[Jun8]

I think aggregators like SkimFeed miss an important point, often made on HN: for a lot of people, including me, a lot of the value of HN is in the comments. In fact, going to the extreme, some posts have little learnable content other than TIL. First example that comes to mind is a post I recently upvoted: Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946989) which had a small number of information-rich comments. Or there are pots where the content is obvious from the title, where I go directly to comments to see people's assessment, e.g. Federated Learning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19944510). On average I would say value of comments to post is 80 to 20 percent for me.

So, rather than tools for submission-based skimming/alerts, I'd like to see advanced tools based on comments: Some ideas:

* Number of comments divided by submission points is a rough measure of contentious topics in the HN community, esp. if this is > 1. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970544. Sort front page by this score. Another obvious measure would be the number of grayed out and flagged comments.

* Identify comments leading to discussions and highlight them. Since comment scores are hidden this has to be done trough analysis of replies (maybe keywords "good reply" or number of replies).

* Identify comments that are informational, simple measure would be to count the number of links; harder to do would be to analyze the "factfullness".

Just some random thoughts.

P.S. I offer myself as a cautionary example of getting too much into HN: This is the first site I skim on my phone when I get up (to get awake, you know) and I easily spend more than an hour every day (who am I kidding, more like two hours). This is idiotic! Don't let your idea debt (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11027684) accumulate.

[StreakyCobra]

Sometimes I do not even read the article at all. Either I read a few comments, and if it seems interesting I go to read the article. And sometime I just read all the comments without even putting an eye on the article. So yes, I strongly agree. HN value is in the comments.

PS: I just notice I did it again here... replying to a comment without having seen the article. I know in general it is better to have read the article before commenting, for sure for top levels comments at least, but in this case my answer is independent of the original content.

[m463]

Sometimes I don't read the article because I have to take the time to ublock my filters (wsj for instance, nature or medium identity redirects, etc)

[barbecue_sauce]

My process with HN articles is

1. Find a topic that looks interesting or important based on the title

2. Read the top two comments.

3a. If they are incredibly polarized, read the article.

3b. If they are in agreement, just read the comments.

[whenchamenia]

That is a recipe for a powerful bubble. HN, while being above average, collectively gets many, many things wrong.

[panarky]

Conventional wisdom says filter bubbles are bad because they hide alternative viewpoints.

But after I've understood and incorporated alternate views and I'm ready to build, then I want to discuss with like-minded people to refine the ideas and take action.

When I'm done with discovery and I'm ready to act, I don't want to keep fighting trolls and pedants, re-litigating stale arguments, weak signal lost in the noise.

More bubble, please.

[la_barba]

Well a bubble is an imagined abstraction. Like most abstractions, it doesn't actually exist. Its just a way to simplify things. Also, there isn't a clear definition of it either, making things even more muddy.

>HN, while being above average, collectively gets many, many things wrong.

That is to be expected. I mean we have programmers opining on quantum physics, bio-chemistry, economics, sociology, and whatever else hits the front page. I don't know of an online community that restricts their opinions to their own domains.

[EForEndeavour]

> Well a bubble is an imagined abstraction. Like most abstractions, it doesn't actually exist. Its just a way to simplify things. Also, there isn't a clear definition of it either, making things even more muddy.

The fact that humans came up with a fuzzy concept to mentally model real-life effects doesn't diminish the existence of those effects. Events occur independently of what names and categories we give them.

For example, hordes of Twitter users have self-selected who they follow until they're exposed to opinions that agree with their own. This is and has been happening out there, in the real world, to real people. Humans, being pattern recognizers, naturally think of this effect in terms of "bubbles" or "echo chambers." These are not defined in a strict mathematical sense, and they don't actually exist, but the phenomenon certainly does.

[la_barba]

>These are not defined in a strict mathematical sense, and they don't actually exist, but the phenomenon certainly does.

That's my point, I'm disputing the central assertion that these phenomenon actually model reality.

>For example, hordes of Twitter users have self-selected who they follow until they're exposed to opinions that agree with their own. This is and has been happening out there, in the real world, to real people.

You can always point to people who unfollow others when exposed to world-view-contradicting opinions. But it hasn't been shown that they always do it, or do it for the same reason in every case. people can and do exhibit contradictory behavior, or have the wrong information, or are simply enjoying the drama, or are trolling, etc. The existence of these and other factors, which are just observations (not models) of human behavior, go against the nice and easy explanations of someone being in a bubble.

We like to put people inside neat little boxes with labels on them. Like you said - " Events occur independently of what names and categories we give them.".

[EForEndeavour]

> But it hasn't been shown that they always do it, or do it for the same reason in every case.

We don't need them to always do it, or for any reason. The fact is that it does happen, as evidenced by, e.g., https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-echo-chambers-are-very-rea...

[yoodenvranx]

> for a lot of people, including me, a lot of the value of HN is in the comments

If I have enough time to kill I usually read the comments first in order to figure out if the article is worth reading

[bobm_db]

I think a really useful interface / AI project would be to write something that categorizes all the comments being made to an article.

That way I could dive into specific comments on topics that interest me, and also decide which comment branches to follow.

I have no idea how this might be implemented though.

[hnjim]

I also find the comments more valuable and often reference a better version of the article so my path is: title-->comments-->article (often a better link or summary than the original).

[craftyguy]

> a lot of the value of HN is in the comments

I'd say this is rarely the case, the exception being technical posts where alternatives, etc are discussed. Most of the content on 'hacker' 'news' are product announcement spam and tesla/bitcoin/737/facebook drama posts that continue beating the respective dead horses. The comments sections for these are filled folks having 'discussions' inspired by the article title by throwing anecdotes at each other, and armchair investigators throwing anecdotes at each other in vain attempts to argue for/against whatever they interpret the article title to mean.

Very often I find myself just visiting 'hacker' 'news' while signed out to find interesting articles to read in all the drama noise and obvious spam.

n-gate.com, while meant to be a very sarcastic take on HN, is surprisingly accurate in their descriptions.