Why I Stopped Reading Hacker News Comments

The signal to noise ratio is just darn low.

First, let us agree that writing articles is not easy

Imagine a person who dedicates some portion of his time and energy to write about something on his blog. The topic must be pretty important for him to justify his devotion, otherwise why do it? If you have ever written a piece of article on a blog, then you know that it could take at least 1 hour to have a piece of text that is almost publishable. More often than not, though, this process starts several days (even weeks, months, years) before you start writing about it. When writing the article, you may find yourself doing some or all of the following:

• You start by organizing your thoughts and coming up with a tentative plan for the article. What is the topic? What are the headings and subheadings? How much are you willing to write about it? etc.
• You write, erase, write again, make corrections, edit, etc. Writing is by no means a linear process. You will go back and forth between sentences and paragraphs in order to make the article flow better. You try to come up with better opening lines for paragraphs to make them coherent with the previous ones, and as you keep writing, you discover things that you had not thought about when devising your plan in step 1.
• You search for suitable images. While Google has made it easier than ever to find pictures, it still takes much effort and time to narrow down the…