> I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media.
But this is pretty damaging, wouldn't you say? Not too long ago, I would follow several consumer tech blogs, and jump right into the comments, because the stories were increasingly page-view driven garbage that needed 8 separate blog posts of ~200 words each to describe one story. The comments tended to provide much more insight than the actual "article".
With HN, (which I've been visiting for <2 years), I'm noticing that the articles posted tend to be long-form and generally thought-provoking. I make an effort to read the article, collect my thoughts on them, and only then view the comments.
For my part, I've found that a good chunk of technical blog posts (whether they are hosted on blog engines, personal sites or even pushed out to Medium) now assume that they will be discovered via HN. And I cannot be objectively sure about this, but I feel that these blog posts have been increasingly targeted to HN lurkers.
They may touch technically very good topics, but the aggregate content, in my eyes, has become shallower. It's almost like the HN crowd is being systematically baited with superficially interesting tech posts.
(A very enjoyable exception: nautil.us - for me the posts are either entirely irrelevant, or readable and interesting with a high probability. I don't remember experiencing much of a middle ground yet.)
So, when my time is limited, I tend to check the discussion before hitting the link. Usually the first few posts are enough to confirm whether the link itself is worth visiting or not.
And sure enough, a primary motivator for this is that finding non-clickbaity titles is increasingly rare. HN thread activity and tone acts as a pretty decent bloom filter.
But this is pretty damaging, wouldn't you say? Not too long ago, I would follow several consumer tech blogs, and jump right into the comments, because the stories were increasingly page-view driven garbage that needed 8 separate blog posts of ~200 words each to describe one story. The comments tended to provide much more insight than the actual "article".
With HN, (which I've been visiting for <2 years), I'm noticing that the articles posted tend to be long-form and generally thought-provoking. I make an effort to read the article, collect my thoughts on them, and only then view the comments.