Submission titles are necessarily brief, not only on the author's side but on the HN side, whose title field has a limit of 80 characters. Some article titles are clickbait, and others are too clever for their own good, but even if the author is trying hard to accurately portray the content of the article, there's only so much you can say in a title.
The result of this situation is that HN readers end up clicking on articles that they would not be interested in reading if they knew what the articles were about, and they avoid clicking on articles that they would be interested in reading. As a workaround, some HN readers just go straight to the comments to see whether the article is worth reading. However, the comments tend to be hit or miss, ironically for that very same reason: a lot of readers are going straight to the comments without reading the article, so there's a kind of tragedy of the commons where a large % of the commenters are ignorant about the article. Moreover, even for commenters who have read the article, casually dismissive comments can rise to the top, upvoted by readers who haven't read the article.
What I'm suggesting, then, is that as a matter of standard practice, it could be very useful for article submitters to summarize the article in the submission text. Presumably the person who submits and article has read the article and is not dismissive of it, considers the article worth submitting. And if the submitter has not read the article before submitting, the absence of a summary would be at least a semi-reliable indicator of that fact.
I think it would be interesting to have expanded HN submission lists that include summaries inline, perhaps with the summaries limited to a certain number of characters.
I'm afraid that you've completely missed my point. I do want to click links to other sites, which is precisely why I come here.
I said, for example, HN readers "avoid clicking on articles that they would be interested in reading" due to article titles that are uninformative.
Nobody has the time or desire to click on every submitted HN article. (I think HN may average a submission every few minutes.) The point of summaries is to direct readers toward the articles that they would be interested in. This would also tend to increase the value of the submission comments, because currently HN readers click on articles that they regret clicking on and come back to the comments to complain about them.
A summary is not a replacement for reading an article. A summary tells you why you should read an article. Call it a "pitch" rather than a "summary" if you like. The problem is that article titles themselves do not make good pitches, but that's the only current pitch we have.
The main reason is the same reason for insisting that the original title be used (unless it is baity or misleading); it's not fair to the author or the community for someone to take it upon themselves to re-phrase the title or the article’s content into something different from what the author wrote themselves.
The community won't know – without reading the full version – whether the rephrased version is an accurate reflection of the author's original words or ideas. But some commenters will write comments in response to the rephrased version, rather than the original, which causes the discussion thread to be poisoned.
We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting. Of course, many won't, but at least if any misplaced comments are based on a mis-reading or non-reading of the article, it won't be due to an inaccurate summary that is tacitly endorsed by HN.
To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors. You must be aware of this, yes?
I think it would be refreshing to have a summary from the submitter who, more likely than other commenters, read the article and appreciates it. As an article author, I say that I'm least worried about the submitter being unfair to me.
> We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting.
The community missed here is the people who not only don't read the article but don't comment either, who completely ignore the article, because the article title was uninformative.
I gave an example in another thread of a submission whose title is so vague as to be practically meaningless to those deciding whether to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966
In the absence of a useful title, the only way for someone to determine whether an article is worth reading is to check the upvotes and/or the comments. But that, I think, makes the anti-summary attitude ironic, because upvotes and comments don't come from the original author. Indeed, one of the reasons that many people go to the comments before reading the article—and HN users explicitly say this—is that they want to determine whether the article is worth reading. From my perspective, a brief summary or "pitch" if you will, would encourage more people to read the article and/or discourage people from reading an article that they come back and complain about having read.
And I would say, by the way, that one of the main reasons that submitters editorialize the article title is the title itself is not particularly informative.
> tacitly endorsed by HN
I'm not sure what this means exactly. In one sense, every submission and comment on HN, even the comments from people who haven't read the article, or comments that are otherwise inaccurate, is tacitly endorsed by HN, except perhaps those that have been specifically moderated by you. Indeed, you might even say that HN tacitly endorses every article that is linked by HN!
In another sense, though, a submission, and the proposed summary of the submission is not endorsed by HN but rather by the HN user who submitted it, whose username is attached to the submission. And I don't see a problem with that. This is always the case for a website with user-submitted content. Everyone can tell the difference between the site and the user.
By the way, while a moderator is here, the person who apparently summoned you here accused me of sealioning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948008
This reads as if you're confusing HN the site (and its goals) with HN the community (and the behaviors of those people). The ideal is that the site goals and the community behavior would be identical. We know that's not how things unfold in practice.
Either the title entices me to read the article, or it doesn't. Both are fine. Besides, I'm here for the discussion, not the articles.
If you want to have summaries, create a browser plugin that automatically summarizes the articles. Do a write-up about the plugin and submit that as an article itself. I'd read that! You then scratched your itch and others might benefit. Without changing HN itself. Win-win!
Why even bother having URL submissions then?
> create a browser plugin that automatically summarizes the articles
I assume that by "automatically" you mean by LLM?
No thanks. The only reason HN interests me is that it's curated by humans. Otherwise, I could just skip HN entirely and have LLMs pick out lists of articles for me to read. In fact I could skip HN users comments and generate those by LLM too. Who needs humans, right?
I think that's because most folks don't know how to do it or aren't able to do so. I don't know how some folks make text posts underneath their URL submissions, unless they are asking mods for help or using some kind of special post type like Ask HN/Show HN. Even then I'm not sure if that's all that is needed for users alone to make these kinds of text+URL submissions without mod intervention.
So if you are saying that this is a thing that is already supported but not used, can you link to such a post that you have made? As it is, I'm not sure that HN even lets you make posts like that.
Otherwise, I guess you can be the change you wish to see, but the guidelines argue directly against the point you're making, basically saying that commentary (which would include a blurb or summary) should go in a comment, not in the submission itself. No one is stopping you from summarizing articles, but just know that AI/LLM and other kinds of generated commentary is against HN guidelines to my reading also, so you would have to do that yourself. It seems likely that what you're asking for would result in more rehashing and less original content, but if that rehashing serves some kind of useful editorial function to raise awareness of content that is otherwise relevant and topical to HN and to its users, then your idea might have some potential merit, but I think it would be gamed by bad actors, and I think the bad actors would benefit more from this change than good actors and existing/future HN users.
I'm cautiously pessimistic on this idea, but willing to hear more about why you think it would help rather than allow charlatans and sophists to invisibly rewrite history and the present to bake in their own ideology and beliefs.
I think that HN simply makes your text the first comment. For example, here I linked to a social media post, and it made sense to quote the entire post to save a click: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556661
> the guidelines argue directly against the point you're making, basically saying that commentary (which would include a blurb or summary) should go in a comment, not in the submission itself.
Where do the guidelines say this? I'm not seeing it.
> AI/LLM and other kinds of generated commentary is against HN guidelines to my reading also, so you would have to do that yourself.
Definitely. I'm not calling for AI summaries. I don't want AI summaries.
> It seems likely that what you're asking for would result in more rehashing and less original content
Why?
> I think it would be gamed by bad actors
What do you mean by a bad actor?
> allow charlatans and sophists to invisibly rewrite history and the present
I honestly have no idea what this means in the context under discussion, especially the "invisibly" part but also the rest of your claim.
The submitter writes a brief summary of the submitted article. Everyone knows it's the submitter's summary. The worst that can happen is that the submitter writes a bad summary, you click the link, and the article turns out to be not what you expected. This already happens with article titles. Then you can come back and complain about the summary in the comments to the submission. I'm not seeing what the big deal is here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935658
Your other points are answered in the guidelines, news guidelines, and/or comments by mods, which are also considered part of the guidelines.