HN Explorer

Ask HN: How much time do you spend on HN everyday ?

3 points by tophernash ↗ HN
And how do you manage it?

This could apply more broadly to social media, and other online communities like ProductHunt.

A few months ago, I deactivated my Facebook account and unfollowed most of the people I used to follow on Twitter. I tried it as an experiment, and it worked out great. I dont have any urge to visit FB any longer, and I save ~10 hours every week which I used to spend browsing (mostly) useless stuff on FB (I keep track of the hours via Rescuetime).

When I look at my monthly HN usage, I can see that I visit ~8 links (on average, posts and comments) via HN everyday. However, thinking deeper on it, I hardly remember anything that I read via those links over the past month. I have been consistently spending ~1 hour everyday on HN for ~4 years now, and have been recently considering drastically reducing the time I spend here, as an experiment to see how much I would miss it. Its one of the more difficult things to do because I love the HN community, but I could probably spend that 1 hour everyday on more productive activities.

4 comments

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boulos
How do / would you prefer to find "news"? I treat HN as a stream of stuff I would have missed otherwise with my limited set of RSS feeds (like you, limited on purpose to avoid making them infinite).

Seems like there's a follow-up: do you find reading actual news to be a waste of time?

tophernash
Yes, I find actual (TV) news to be a waste of time. It wasn't always like this. I used to follow news related to politics etc daily, until I realised I was spending too much energy and time on it, and over a long period it wasn't helping me.
tpiha
Even though I have an account for years now, I just recently got hooked on HN. I still don't have an estimate on how much time I spend on it, but I don't even care. Ok, I use it as a news aggregator and I'll probably forget about most of it in a few days, weeks or whatever, but more importantly, I use it to find out about resources too.

Resources for learning and for my job in general, for my own products or for my day job. I think it currently might be one of best places to stay informed and on top of latest technologies.

I don't think HN and Facebook belong in the same category here, at least not for most of people. Somebody can still use Facebook to get informed about the technology, but most people don't.

tophernash
> Resources for learning and for my job in general, for my own products or for my day job.

I agree with you on this. However, when I need resources to learn about a topic, I have found it more effective to just go to the HN Algolia search [1], and look for the most voted links for that topic.

For example, if I want resources on React, I would search "react" filtered by "past year" on Algolia [2]

I find this approach more effective because I dont have to be constantly following all the stories on HN, and keep bookmarking the resources I find useful.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=React&sort=byPopularity&prefix...