[smt88]

My observation is that most upvotes are because of the title, and then a minority of people will read and critique the article in the top-voted comments.

Doesn't sound like a perfect system, but actually does a wonderful job at debunking very appealing-sounding articles.

[kjeetgill]

The upvote isn't for the article per see it's for the subject matter. I'm hoping to hear war stories and crtiques of Hilbert Curves vs S2 vs H3 or KD-Trees for spatial indexing.

The fun of Hacker News is hearing pros talk shop about stuff too distant from what you're working on.

[Nition]

The bigger problem is when people comment and even discuss the title without reading the article. It's extremely common on Reddit but luckily less prevalent on Hacker News .

[Theodores]

...if paywalled then at least you know some people at least tried to read the article because they comment about the paywall.

Everyone else a) paid their way (as if), b) got a free pass as they don't generally read articles, c) used that new trick for bypassing the article that only people who read articles know about or d) just blurted their opinion without reading the article.

I know there have been changes on the internet lately and there is only so much that one can 'stalk' in someone's browser, but is it possible to have a comment system where you can only comment if the article is in the browser history, with that page having been visited at least three minutes before the comment is submitted?

If I go shopping online then I jump straight to the reviews and decide to buy on that basis. the 'shoddy' product description sometimes doesn't get a glance over. On HN I find some articles are the same, the real insights are in the comments so paywalled does not deter, the real insights will be in the comments.

[Nition]

I don't mind when people only read the comments, honestly. As you say, sometimes the comments are more insightful than the article. But I do think that anyone making a comment related to the article should have read the article. Otherwise it's the blind leading the blind.