We tried that on reddit a long time ago. It didn't work. We realized that a lot of people just want to see the discussion.

I always click on the comments first myself to see if the article is even worth reading.

I thought that was the WHOLE point of Reddit when I joined years ago. It was like Digg but ONLY for people that had "Read-It".

I think that was the idea and it quickly devolved into horse shit.

I would love a site that was like Read-It but forced people to "read-it" first.

My take on “read it” - is that I read the title, look at the score and then the qty of comments

If it’s an interesting title and the score and qty of comments is high, i go to the comments.

I’m pretty much in /all and I hide tons of subs using RES...

So my feed on /all is pretty clean and tailored to things I’m open to.

First and foremost thanks for reddit, Ive had an account for 14years, and pretty much hit the site every single day for 14 years

With that said; I do the same thing... but I rarely upvote a story - I do check out stories but far far less than the comments.

I do the same here on HN. Especially here because there are a ton of smart people here and HN is pretty strict on being anti-troll - but i dont count ant-trolling as censorship, it’s forum-housekeeping.

Before reddit I mostly was on slashdot, and some other forums that don’t exit any longer.

The OP is talking about posting comments, not viewing them.

So was I.

I just was talking to someone about this.

I'm the worst on HN at commenting on a topic before/instead of reading the article.

But I see HN not as a place to share random articles around the web, but as a place to discuss interesting topics with a (relative to other alternatives) civil and educated userbase.

I'm usually not super interested in what a single person has to say on a given subject (i.e. the linked article) as much as I am in the collective thoughts/responses from the HN community.

Again, admitting that I'm likely part of the problem, but just being honest, and -- in my own mind, at least -- feels like a mostly justified reason for making the most of the time that I have/feel like spending on these topics.

If a similar community existed that was (again, relative to other alternatives) civil & educated, but just allowed discussion on topics vs. links to articles, I'd be hanging out/engaging there instead.

Honestly clicking on the article just leads to paywalls or ad laden disasters that just consume my CPU (or complain if I have an ad blocker).

HN just works, so it's a lot less work just to read the discussion here.

HN self-policed fine back when caustic takedowns of incorrect comments were normal/expected/rewarded. But in the dang era of "comments must be nice" you get more upvotes by regurgitating HN-friendly views quickly based on the headline than by reading the article, so of course people respond to that incentive.

Then I'll just click the link, read some memes on reddit, then come back once the timer runs out.

Why are you so opposed to reading something before commenting on it?

A lot of people aren't interested in discussing linked material and therefore reading it, they just want to have a discussion on the topic of the title.

And in the process turning this site in to a predictable talking-point forum that just gets triggered by random title keywords.

A few weeks back I saw a front page article written in terrible english, being factually wrong on almost all points (it was talking about tech history so you can be objectively wrong), and was like 2 pages of rambling - blogspam 101.

But the title was something complaining about Electron and it was clear that nobody read it and everyone was just bandwagoning on Electron.

Then there was that outrage about a guy who was maintaining faker.js and people spinning same old BS about licenses and how everyone should use GPL - meanwhile it was obvious nobody even looked at what the library did because none of the discussion applied.

So people interested in discussing points should maybe find a different site for this - it's really dragging down the quality of content.

Of course you will, but the point is that many people like you will find such a process more of a hassle than it's worth. My solution would reduce the amount of this happening significantly, even if it won't stop every do-badder...