I rarely read even the articles with interesting titles that make it to HN's front page.
This is because when I did read more of them, they usually turned out to be a lot less interesting than the ensuing discussion on HN.
So now I use the HN discussion as a proxy for article quality. In the HN discussion I can often find a good summary of the article and get a sense of whether the article is likely to be worth reading or not.
Only maybe 1 out of 10 articles or less that I look interesting to me on HN wind up ones that I actually bother to click through. And of the ones I click through, only 1 out of 10 wind up deserving of being read rather than skimmed.
Some years back, there were a couple of "HN Full Feed" type RSS feeds, that would send the contents of the entire linked article, so I could read them without even bothering to go on to the web site.
I valued these services not only because they were more convenient in that it made clicking through and waiting for the aritcle to load no longer necessary, but also because there'd be less tracking of my interests this way.
I also have javascript disabled for 99% of the sites I visit, and am considering starting to use TOR for more of my browsing. It's really nobody's business what I'm reading, and it's a real pity the Internet wasn't built with more inherent privacy and anonymity features.
Agreed, I'm the same way, I probably haven't clicked an article on HN in weeks, I usually just read the comment sections of articles that have interesting titles.
Yet that discussion is littered with uninformed pot-shots at the topic. We can hope that more than 6% of the HN comments come from folks who read/understand the topic I guess.
Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff? Can you think of a way to measure this? Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful.
"Btw how did you accumulate your '1 in 10' stats? Off the cuff?"
Yep. Just a rough estimate based on my sense of how many articles I actually bother clicking through to. Having a more accurate estimate of my own click-through rate would not be valuable to me, so I never bothered to try to find out.
"Can you think of a way to measure this?"
If I was interested in gathering such stats for myself, I suppose I could use a browser add-on to measure my HN use.
Alternatively, HN could start using indirect links. But I'm not sure if I'd stay with HN if they started doing that. I hate being spied upon, which is one major reason I stopped using Google, and would probably drop HN as well if they started going down that road. Not that HN really needs to do that, since they already know which HN discussion pages I open and what I write (which are reasons for me to start making myself a bit more anonymous in my HN use).
"Because I don't think 1 in 10 articles 'deserve to be read'. Somebody DID read them, took the time to post them here. So for some audience at least they were meaningful."
It all depends on who the audience is, doesn't it? If you aim for the lowest common denominator, you'll probably get a bigger audience. This is a major reason for much of the mainstream media content being such utter garbage (from my perspective).
Also, just because someone clicked through on an HN link doesn't mean that they liked what they found when they got there. The same goes for tracking of people clicking on "Like" buttons or even sending links to their friends.
People could have all sorts of reasons for clicking "Like" buttons that have nothing to do with them enjoying or even reading the content. And I can't count the number of times I've forwarded unread articles to friends because I thought it might be something they might be interested in, but that I had no interest in myself.
This is because when I did read more of them, they usually turned out to be a lot less interesting than the ensuing discussion on HN.
So now I use the HN discussion as a proxy for article quality. In the HN discussion I can often find a good summary of the article and get a sense of whether the article is likely to be worth reading or not.
Only maybe 1 out of 10 articles or less that I look interesting to me on HN wind up ones that I actually bother to click through. And of the ones I click through, only 1 out of 10 wind up deserving of being read rather than skimmed.
Some years back, there were a couple of "HN Full Feed" type RSS feeds, that would send the contents of the entire linked article, so I could read them without even bothering to go on to the web site.
I valued these services not only because they were more convenient in that it made clicking through and waiting for the aritcle to load no longer necessary, but also because there'd be less tracking of my interests this way.
I also have javascript disabled for 99% of the sites I visit, and am considering starting to use TOR for more of my browsing. It's really nobody's business what I'm reading, and it's a real pity the Internet wasn't built with more inherent privacy and anonymity features.