It has little to do with overdesign or load times.
More generally speaking though, I do agree that comments probably tend to give people more of a dopamine hit than the content itself, especially if it’s long-form. However comments on HN often are quite substantial and of high quality, at least relatively speaking, and the earlier point about reading the articles often being a poor experience has a lot of merit as well. Why can’t it be a combination of all of the above (to various degrees depending on the individual, etc)?
What do HN comments and AI Overviews have in common?
- All information went through a bunch of neurons at least once
- We don't know which information was even considered
- Might be completely false but presented with utmost confidence
- ...?
From reading one or a few short comments I at least know what the linked article is about, which the original headline often does not reveal (no fault of those authors, their blogs are often specialized and anyone finding the article there has much more context compared to finding the same headline here on a general aggregation site).
If something is overwhelmingly long, especially considering the subject matter, I just skip to the comments or throw it in an LLM to summarize.
This is not strictly logical but I have a feeling I'm not alone.
Me too. That is why sometimes I take the raw comment thread and paste it into a LLM, the result is a grounded article. It contains a diversity of positions and debunking, but the slop is removed. Social threads + LLMs are an amazing combo, getting the LLM polish + the human grounded perspective.
If I was in the place of reddit or HN I would try to generate lots of socially grounded articles. They would be better than any other publication because they don't have the same conflict of interests.
Harvest said comments and create a 1h, 1d, 1 week, all time digest.
(I don't know if Rust is overhyped, it's calmed down again but at one point a recurring post on HN was "solved problem X... but written in Rust!", where the latter was the main selling point instead of e.g. the 10x performance boost that a lot of applications get from a rewrite to a lower-level language)
Even the routine posts about uv seem to have settled down from that, honestly. The "written in Rust" fanfare is mostly contained to GitHub READMEs now. I still get the sense that it occupies quite a bit of mindshare in the background, though.
Often the title sort of explains the whole topic (ie lack of parking in NY, or astronomers found the biggest quasar yet), then folks chirp in with their experiences and insight which are sometimes pretty wild.
Yet I too often am looking for the discussion. When I see there's high quality discourse or valuable experiences being shared, I'm more likely to read the full content of the article.
Or, youre confusing primordial desire to be aligned with perceived peers -- checking what others say, then effortlessly nodding along -- with forming your own judgment.
The difference of discussing topics on the internet and in person is very stark. The average person is much more chill than the average commenter, even within the same general demographic or interest/hobby.
Now, of course I'm not saying we should have a thousand generic comments along the lines of "yeah, I guess that's pretty neat" or "oh well, that's a bummer; now onto regular daily life things..." Just that maybe it helps to consciously recognize this, though perhaps the perception can't be overridden.
And of course the negativity can masquerade as expertise. If the monkeys next to me (commenters) confidently challenge the isolated monkey's (OP) position, maybe we can defeat him and take his resources and status.
The final form of this stuff is subreddits. At least HN forces everyone onto a single front page, there are no subHNs. Which balances things a bit and prevents extreme bubbles.
But I never expected that this would also link back to my tendency to skip an article and just stick to what the top comments of a section have, HN or Reddit.
Because when you were still swinging from the trees a some generations back that was a survival trait.
At the same time, I have no issue disagreeing with whatever is the popular stance, there’s almost some catharsis in just speaking the truth along the lines of “What you say might be true in your circumstances and culture, but software isn’t built like that here.”
Regardless, I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with finding likeminded peers either, for example if everyone around you views something like SOLID and DRY as dogma and you think there must be a better, more nuanced way.
Either that, or everyone likes a good tl;dr summary.
I often click on the HN comments before reading the article because the article I very often nothing more than the headline and I'm more interested in the discussion.
Hey, coming out feels good - I thought I was the only one.
This is where it breaks down; why would they shove in MORE ads when their readers are going down? I'm not saying it's a rational decision, of course.
I suspect a big part is metrics-driven development; add an aggressive newsletter popup and newsletter subscriptions increase, therefore it's effective and can stay. Add bigger / flashier ads and ad revenue increases, therefore the big and flashy ads can stay.
User enjoyment is a lot harder to measure. You can look at metrics like page visits and session length, but that's still just metrics. Asking the users themselves has two problems, one is lack of engagement (unless you are a big community already, HN doing a survey would get plenty of feedback), two is that the people don't actually know how they feel about a website or what they want (they want faster horses). Like, I don't think anybody asked Google for an AI summary of what they think you're searching for, but they did, and it made people stay on Google instead of go to the site.
Whether that's good for Google in the long run remains to be seen of course, back when Google first rolled out their ad problem it... really didn't matter to them, because their ads were on a lot of webpages. Google's targets ended up becoming "keep the users on the internet, make them browse more and faster", and for a while that pushed innovation too; V8, Chrome, Google DNS, Gears, SPDY/HTTP/2/3, Lighthouse, mod_pagespeed, Google Closure Compiler, etc etc etc - all invented to make the web faster, because faster web = more pageviews = more ad impressions = more revenue.
Of course, part of that benefited others; Facebook for example created their own ecosystem, the internet within the internet. But anyway.
The everyone just stops using it, cause it's shit and not worth the money.
Doesn't scale, but maybe that's the only way to survive.
I will need $100M in seed funding.
Except the other commenters didn't read the article either. Now you're all basically just LLM using the title as a prompt.
I do this on hackernews, and especially on news-sites I check (cleantechnica, electrec, reneweconomy) and I actively shun sites _without_ comments.
https://lite.cnn.com for example.
I'm not a big fan of CNN but this is something I'd like to see more of.