Item — HN Reader

>The entire point of my proposal is simply that a summary of the article, longer than the article title but still relatively brief, can frequently be a better guide than the article title alone as to whether the article is worth reading. That's it.

Here's the line in the guidelines that seems to be eluding you in this whole discussion:

>It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

The fact that an article has been submitted is the "better guide" the site uses to indicate "whether the article is worth reading." Tomhow's comment says why HN has not seen this to be something that should change.

1 comments

It's implicit that the submitter of an article thinks it's worth reading. It's not implicit that other HN users think it's worth reading. Again, HN receives a new submission every few minutes. Not every article is worth our time; there's not enough time even if they were.

Thus, the point of the summary is for the submitter to explain to other users why the article is worth reading. Moreover, HN submissions are on a very broad range of topics, so even if an article is worth reading on a specific topic, readers are not interested in every topic. Some article titles are so vague that you can't even discern the topic!

>It's implicit that the submitter of an article thinks it's worth reading. It's not implicit that other HN users think it's worth reading.

This is what tptacek was noting in the search results he posted: Dang has made clear that HN is okay with having its readers "work a little."