I have to strongly disagree. The lengthy article has much more thought put into it. It's almost always better researched and the author usually has relevant experience or expertise, and those are usually at least known to the reader in some way or easily discovered.

I have seen many, many cases where a big portion of the top comments are either saying something similar to what the author of the article said, or they are asking a question, or raising a rebuttal, that is already addressed in the article.

Comments are short and probably have close to zero research on average. Experience may play a part, but people don't usually offer up the resume with a comment, so you have no idea if they even have credibility. And there are mountains of witticisms, anecdotes, or emotional arguments that add little to nothing of value to the conversation.

Personally, I almost always read the article and then skim the comments to see if anybody has added any thoughts I might find interesting.

There’s not much to disagree with here.

I simply stated my experience — I never even said my experience was right or that it is wrong to read the article, or that others should experience HN the way I do.

I’m a slow reader and don’t have time to read lengthy articles, and therefore am drawn more to discussion.

You are (likely) a quicker reader and are drawn more to articles.

There’s room for both of us in the world — and on HN (I hope).

You said "I often wish HN would just allow titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that". If there's anything I can wholeheartedly say I disagree with it's that, so yes there's a lot to disagree with here.

I think that was an inadvertent juxtaposition of the words "just" and "allow": the GP probably didn't mean that links to articles should be forbidden, and only subjects for discussion ("titles") should be allowed to be posted.

At least I read their comment as "I often wish HN would allow, besides links, just titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that".

Would you still wholeheartedly disagree with that, too?

A part of the problem here is distinguishing which articles are worth reading. I may know that a Dan post is probably good, but if I saw this exact same headline taking me to a long article on <random tech news site>, I'd probably skip it and skim the comments instead, since chances are the article itself is near worthless.

I very much disagree with this. In fact, this article is a perfect counterexample to what you're saying, ironically - it's a lengthy, well thought out essay that the author clearly spent a lot of time thinking about and putting together. Quite honestly, it's very unlikely that any number of pithy HN comments could match up to it, and I say that with a fair amount of respect for the HN community at large. It's just very unlikely they're going to have insights on the same level: the author of the post had at least a couple of weeks of actual concentrated effort to put together thoughts on the topic.

Plus I just have a lot of respect for the author. Dan Luu is a smart guy.

> And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article.

The thing is, the topic of the actual article is generally more interesting than the topic suggested by a naive reading of the title (as is the case here).

People discussing things based on titles leads to generic discussions that recur again and again and go nowhere. Whereas the actual topic of the article's content is rather more specific and could lead to an actual new and more specific discussion that might actually go somewhere.

Possibly, but I would bet that many people are upvoting these articles based off a combination of the title + the discussions of the title, which would suggest enough people find those two things interesting (which is why it’s at #1 and why most of the comments are around the title vs. the subject).

Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a title that fits the subject, vs. making sure people click the article.

> Also, if the subject is more interesting than the title, then authors should consider being more thoughtful around a title that fits the subject, vs. making sure people click the article.

The problem with this is that, frequently -- as is the case here I'd say -- there is no easy way to properly pin down the actual topic in the space of a reasonable title. The title will necessarily be more broad than the actual topic; if you in general take titles as wholly delineating the topic, rather than suggesting the general space they're in, you're making a mistake.

Sticking only to those topics that can be wholly expressed in the space of a brief title is a big limitation on topics; as I said above, taking titles as topics just leads to the same discussions over and over.

I absolutely understand where you're coming from here, but in practice and reality, the point of the title really is to make sure people click the article.

I agree about the comments here often being the most interesting part.

But I think that the best way to start the conversation is usually with a well-written article.

If there would only be a title and no article, I'm pretty sure that I would find the comments to be less interesting.

But maybe I'm wrong, and since my argument is based on the original article being well-written, maybe it isn't true for most posts.

But I still think that I would rather try to find the posts with good articles, and just ignore the rest, and hopefully, that is what the ranking system does (at least help with).

Conversely, often it's more interesting to read a single person's well researched opinion than a dozen one-off comments.

But on Hackernews those one-off comments can come from years of studying the same topic. Sometimes even explaining why the long well researched opinion missed something so important that the whole article is wrong.

No, they dont. Which is pretty clear everytime something you do know a lot about pops up. Majority of it is just people shooting their opinions over coffee break. Which is fine, we go here to relax and slack, but does not produce super educated opinions.

I guess it depends on the topic.

If the topic is some change in the latest release of a programming language, I usually find the comments here to be helpful.

But if the topic is global politics or economy, then sure, the quality here isn't much better than some other random social media site.

    I often wish HN would just allow titles to get 
    posted and HN folks just have a discussion around 
    that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the 
    form of a question.)

Sounds like a real recipe for hivemind to me. I mean, any community struggles with hivemind a bit. But, at least with discussions centered around articles that exist outside HN, we get a little fresh air.

    especially if I don’t even know whether 
    this person is an expert on said topic.

He's a pretty respected voice, or at least popular on HN.

I find it very valuable to look into the authors of linked articles, see which authors pop up on HN frequently, etc.

Gives you an idea of who the leading voices in the industry are, helps you to know which way the winds are blowing.

Especially for somebody with a slower reading speed this may be crucial; helps to understand which article may actually be worth the time investment.

Sure, but then we’re discussing the topic as set by the post’s title, not the actual topic(s) addressed by the post’s content, which are quite a bit more complex and nuanced than a title of a few characters could ever convey.

What if we want to hold a conversation about the actual post content? Should we add a tag such as [please read]?

Why not both? There is good discussion being held on both topics in this thread.

That’s the benefit of nested comments, to allow different top-level discussions where others can discuss what is being shared by top-level commenters.

My original point was to not be “depressed” by others choosing to not take the time to read the article, and have a discussion on the topic rather than the subject.