[krapp]

When people don't read the article, they tend to do one of two things - comment on the title (which is often misleading) or use the title as a springboard for politically-driven polemic. Both drive down the quality of discussion considerably. The fewer people who read the article there are, the less substantive the discussion becomes, less insightful, less novel, more tedious and repetitive. The best comments are, invariably, informed by the content of a well-written, insightful article.

The goal of this community is to gratify intellectual curiosity. If most people the forum and never engage with the posted content, preferring only to engage with other, similarly unenlightened commenters, how is that curiosity ever going to be gratified?

It's as if Hacker News were a book club and you said it wasn't that important to actually read the books. Yes, it's possible to discuss A Confederacy of Dunces by only having read the cover and back blurb and hoping someone else in the group actually did the legwork, but why join a book club in the first place if you care so little about reading?

Unfortunately, I think your other points are correct. It isn't possible or even feasible to force people to read the articles. More people have to want to put in the effort and if they don't, they don't. There should at least be as much social pressure within the community to expect people to engage with content as there is to suppress humor or incivility, but the insularity and elitism of the culture here makes that infeasible. There's no way to engineer this, people have to care more.

[brudgers]

Because HN allows comments to wander...or jump on an airplane to a different continent...reading the article is not a prerequisite for good comments and discussion. The articles are mainly an excuse to type into little boxes.

The main thing that produces good discussion is good comments. The double converse is also the case. And a recognized problem: people read the article to find something negative to say...cherry picked quotations taken uncharitably is a proven method with the bonus of suggesting that the commentor actually read the article (but it is easier if something early in the article is a call to angry typing in outrage).

To put it another way, HN is able to have interesting conversations about lists, diagrams, and landing pages. Thin low information blog posts that are only worth reading for their headlines can spark deep informative comment pages.

To put it another way (again), Ask HN is a ready example of how little catalyst the community needs at times. The article is a spark and if it lands on the right intellectual tinder you get a great inferno.

[For polemic reading the article matters not. Polemitians bring their own tinder to the forest and find fuel in the comments no matter how good.]

[tomjen3]

Old angry man rant incoming.

>comment on the title (which is often misleading)

I grew up with the understanding that in a newspaper you should be able to read the title and get to know what happen and then be able to progressively read more if you wanted more details.

When the title is not accurate enough, or is click-bait, maybe we should start there with the AI there?

[jstx1]

Newspapers use (used?) an inverted pyramid structure because the bottom of the article can often be cut in editing so everything fits correctly on the page. As a newspaper journalist, this is out of your control so you need to make sure that your text makes sense even if one or more paragraphs are cut from the bottom.

I suppose it helps with attention and assimilating information too.