Ask dang: How many HN comments per day do you read?

[crusso]

While we're at it - thanks, Dang. You do a lot of hard work keeping HN a place worth visiting. I even appreciated the time or two you corrected me personally.

The comments sections of most online forums are about useless and I know that places like HN don't stay this way by accident.

[thucydides]

The quality of the comments here is so high that I often preface my Google searches with "site:news.ycombinator.com" when I'm researching technical stuff.

[colinbartlett]

The Shut Up Chrome extension[1] is one of my favorites and HN is one of my few whitelisted sites.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shut-up/oklfoejikk...

[dang]

I'm not sure. Probably a few hundred.

[sktrdie]

dang that's a lot.

[ethbro]

Do you feel reading that many random comments has an impact on you? Hopefully we keep the experience net positive.

[pgbovine]

also thanks from the countless numbers of additional people who mostly read this site and don't comment much

[maxxxxx]

I sometimes read only the comments and not the article. I think that's a bad thing :-(

[jeffwass]

I do that too at times.

Sometimes I'm more interested in the tech scene's opinion on an article than the actual article itself.

Other times, if an article is excessively long, or is a video, I look for someone that summarised the gist.

On that note - am I the only one who would prefer to read transcripts of videos than watch videos themselves? Specifically news sites that only have the video report and not any accompanying text.

[jakub_g]

I often start by reading HN comments to know if the article is worth reading :)

[dasil003]

A decade ago I would have agreed with you. In blogging's heyday in general I found online articles to be of much higher value than the comments, especially as Slashdot descended into pure meme-dom.

But these days there is a confluence of factors that have driven average web content quality through the floor. Whether it's the highly tuned click-bait industry, the easy accessibility of turnkey viral content platforms like Medium encouraging banal populist "think" pieces, or just the mainstreaming of tech startups as an average career path, whatever it is the average article I see these days is worth far less than the attention it expects.

I'm not sure whether HN comments are the best use of my time either, but middlebrow dismissals not withstanding, at least they aren't a race to the bottom.

[HalcyonicStorm]

Yeah, I use the comments to vet the article and see if its worth reading

[omegant]

When I'm browsing from the airplane wifi I just can't afford to waste 4 megas in just trying to open a simple text site (that will not charge completely by the way). So I open HN and I´m still able to read about the news but just expending a few Ks for each one.

[jnpatel]

also: do you use any special tools to help monitor comments, or just https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments ?

[dang]

Lots of special tools. I'm working on revising them so we can open-source the parts that are useful for general reading.

Right now it's a Chrome extension, but I'd love to serve it as plain JS. Anybody know if you can give a web app privileges to open and close tabs without making it a browser extension?

(Don't worry, btw; if we ever publish this it will be entirely opt-in.)

[Reedx]

A lot.

I actually optimize for the comments, heh. I open HN links in new tabs and then wait a day or two for the discussion to complete before reading through them. So I don't end up refreshing for new comments or re-reading the same ones.

There are a couple downsides to this though: One, I generally miss the window for participation. Two, my browser is perpetually filled with dozens of HN tabs.

[jsnell]

There are browser extensions that mitigate both of your reasons to delay reading the comments. I use hckr news (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle...), which does the following:

- Highlight any comments added since the last time you loaded the page with a little vertical orange bar.

- Change the hckrnews.com comment count display to show the number of unread comments in addition to the number of total comments.

[mk4p]

If you're on Chrome, you might like the "Tab Snooze" extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-snooze/pdiebia...

[Kiro]

Good comment but I think you missed an important part of the question. Unless you're dang's alt account.

[lexhaynes]

I often read the comments first, and then read the article. I love comments sections in general (Gawker, Gothamist, NYT come to mind in terms of decent commenters), but I've never learned as much as in the HN comments section.

I probably read ~500 comments a day on HN.

[CM30]

Depends if anything controversial has been posted that day. Some topics I read get hundreds of comments, some get about 3. So I guess it depends on whether there's a political war going on or some giant controversy in internet land, or whether anyone's staying reasonable for a few days or so.

[probinso]

O(n)

[CaiGengYang]

Depends on my mood ... probably about 10 per day

[askafriend]

Millions, or so it feels that way.

[tgb]

He reads only one HN comment per day, but it is always the correct one.

[dang]

A 'best of the day' feature has been on our minds for a long time. We really need a way to collect the amazing stuff this community produces.

[smeyer]

From the guidelines:

>Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to [email protected].

This may not specifically fall in that category, but you may still want to email if you don't get your answer here.

[dang]

Come now, let's not punish smeyer for a good-faith comment, even if people did turn out to like this thread.

[AlexandrP]

I think andreygrehov not only one who want to know the answer.

[anon987]

Less and less.

Too often comment chains devolve into nitpicking, pedantry, and into off-topic discussion where two people fight tooth and nail for Internet Points.

From a technical perspective I get little or nothing from them, and from a discussion standpoint there's little reason for me to spend my time watching people nitpick each other over things that nobody in the community cares about.

[firebones]

Don't forget the obligatory 18-comment critique of the OP site's design choices regarding page size, font, color scheme, and scrollbar and/or back button hijacking, not to mention hosting and CDN critique. It's common enough to warrant its own segregated meta thread for every post to keep it out of the on-topic discussion.

[ep103]

I get the distinct feeling we're getting more and more of reddit's overflow. If anyone knows any other websites like, HN, I'd love to hear about them.