[TeMPOraL]

My personal experience tells me that places like HN and some higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides. Often it's tangents (and plenty of submissions are posted just to start and anchor a conversation; reading submission is literally not the point), but often enough it's actual experts, or people with first-hand knowledge of the submission's topics, even people talked about in the submission, popping in and thoroughly debunking all the bullshit the submission itself has.

Of course, there's also commenters posting uninformed bullshit on the submission topic without actually reading the submission. But, again from experience, those comments have tell-tale smells, which you learn to recognize.

[Kaibeezy]

OP. Yep. I wanted to read an article on this topic. When I read this one, I wanted more perspective. I know where to go for that, so here we are.

[bumby]

>higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides.

I have this experience too, until I remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. There are certain forums where there appear to be loads of high value takes, people discussing with confidence and conviction. And then you run into those same types of comments on a topic you’re actually a relative expert in, and they prove to be quite low value perspectives, but said with the same confidence and conviction. That tends to temper my feelings that any low-effort medium can be generalized as high-value.

[TeMPOraL]

That's a good point, and a thing to remember. However, wrt. to what I wrote, my experience is mostly based on hanging out in places and reading comments on topics I understand to some degree - somewhere between an informed amateur and a relative expert, depending on specific topics. There are also some factors that help compensate for Gell-Mann amnesia effect:

- Comments are conversations -- in a quality community, low-value perspectives will get taken apart, and you can kind of get a feel from the conversation itself whether or not any of the participants actually know what they're talking about;

- Communities transcend individual discussions -- hang out in a community long enough, and you start to recognize other participants; over time, you'll learn who's an expert in what, and then those people become your reference points.

Say, e.g., I look at a subthread where some X, Y and Z talk deeply about cybersecurity, above my level of comfort. Normally I wouldn't be able to tell who, if anyone, is right, but over the years I've seen many comments of Y and learned that they're an actual domain expert on cybersec - so now the way Y responds to X and Z, and how the two react to Y's comments, give me a way to indirectly determine whether X and Z know what they're talking about.

And so on. Lots of natural, fuzzy human reputation tracking stuff - but that works in communities (like HN), not in one-off interactions (like a random article submitted to HN).

[bumby]

I think that makes sense, but it implies the quality is really a function of the curation. That’s true regardless of the forum, though; I can have a high quality Twitter feed by carefully curating it, but that doesn’t mean Twitter is an inherently high-quality forum.

[TeMPOraL]

s/curation/moderation/, and then it works for forums. Case in point, HN.