Do you ever browse HN on the New Comments page?

I just looked at it for the first time. While reading down it, I got the feeling that I was a content moderator looking for stuff violating the HN guidelines. So maybe it's useful for dang?

Otherwise, comments out of context do seem pretty useless.

I am building a smart RSS feeder that works like Tinder, I give articles a thumbs up or thumbs down. Right now on the weekdays the system shows me a bit less than half of the articles it ingests.

Early when I didn’t have a lot of text I tried the new comments RSS feed and mixed those in with other RSS articles. I had the same problem you had.

I still have the top comments RSS feed going into the system, it is better but still not that great. The highest ranking comments that it shows me have a predicted probability of 0.3 that I’ll like them compared to 0.7 or so about for articles about the NFL and 0.2 for articles about the other kind of football.

What I’d say is that some comments do stand on their own, but many don’t. There is the dependence of the comment on the prior conversation. Some comments make sense without that but you may find the comments to that comment will change the meaning for the comment for me. My take is that the bag-of-words classifier I use for articles is not so good for comments because it does not take context into account.

Always.

The default page is heavily biased towards the common denominator of technology understanding and intellectual curiosity, and it is also manipulated by people with a strong left leaning bias.

The "new" tab is where I find a lot of the more domain specific tech articles and also some interesting topics worth paying attention to before they get censored.

Sometimes when I'm bored. The comments are so new that they haven't been filtered yet, so there's a lot of noise compared to "main line" discussion, but you get a sort of cutting edge view of the collective instantaneous zeitgeist of HN.

But that's really only interesting briefly. The fun thing to do is find somebody who makes intelligent and constructive comments and then trawl through their comment history for other good comments. YMMV

I normally accidentally end up there. I find it leads to better content than browsing by headlines to be honest, just really unintuitive.

I tend to go Ask HN first, then my threads, then main page, then Show. But a lot of the good stuff is actually on the 4th page of news - things that are not controversial enough to get back and forth conversations, but interesting enough that someone comments on them after they're no longer featured.

I do it. Specifically, I go to "comments" and inmediately press the End key, and go back up from there; if I don't go into a tangent before I reach the top, I refresh the page (and press End again).

This yields links and discussions I would otherwise miss, so I still do it sometimes. YMMV.

Edit: mixed "new" and "comments". Fixed.

Yes it’s almost always a mistake now. I used to be able to find interesting threads I might miss otherwise, but for a while I tend to just find whatever the most popular flame war thread at the time is.

I've accidentally hit the new comments page a few times

Always instantly regret doing so

I do. It's a good way to find articles I would have otherwise missed. It's also fun to catch a comment that's mid-argument so I can go right to it and catch up on the whole thread.

I’ve tried that a few times, but it’s not a thing that stuck for me, in fact I haven’t tried it in quite some time….

Sometimes I do it out of curiosity, I mean it's not as good quality content-dense as the most popular pages.

it shows you who commented last -- it's kinda like an RSS feed of most recent comments, it can be helpful for finding new accounts that you can trace back to their other contributions / comments