[cyberferret]

Nice idea, but I must admit though, that I often look at the comments first to ascertain the quality of the article posted. If I see civil, structured discussion, then I am more likely to visit the link afterwards.

However, if I see off topic rants and arguments, then I tend to dismiss the article as an opinion or puff piece.

Generally like that the comments on here tend to stay on topic and thoughtful, although I am disappointed that some of my posts on here lately, which have merely been questions about aspects of the article, have been downvoted. Hope HN doesn't turn into another StackOverflow imitating over-moderated "that doesn't belong here" type site.

[anitil]

This is exactly my behaviour. I end up with a bunch of tabs and ctrl-w/ctrl-tab through them with a small set of simple heuristics, the primary being quality of the first few comments.