posted time);

2. make it so threads aren't “bumped” to the top from regular posts in those threads;

3. add a special “news link” type of post, that users can make, which does bump the thread.

(Bonus ideas: scrape the news-links and so render the news-link's content inline in the thread. Have automatic "threadmark" navigation between the spans of posts delimited by these news-item posts. Make clicking the thread in the thread-list view navigate to the newest news-item post. Require moderators to approve news-items before the bump triggers, to avoid "redundant" bumps, to in turn increase users' faith in bumps translating to a real renewal of discussion.)

I imagine such a UX would work much better as a way to explicitly run continuous long-running discussions of news topics, as refueled by news links. One core benefit is that what would on Reddit be “previous threads” would on this forum be “the same thread”, and so people would (hopefully!) feel much less of a reason to recapitulate the exact same posts.

There is a value in rehashing previous conversations. Imagine if you were at a cafe, having an intellectual conversation with your friend while a GPT-12 butler listened. Every time you rehash a conversation that someone else had, GPT-12 butler interrupts and says "excuuuuse me sir, some permutation of this conversation has happened 2000 times on the internet. I will replay the top 3 of those. Please listen carefully, then proceed to tread new ground." I think that GPT-12 butler would be very annoying.

You might think that I'm making a strawman argument, because I'm certain you wouldn't like the interrupting GPT-12 butler either. However, the UX you proposed would sometimes feel just as constraining.

Participating in arguments, even if they aren't novel, is a cognitively enriching experience. Reading but not participating in those very same arguments, while enriching in its own way, is not a complete replacement. Furthermore, I feel that in order to argue at higher levels of abstraction (which new fields are biased towards), you should first participate in discourse at every preceding level of abstraction. Reddit and HN allow for that. They're not perfect, but I don't think that enforced meta-threads would be an improvement.

All that being said, I think that your "bonus" idea of hyperlinking discussion to relevant excerpts in the article, inline, can be singularly transformative.

> Anything with quantum physics in the title works too.

Well, there's a small chance you'll update the submission to point to a working link in the future, and that some of the comments refer to that...