HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you manage to go through so much of good content posted on HN?

59 points by sbmthakur ↗ HN
A lot of good content is posted on HN. However, I am unable to read/watch most of it. I do use Pocket to store articles for future reading. But the list gets big too quickly and I find it overwhelming to finish all of it.

Any specific technique or tool you use to manage all this content?

79 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread
gtirloni
I don't have a technique to manage all this content. I've been working on the opposite. Here are some disconnected thoughts.

First, realize you don't need (or can't) known everything. There's too much content out there. You'll get overloaded and burn out.

Not everything is useful to you. Sure, it's always good to read about things outside one's bubble to get new insights, but that will occur naturally if you're a curious person. Fight that urge.

After trying to minimize the amount of things that go into your to-read bucket, you'll notice you still have too much to read. Filter again and be okay with missing something. When you actually have an issue in front of you, you'll know how to find the solution. No need to cram everything into your brain.

exolymph
> Filter again and be okay with missing something.

Yes, this is key. You just have to accept that there is vastly more interesting material in the world than you can ever possibly digest. Then be very discerning about what you pick.

exolymph
I mainly read the comments, rarely the articles themselves. (That's not to say that I don't read articles in general — I do, but I mostly find them via Twitter.) Usually, I'm much more interested in what the community has to say about a given topic or issue than I am about the object-level news.
jvzr
Same. I use hckrnews.com to have an up-to-date list of recent topics discussed on HN, quickly skim it for headlines that stand out, but mostly focusing on highly-commented posts (50+ when in the morning, 20+ later on in the day), and I read comments first.
sbmthakur
hckrnews.com looks cool. Thanks for sharing.
piva00
Normally I don't do this but: third here, didn't expect it to be so common.

Probably the difference for me is that I live in Europe so I tend to catch up to a bunch of posts from the evening/night in the US during my morning coffee and then open hckrnews.com again by the end of the afternoon when some new posts begin to crop up.

I'll read the articles with interesting headlines but always jump to the comments first, some articles that I really think could help me in the future (or deserve further reading or research) I will save to my todo-list or in my Pocket account and then set a reminder to re-read/research in a given day when I'm free.

tebugst
Woow. I too do the same. But I browse only 1st page in morning (30+) and later I went thr' other pages.
YouKnowBetter
The quality of the comments might make me read the article, but that is 1 in 10. I admire the fast groups of subjectmatterexperts who will quickly prais or debunk the content of the articles and post links that are even more interesting.

Further, I use https://theoldreader.com to subscribe to the RSS feed, makes all my "monitoring" a lot easier.

craftyguy
Reading other comments here, it seems that nearly all HN users read the comments and not the article. If no one is reading the actual article, then that means HN users are reacting to an article title and to each other (also reacting to an article title)?
CM30
This seems to be a common thing with aggregators in general. As someone who's seen their work posted to Reddit and other sites (or has posted it there themselves), the aggregator topics seem to get a lot more views and comments than the source article does.

I think in many cases, the system comes down to "upvote the topic and comment if I agree with the premise (or what seems to be it), or downvote the article and comment if I disagree with the premise (or what I think it seems to be)"

lostmsu
It is not that simple. For one, I only put the first comment under an article after reading it. Which does not happen until I am interested in the topic.

I mostly rely on top level commenters replying to the article content, often with quotes, and then go down into discussion from there.

yehosef
This is because you are reading comments of people that write comments. People that write comments, (usually) read comments. There are lots of people that read comments that don't write comments and probably even more that don't read comments and click on the links.

For the last group, the votes and number of comments are just signals for how good the link is - they don't care about the comments.

Toast_25
The problem about this is that a LOT of users that seem knowledgeable pull shit out of their ass. I've seen this many times here: I read the article and then the comments and they just end up being elaborate bullshit based on a title and previous "knowledge" (often refuted by the article itself) rather than informed discussion.
huehehue
This goes both ways. Articles aren't always 100% trustworthy either, and in that case a commenter might just as well offer a valid counterpoint or correction(s).

As with anything, be reasonable. If you're really interested, then use whatever content is available to educate yourself, be it comments, the article itself, or independent research.

Toast_25
I agree, the cases that bother me are the ones where it's painfully obvious the commenter didn't read the article. I enjoy reading counterpoints and is one of the main reasons I read the comments.
shahbaby
I try to limit myself to things that actually pertain to me.
DoreenMichele
Any specific technique or tool you use to manage all this content?

I am medically handicapped. I spend a lot of time convalescing. HN helps minimize the degree to which I go stir crazy while doing so.

I don't recommend it as a method.

I know from long experience that the assumption is that those doing a lot of X are overachievers to be emulated and their perceived accomplishments to be aspired to. Such perceptions aren't necessarily accurate.

ochronus
I also use Pocket - each evening I go through my RSS reader (HN is included) and click what looks interesting, I skim the article (10 secs) and if it indeed looks interesting/useful/valuable I save it to Pocket and I add a label. Labels help me to revisit Pocket in a more systematic way and I also re-filter Pocket from time to time.
greenmana
Can you or anyone recommend some good RSS readers these days? Thanks.
_hao
Inoreader is by far the best option!
ochronus
I'm a pretty much happy user of Feedly
LVB
If you happen to run your own server, give https://tt-rss.org a try. It is straightforward and has all the essentials I expect in an RSS reader. There are mobile clients too. I’ve used it for a number of years with good results and almost no maintenance.
flear
I use http://hckrnews.com/ as an interface.

Depending on how much time I have, I filter by Top 10 / Top 20 or "All posts".

m4tthumphrey
My technique is to simply keep checking back every few hours and never go past page 1.
imron
Ignore most of it!

In the grand scheme of things, most of the 'good' content really is not that good. It might be interesting - or more interesting that what you should be working on, but a year from now most of it will be irrelevant.

You can save a lot of time by ignoring it.

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eqtn
I use feedly to manage rss. I like to read comments about the article more than the article itself.
eimg
RSS reader. I use Feedly to subscribe HN altogether with dozen of other sources and receive somewhat around a hundred posts daily. I read through all headlines. But only go through a few that really interest me.

It doesn't help much with filtering content but it help you make sure you don't miss anything interesting.

n17r4m
Firefox mostly, but I get what you are asking for. Ultimately my brain, I know I should bookmark more great links, but I guess in the end I just hope I remember them.

Besides that, just have my own forked merge of exolymph's and m4tthumphrey's replies.

As in another discussion, it's just part of life.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16338723 . If it wasn't HN, it would be slashdot, or ars, or medium, or searching deep into the web for ghost hosts.

n17r4m
Excuse me for replying to myself, but on a different topic. What ever happened to bookmarklets?

LPT for those that enjoy going insane by reading things at super speed: http://spritzinc.com/get-spritz . [no affiliation]

voltooid
I open up links to articles that seem interesting to me at that moment, skim through and find out if it is indeed still interesting, leave it in a browser tab to come to later. I come back to my browser tabs and ask myself if I still am interested in the article. Close it if the answer isn't a resounding yes.
pm
I read through half and then bookmark everything. I have years of articles to go through. So, I don't actually manage it, and really need to.
[dead] blindpixel
I scan HN once in the morning and before going to sleep. I save interesting links to pocket and then listen to them at 1.5x speed during my commute or free time. BTW Pocket's TTS has definitely gotten better now barring a few obvious errors. The experience is largely good.
gamapuna
I use hn.algolia, if there's some topic I am interested in searching there usually fives me the most relevant HN link
prorsum
I've created a slack channel and configured an RSS reader that periodically sends new posts to that channel. I find it quite useful because it is push model rather than pull, which avoids switching context just to check if there is anything interesting. Another positive thing posts remain in the slack which allows sharing, threading, pinning, favouriting, searching etc.
dotdi
In the morning, I get a coffee and open up all the interesting articles into tabs on hckrnews.com, which I then stack (using Vivaldi browser).

I'll go through these tabs during the day when I need a break or have some downtime. The HN tab stack is helpful because I know the other open tabs have something to do with work.

If I'm intrigued by what I read in the article, I'll read comments on HN, but often I completely ignore them.

fsloth
I ignore most of the articles posted. I get this intuitive "itch to read" when I see an interesting topic and that is a sufficient filter to me. It's not like this is important, anyway, it's mostly only news and blogposts :)
jgtrosh
A life-long practice from lower-tier websites like Reddit of seeing way too much content go past to ever try and catch up with everything. When I was young and 9gag came to existence I remember being able of seeing everything that was posted by checking it out once a day. I learned to give up back then, and now on a vastly more interesting website like HN I enjoy finding interesting bits every day but don't expect to know about everything that happened.
thisisit
Okay this might get weird.

I was (am) kind of perfectionist. So I used to feel pressured by the sheer amount of content and feeling what I was missing. I have been doing mindfulness for a month now and it has helped me come to terms with this overload of information.

Now, I don't get bogged by the fact that I missed reading something. Previously I used to read every topic possible - cryptocurrency, finance, technology, blog posts or writeups - even about technology which I am sure I am never going to work on. Now I focus on stuff that really matter to me - finance (mainly personal finance) and technology. Others, like politics etc I simply ignore.

ninjakeyboard
Catch the highlights! There are some tools that will send you eg newsletters with the top items. You can't read everything! Better to both consume and to also produce. Doing one or the other too much is worse than doing the right amount of both.
weego
I learned very quickly that most of it isn't actually very good (ie its outside my sphere of understanding so if it's well written it can seem good when actually later you come back to it and realise it was garbage) or relevant to me so I ignore most of it.