I always read the comments here before the article. Usually the comments tell me everything I need to know and are more interesting. Most of the time I never end up clicking on the actual article because I've gotten enough info from the comments.
I have tendencies to want to do this, but I choose to stop myself, to remember that random (hopefully) people on the Internet aren't necessarily more reliable than some random article on the Internet. It's valuable to check one's sources, but how many people actually check the source of some random upvoted commenter? How many people have the capacity to verify the veracity of convincing-sounding Hacker News comments?
Same. It happens often that the comments repudiate or at least undermine the article's claim. By the time I've read a few I've lost interest in said article.