Great question. I usually visit the link first then come back to the comments on Hacker News. It’s like enjoying more seeing a movie you don’t know anything about than reading critics first.

Reading the comments on hackerNews is the main reason I do not activate comments on my website. For me if a discussion needs to happen, it should be where the people found the link. So if you post your link on reddit, HackerNews, Digg, etc. you end up having focused discussions. Each one having a much better quality than mixing every point of view in one place (the comment thread of the website).

Have good day. Thibault