I think that was true during the age of the blog, but far less so now.
Comments and discussion of a post are to be found on third-party communities like Reddit, HN, or even Facebook. How many of us scan the list of comments under, say, a Substack post vs. will scroll through a page or two of HN comments for the same post?
IMO it's a foregone conclusion that a discussion on HN will be higher quality for a tech-related post than a comment chain on a specific post, since HN has already attracted a wider set of readers than 99.9% of all blogs.
The main advantage of commenting directly on a blog post is that the author is far more likely to see it vs. the ephemeral state of the post being on the HN front-page.
The more people join a social media site the worse the conversation gets.
This is already happening to HN as tech people flee Reddit.
Most of the new comments on any given post are people that didn't read the linked content and complain about stuff addressed in the second paragraph.
This is an evolutionary process where the commenters that get the most engagement are those that are first to respond or react. First-mover advantage entrenches itself as those posts are boosted higher due to the engagement they receive.
Those that think deeply before responding are discouraged when a well-thought out comment is buried beneath a sea of first impressions.
This reward cycle is amplified by more people, because engagement is very unequal on platforms that share a top comment or front page for everyone. You either make it to the first few comments or get nothing at all.
Sites like Discord or Facebook try to counteract the monopolization of engagement by an impulsive few by splitting users into smaller groups. Less competition for social interaction creates more diversity in winning strategies. Evolutionary pressures still exist, but you don't need to perfect a "winning strategy" solely to interact with other people on the platform.
Contrast Reddit or YouTube videos. The concentration of attention means it has monetary value due to SEO, product reviews, or advertising. The value of a large audience makes a platform more competitive. Competitiveness means many YouTubers and Redditors professionalize attention-seeking behaviour. This comes at the cost of quality.
Most of the new comments on any given post are people that didn't read the linked content and complain about stuff addressed in the second paragraph.
Almost everyone does that since I’m here and that is at least for 10 years. We even have a thread about it from time to time. HN is absolutely fine and didn’t change that much cause it disincentivizes attention seeking, at least cheap one. They may slip in from time to time but mostly get a cold shower from users and mods. Also this forum is much more tricky than it seems, from a technical standpoint.
Yes but that's okay at a smaller scale where all the users are more aligned and there's less karma to get. HN now is big enough that gaming the karma system by commenting quickly with rage or nostalgia bait is a winning strategy and for most general appeal topics on the site these days that's exactly what happens.
Part of that may be you learned to detect these behaviors and not always correctly. Another part may be old commenters getting nostalgic and/or angry (a thing in life).
Did my homework though and checked top ten threads and their first comments where all these karma people should be. All top comments are pretty HN spirited. One of these may be called nostalgic but has a specific request in it and doesn’t look like a bait.
Yeah these things are all pretty relative of the reader's perspective. FWIW I mean this specifically for the less technical threads. Technical threads still seem to rank contributions appropriately. But the moment you touch on something more cultural, like the long term computer thread, or the Mr Beast thread from the other day, you get a lot of pretty low signal comments that get a lot of karma. I do find that the very top of the comments page stays okay but the moment you get past the very top you get lots of low effort comments.
> Those that think deeply before responding are discouraged when a well-thought out comment is buried beneath a sea of first impressions.
A specific capability oh HN, that I take advantage of often, is being able to skip thread branches. It’s not uncommon for me to go a few messages, think “Nah”, tap “root”, then “next”, and, boom, a 100 first impressions vanish in a click of disinterest.
It’s a really great feature and can act as a crude filter for first impressions.
Exactly. Sometimes you see that a subthread goes sideways and just parent/root [-] it, and you’re back in the thread without parsing through non-interesting parts.
Comments and discussion of a post are to be found on third-party communities like Reddit, HN, or even Facebook. How many of us scan the list of comments under, say, a Substack post vs. will scroll through a page or two of HN comments for the same post?
IMO it's a foregone conclusion that a discussion on HN will be higher quality for a tech-related post than a comment chain on a specific post, since HN has already attracted a wider set of readers than 99.9% of all blogs.
The main advantage of commenting directly on a blog post is that the author is far more likely to see it vs. the ephemeral state of the post being on the HN front-page.