Internet comments

I sometimes wonder what fraction of commenters on places like HN and reddit have actually read the article. Every once in a while, and article is mis-titled such that the title doesn’t reflect the content of the article at all. When that happens, most of the comments (and sometimes all of the comments) will reflect the title and not the content. There are some biases here because articles with incorrect titles probably aren’t a random sample of all articles, but this at least indicates that it’s plausible that most internet comments are made by people who haven’t read the article.

A related phenomena is that the comments on any event or business-related story (e.g., the announcement or cancellation of a product line, or why a business unit announced profitability at a point in time) are almost certain to be wrong. There are couple of well respected HN commenters who regularly explain “why” some event is happening in a way that sounds really authoritative. In every case where I’m familiar with actual events, the explanation in the comments is completely and totally wrong. It’s always a plausible story, told in a way that makes it sound like the person knows what they’re talking about, but the explanation is always unrelated to what actually happened.

In general, people who have direct knowledge of things aren’t going to comment on them publicly. People with indirect knowledge might comment publicly, but that’s still rare unless they’re in a position to get anonymous tips; people who are don’t tend to put their information up in the comments sections of articles or news aggregators. It’s often possible to, with enough sleuthing, figure out what’s going on, but as with the above, but the time it takes to do that makes it unlikely for the product of a bunch of sleuthing to just happen to show up in the half day or day that a story has active comments.

While there’s a very limited number of people who actually know what’s going on and those people are unlikely to comment, there are an effectively unlimited number of people who don’t know what’s going on but are willing to authoritatively speculate in a way that doesn’t sound like speculation, any some of them are serial commenters.

This is worse than it sounds. Commenting on the internet trains people to comment in a way that gets their comments upvoted. Serial commenters are good at writing comments that people like that will get upvoted. On the very rare occasion that someone who knows what they’re talking about drops in, it’s likely that person isn’t as good at writing comments as the speculators and so the actually useful comments are much less likely to get upvoted. On purely technical stories, good comments at sometimes be saved because enough people familiar with the area will elevate the good comment above bogus speculation, but when it comes to events, there are few enough people who know what’s going on that any votes from people who are familiar with the event are going to be drowned out by people who upvote things that sound authoritative and plausible.

Despite everything I’ve just said, my first reflex when browsing news aggregators is to click on the comments for interesting sound stories and then click on the article of the comments indicate that it’s worthwhile. I obviously shouldn’t do this and I wonder how I got into this habit. One reason is that, when I’m in the subway or in another place with slow internet, HN comments will actually load, whereas articles on most sites that, uhhh, aren’t my site, won’t load. But reading pointless speculation just because it will load isn’t a good idea, and if that’s the main reason, I definitely shouldn’t have let that become a habit when I’m browsing on a “real” internet connection.