No its pretty logical, I often get more info in comments than in article, plus many angles on topic. I only actually read the most interesting articles, often heading right into comments.

Often the title sort of explains the whole topic (ie lack of parking in NY, or astronomers found the biggest quasar yet), then folks chirp in with their experiences and insight which are sometimes pretty wild.

> To me, blogs and other articles feel like sales pitches, whereas comments are full of raw emotion and seem more honest. I end up seeking out discussions over buttoned up long-form articles.

Me too. That is why sometimes I take the raw comment thread and paste it into a LLM, the result is a grounded article. It contains a diversity of positions and debunking, but the slop is removed. Social threads + LLMs are an amazing combo, getting the LLM polish + the human grounded perspective.

If I was in the place of reddit or HN I would try to generate lots of socially grounded articles. They would be better than any other publication because they don't have the same conflict of interests.

I absolutely do that because I got so bullied that my personality shifted from self-expression to emulation. I realized that just this week because I caught myself copying a coworker he's respected and has people laughing with his jokes, and wondered why I have the tendency to do it.

But I never expected that this would also link back to my tendency to skip an article and just stick to what the top comments of a section have, HN or Reddit.

I think this is a really good take. It was mean for sure but you’re right. Why do we do this? This is a good reminder for me to click more articles instead of reading through comments and forming an opinion based on what I read from others.

Or they know themselves better than you do and it's exactly what they claimed.

I think that's a mean and disingenuous.

I often click on the HN comments before reading the article because the article I very often nothing more than the headline and I'm more interested in the discussion.

Probably also because a trust in the content of the website and articles has dropped because of much Enshittification has happened and a more trustworthy signal has found its location in people's discussion.

I mean, not necessarily. If there’s more eyes on the article and people share their opinions, then problems or mistakes in it will become more obvious, much like how code bugs can become shallow.

At the same time, I have no issue disagreeing with whatever is the popular stance, there’s almost some catharsis in just speaking the truth along the lines of “What you say might be true in your circumstances and culture, but software isn’t built like that here.”

Regardless, I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with finding likeminded peers either, for example if everyone around you views something like SOLID and DRY as dogma and you think there must be a better, more nuanced way.

Either that, or everyone likes a good tl;dr summary.

js cult will never ever understand this. designers need the courage to work with html+css only.

> sites shove in more ads to survive

This is where it breaks down; why would they shove in MORE ads when their readers are going down? I'm not saying it's a rational decision, of course.

I suspect a big part is metrics-driven development; add an aggressive newsletter popup and newsletter subscriptions increase, therefore it's effective and can stay. Add bigger / flashier ads and ad revenue increases, therefore the big and flashy ads can stay.

User enjoyment is a lot harder to measure. You can look at metrics like page visits and session length, but that's still just metrics. Asking the users themselves has two problems, one is lack of engagement (unless you are a big community already, HN doing a survey would get plenty of feedback), two is that the people don't actually know how they feel about a website or what they want (they want faster horses). Like, I don't think anybody asked Google for an AI summary of what they think you're searching for, but they did, and it made people stay on Google instead of go to the site.

Whether that's good for Google in the long run remains to be seen of course, back when Google first rolled out their ad problem it... really didn't matter to them, because their ads were on a lot of webpages. Google's targets ended up becoming "keep the users on the internet, make them browse more and faster", and for a while that pushed innovation too; V8, Chrome, Google DNS, Gears, SPDY/HTTP/2/3, Lighthouse, mod_pagespeed, Google Closure Compiler, etc etc etc - all invented to make the web faster, because faster web = more pageviews = more ad impressions = more revenue.

Of course, part of that benefited others; Facebook for example created their own ecosystem, the internet within the internet. But anyway.

Unless there's a conscious reset, like the Onion reboot. Now with physical copies!

Doesn't scale, but maybe that's the only way to survive.

I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's the perfect analogy.

What do HN comments and AI Overviews have in common?

- All information went through a bunch of neurons at least once

- We don't know which information was even considered

- Might be completely false but presented with utmost confidence

- ...?

Contradicting someone describing their own experience based on assumptions and generalizations that may or may not have a basis in reality is pretty arrogant. How are you so confident that you can presume to tell that person what’s going on in their mind?

More generally speaking though, I do agree that comments probably tend to give people more of a dopamine hit than the content itself, especially if it’s long-form. However comments on HN often are quite substantial and of high quality, at least relatively speaking, and the earlier point about reading the articles often being a poor experience has a lot of merit as well. Why can’t it be a combination of all of the above (to various degrees depending on the individual, etc)?

The majority of the linked articles is waaayyyyy too long for what they have to say, and they reveal the subject only many paragraphs in.

From reading one or a few short comments I at least know what the linked article is about, which the original headline often does not reveal (no fault of those authors, their blogs are often specialized and anyone finding the article there has much more context compared to finding the same headline here on a general aggregation site).

The troll gives me the main idea without having to find five tiny x's on the screen like some sadistic minigame then paywall me. I'll take the troll.

If you're only reading the comments you have no clue how often it actually works as a summary.

Temu ad just below the fold, no thank you.

.. strictly worse than HN's UI, and with a cookie banner and an ad.