[xzion]

I just can't agree with the recommendation to read the comments before articles you find online.

Critical thinking is such an important skill for everyone, not just engineers, and this habit all but eliminates it. You go into an article with a framed opinion of what it's trying to convey, and spend the time reading the article looking for confirmation of that opinion rather than thinking critically for yourself.

This might be OK in some communities like HN where people are usually pretty reasonable and the site seems fair. But it becomes a habit and can be dangerous in other places where the top comment could be paid for or manipulated without you knowing, seeding opinions and confirming them as you view the content.

Definitely read the comments. The author is spot on about the gems and lessons to be found. But do it after you've read the article, and thought about what it meant for you.

[jasode]

>I just can't agree with the recommendation to read the comments before articles you find online.

Your disagreement makes it sound like he made a universal recommendation for all articles in all circumstances. I didn't read it that way.

He specifically constrained his observation to staying on top of new technical developments in /r/programming and HN:

"When browsing Proggit, I recommend reading the comments before committing fifteen minutes to reading a nicely titled (or click-baited) article."

It looks like his advice meant to be a time management tool instead of a shortcut to disable critical thinking. You have several factors that lead to the comments-first-then-read-article strategy:

1) finite time -- can't possibly read every article -- must prioritize the information overload somehow

2) Sturgeon's Law -- 90% of everything is crap (e.g. clickbait titles)

3) you lack the technical background in the new and unfamiliar topic that's a prerequisite for applying critical reasoning.

>Critical thinking is such an important skill for everyone, not just engineers, and this habit all but eliminates it. [...] But it becomes a habit and can be dangerous in other places ...

I think people can be adaptive and use comments-then-article on certain websites but also use the opposite article-then-comments on other websites.

For online articles of New York Times, Washington Post, and Youtube videos... it makes more sense to consume the content and then look at the comments (or skip the comments altogether since they are often a cesspool of nonsense.) For fast-moving technical crowd-sourced article submissions -- it can be rational to read the comments first.

[dalore]

Yeah when I don't have much time I read just the comments.

[dmichulke]

If you get a "framed opinion" by reading comments, you are just as likely to get a "framed opinion" by reading the article.

If you think critically, you will not give too much credence to either, no matter what you read first.

[nizze]

The comment section is pure gold for discovering contrasting opinions - which will feed critical thinking. Reading what ever article while remembering different opinions from comment section gives a really nice insight.

Totally agree about the top comments. Not that valuable and some times even misleading/manipulated/bought/nasty.

[NobleLie]

His whole point is that reading comments first is the mistake. It primes you with thoughts and opinions with little to no cognition required (recognizing they still may be valuable, but those comments will be there after your analysis...)

What we really need is to develop our own critical reading skills, how to connect dots on our own etc. I agree that seeing others comments first before starting that process might be a negative for many reasons.

[treehau5]

Most just don't have the luxury of critically analyzing things these days at their work -- the goal is to produce as fast and as much as possible. I find reading the comment sections first helps me gauge what exactly is important in the article and what the takeaways are -- from both angles. Then I can go back to work.

[achileas]

The problem with that is often it gives equal credence to unequal opinions. And not everyone has the critical thinking skills and freedom from bias that they think they do. I'd argue that really nobody is able to fully remove from themselves any biases that may make them more likely to believe some comment over another.

Voting does nothing for this either, as people may upvote a popular lie or misconception, or downvote an uncomfortable truth - I used to see this happen often in the science-based subreddits when I bothered with them on reddit.

[smnc]

We should bump this up to the top.

[gkafkg8y8]

> Definitely read the comments.

I agree. I'm very senior now, bordering on ancient (or at least in the last part of the age tail), and especially over the past 8-10 years (perhaps back to 18 years if you consider the explosion of OOP/OOD and Java to be a tagalong trend) group-think has been a serious problem in development.

The problem with group-think is that that it isn't moderate thinking that is an average of all well-informed people. It can be influenced by a few that have good design skills and say things in a way that people want to believe. I personally have just said whatever came to mind, bullshitting because I was bored, and got many karma points for comments that I'd not thought out, and have definitely seen other comments that were similar. This is especially true when you are shooting down what could be good ideas. A lot of us just like to argue for arguments' sake. Now, a lot of times that is good, but it is very important to try things out that you on your own think are reasonable and see for yourself.

For example, what if HN had been around when PhP was developed and a group of bored naysayers had shot it down because it wasn't organized enough and would promote bad practices. Those things were true- you could write bad PhP code. However, a lot of what exists today was born of people just having fun coding in PhP, and those people wouldn't have learned from their time in PhP, because it never would have come about.

[marcosdumay]

There's a famous saying about it... But, anyway, it's best to have a bias into believing a well articulated comment saying something is viable or useful, and into doubting a well articulated comment saying something is not viable or useless.

[koolba]

Reading only the article headline, reading short comments and responding to them is good practice for bullshitting through meetings.

It's a pretty good approximation for boring meetings as you've got a small amount of overall context (article headline::meeting) and small amount of specific context (comment::sentence before your name).

[JustSomeNobody]

> I just can't agree with the recommendation to read the comments before articles you find online.

I often do this on HN just to make sure the article would even be worth reading.