I guess it comes down to your perception of how bad comments are, generally. Like, for a given comments section, what percentage is "that's interesting, I'm glad I read that!", what percentage is ignored, and what percentage is "I fear for the future of humanity".
I would say HN has by far the best signal/noise ratio for comments of any site I read, but even here, the "I'm glad I read that" comments are maybe 10% of what's posted and the "I fear for humanity" is about the same.
YouTube or any local newspaper are the extreme examples, pretty much 100% "I fear for humanity" comments.
Ars Technica and The Verge seem to well above average, but they're 5% good/45% ignorable/50% freaking awful.
Engadget or any Gawker site seem to be about average for the Internet, 1% good/10% ignorable/89% freaking awful.
I guess what I'm saying is, with very very few exceptions, my personal experience on most sites (including small blogs with high quality content) has absolutely been that the comments are not only a distraction but almost always just make me depressed if I bother to read them. If I want to read comments on a particular article, I'd much rather do it on HN or (maybe, sometimes) a good subreddit.
I would say HN has by far the best signal/noise ratio for comments of any site I read, but even here, the "I'm glad I read that" comments are maybe 10% of what's posted and the "I fear for humanity" is about the same.
YouTube or any local newspaper are the extreme examples, pretty much 100% "I fear for humanity" comments.
Ars Technica and The Verge seem to well above average, but they're 5% good/45% ignorable/50% freaking awful.
Engadget or any Gawker site seem to be about average for the Internet, 1% good/10% ignorable/89% freaking awful.
I guess what I'm saying is, with very very few exceptions, my personal experience on most sites (including small blogs with high quality content) has absolutely been that the comments are not only a distraction but almost always just make me depressed if I bother to read them. If I want to read comments on a particular article, I'd much rather do it on HN or (maybe, sometimes) a good subreddit.