It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to.
"Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field.
How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them.
I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them.
The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.
My personal experience tells me that places like HN and some higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides. Often it's tangents (and plenty of submissions are posted just to start and anchor a conversation; reading submission is literally not the point), but often enough it's actual experts, or people with first-hand knowledge of the submission's topics, even people talked about in the submission, popping in and thoroughly debunking all the bullshit the submission itself has.
Of course, there's also commenters posting uninformed bullshit on the submission topic without actually reading the submission. But, again from experience, those comments have tell-tale smells, which you learn to recognize.
>higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides.
I have this experience too, until I remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. There are certain forums where there appear to be loads of high value takes, people discussing with confidence and conviction. And then you run into those same types of comments on a topic you’re actually a relative expert in, and they prove to be quite low value perspectives, but said with the same confidence and conviction. That tends to temper my feelings that any low-effort medium can be generalized as high-value.
That's a good point, and a thing to remember. However, wrt. to what I wrote, my experience is mostly based on hanging out in places and reading comments on topics I understand to some degree - somewhere between an informed amateur and a relative expert, depending on specific topics. There are also some factors that help compensate for Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
- Comments are conversations -- in a quality community, low-value perspectives will get taken apart, and you can kind of get a feel from the conversation itself whether or not any of the participants actually know what they're talking about;
- Communities transcend individual discussions -- hang out in a community long enough, and you start to recognize other participants; over time, you'll learn who's an expert in what, and then those people become your reference points.
Say, e.g., I look at a subthread where some X, Y and Z talk deeply about cybersecurity, above my level of comfort. Normally I wouldn't be able to tell who, if anyone, is right, but over the years I've seen many comments of Y and learned that they're an actual domain expert on cybersec - so now the way Y responds to X and Z, and how the two react to Y's comments, give me a way to indirectly determine whether X and Z know what they're talking about.
And so on. Lots of natural, fuzzy human reputation tracking stuff - but that works in communities (like HN), not in one-off interactions (like a random article submitted to HN).
I think that makes sense, but it implies the quality is really a function of the curation. That’s true regardless of the forum, though; I can have a high quality Twitter feed by carefully curating it, but that doesn’t mean Twitter is an inherently high-quality forum.
"Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field.
How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them.
I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them.
The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.