HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why do you still use HN?

27 points by kirillzubovsky ↗ HN
Personally, I've deleted Instagram, curbed my Tweets, don't use Facebook anymore, and trying my best not to be social on social, but Hacker News is one of the resources I can't stop coming back to. I know I am not alone. Anecdotally, I've met many people who do the same.

I don't know why though. What makes HN special? Is it the constant curation, the old-school design, the constantly updated front-page? I can't figure it out.

27 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 80.3 ms ] thread
Antonov45
I'm an ordinary person from France. I don't work in IT but HN has helped me to get a hard as steel general culture (sorry , I'm french, not a good english speaker !).

1. Top quality articles and research paper every day, in every domain of science 2. The real news, I mean, the news that matter 3. Very informed opinions in the comments.

HN is the top of the top of the web !

pizzicato
Non-IT person here too, hello there :)

I like HN for the curation and beautifully minimalist interface. I've learned a lot about technology just by lurking here.

The discussion around tech-related topics is second to none. Insightful, detailed, and well-written. I tend to avoid the discussions in non-tech fields such as politics, medicine, and philosophy, however.

kirillzubovsky
Interesting, does it mean France doesn't have. its own version of HN-type community, or it's just that HN covers the world, which makes it more interesting?
fudgefr
Both actually!

There is no HN type community in France (that I know of). And the openness and international aspects of HN are incomparable

non-entity
Incredibly detailed and well written technical articles. I still have a very well detailed description of the UEFI boot process saved on here that I need to get through.
rhoque
For the discussions under each article. It helps me see a lot of interesting perspectives.
kirillzubovsky
Oh yeah, that's something I've started to spend a lot more time on now. Sometimes the threads are hard to read/follow, but once in a while there are such gems in the comments, it's definitely worth it.
jeremy_k
Sometimes the sheer number of comments is daunting too. Seeing some discussions reach three, four, five, even six hundred comments is almost a deterrent. I'll usually look at the first few top level threads to see if anything interests me if not, I'll move on.

I also wonder how it's possible that big of a discussion is happening in the middle of the day. I usually take a break from coding for 5 or 10 minutes, pop over to HN, refresh and see if anything sparks my interest. Then I notice some article has gone from 1XX to 3XX comments and am just like 'huh...'

AnimalMuppet
You can have actual intelligent conversations with people who think. You can read ideas that differ from your own, from people who can tell you why they hold those ideas. The knowledge available here is remarkable. (I was doing some research on some number-theory-type stuff. I asked a question here. A Cambridge PhD gave me some pointers. Gave them to me, a random nobody on the internet with a BS, no affiliation, and no academic work for the last 35 years.)

It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you get ideological wars. Sometimes you get people who Just. Won't. Listen. - who are, on that topic anyway, just going to argue their position to the end of the earth with scorched-earth tactics. Sometimes people come here to do ideological battle rather than to have an actual conversation. That happens here more often than I'd like. But it's still better than anywhere else that I've found.

Melting_Harps
> I was doing some research on some number-theory-type stuff. I asked a question here. A Cambridge PhD gave me some pointers. Gave them to me, a random nobody on the internet with a BS, no affiliation, and no academic work for the last 35 years.)

This. HN reminds me how the Internet was 20+ years ago when I was growing up on it, and where random anons would provide this kind of experience for no other reason that just to do it.

> It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you get ideological wars. Sometimes you get people who Just. Won't. Listen. - who are, on that topic anyway, just going to argue their position to the end of the earth with scorched-earth tactics. Sometimes people come here to do ideological battle rather than to have an actual conversation. That happens here more often than I'd like. But it's still better than anywhere else that I've found.

Agreed. But that is also part of the allure; zealots often reveal more about ourselves, particularly how we engage in discourse with others, than we'd like to admit and opportunities to learn from these experiences.

xupybd
Yeah the mods here kill flame wars pretty quickly. At first I was put off by it but HN has a really good community because of it.

You can have nuances in discussion here. I don't know of any other places online where that is possible. It's also possible to have a civil disagreement. It's a credit to the mods and community rules.

ed
Props to Dang, who is so active that I sometimes wonder if he’s an AI
mettamage
Exactly this. I sometimes go to other communities (e.g. YouTube comments) and having a deluded hope that they'll be intelligent comments.

They always leave me disappointed. They're funny sometimes, but I want intelligent, not funny (there's enough funny content out there).

uvw
I never got addicted to social media. I have Facebook, twitter, Instagram, reddit, HN, digg etc etc, but I rarely if ever use it. Although I do read reddit and HN regularly, I never felt a desire to delete it in order to curb the usage. Haven't posted anything on Facebook in two years, on Instagram in almost a year, on Twitter in 4 years.
kirillzubovsky
I use Twitter a fair bit to DM with people that I find interesting, on Twitter, but lately it's become too much of a firehose of opinions, rarely backed up by data or even sound logic. Now I try to use it only once a day, or even a few days. So far, so good.

Instagram on the other hand, that got out of control quickly. I found myself browsing through the feed and liking a lot of content, only to eventually realize that what I really wanted to do was to BE in places that I was liking; spending time on Instagram certainly wasn't going to get me there faster. That was the point where I deleted it.

Suspending the account, deleting the app... none of that has worked for me with Insta, there was always some pull to get back into it. Once I deleted the account, some number of months ago, I haven't had the need to even think of it.

ivan1783
The discussions on here are what keep me coming back. I often dont even read the article, just jump into the discussion. Provides a lot of interesting perspectives from people who clearly think and can articulate those thoughts. As an aside: I am not IT but I do work in tech.
austincheney
> I don't know why though. What makes HN special?

Cry baby echo chamber is not the preferred normal behavior here. This is exactly why I deleted my Reddit account (r/programming).

danielscrubs
It's the one forum where people seem to attack ideas not each other. :)

A lot of people that people can look up to are here too. Lots of famous engineers, computer scientists professors, data scientists, you name it.

I wish there was something similar for business/economics.

gitgud
Surround yourself with people smarter than you. I'm not that smart though... so it might not be a compliment...

It's simply discussion around links, and isn't dominated by competitive people trying to get top comment like Reddit/Imgur is.

There's much more emphasis on innovation and technology, rather than cat pictures. I think this rather serious and neutral nature of Hacker News is why I keep returning

Fej
Perhaps due to its connections to business, some influential people hang around HN. For example, once I got a response from the CEO of Namecheap (my web host) in a thread related to their services. It was very informative and I can't imagine getting that kind of interaction anywhere else.

You don't get that on places like reddit because the standard of discourse is generally lower and it's not worth their time.

Also: the moderators are consistent, clear, professional, and easy to talk to.

CM30
I use HN because it's the one place I can find a variety of intelligent discussions on different topics that don't devolve in name calling, flame wars, doxing, etc. The latter is why I only use Reddit for pop culture related topics, since the political and cultural ones there devolve into absolute hell. Same with their equivalents on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

At least on HN, you know that everything from a discussion on web design best practices to a talk on the changing role of journalism in the modern world will have some form of civility to it. And that the people involved will be at least trying to have an intelligent conversation rather than fighting over red team vs blue team tribal politics.

I also find it one of the few places online where I can find, how best to say this, obscure/personal sites, articles and content written by people knowledgeable or passionate about a topic. Links on Reddit are about 40% mainstream media outlets, 50% YouTube/Twitch and 10% stuff from other sources. The links on Hacker News are far more varied, and far more supportive towards independent creators.

toomuchtodo
The quote goes, "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room". HN is an enormous room where I'm confident I'll never be the smartest person, ever, and that is invaluable for someone's curiosity. Every day I get to converse with and learn from intelligent people (many of whom are also as curious as I) I would've never had the privilege of interacting with in person or another online forum.
krgraver
I keep my social media accounts only as utilities with reddit the only exception. I've found Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and now HN to be awesome communities of people smarter than me and actually building stuff. The world needs more people building stuff.
dmarlow
Because when I see an article about some obscure topic I'm interested in, but know very little about, there's a high chance someone knows so much about that topic and will make some outstanding post to add to the conversation.
photonios
I come here exclusively to read the comments and sometimes participate in them. I often only end up clicking a link because I need more context to read the comments.

The comments are often insightful and intelligent. Its interesting conversation, from people with different backgrounds, different opinions etc. As opposed to most other forums, HN is heavily moderated and the crowd it draws helps. Sometimes I see a comment that looks out of place and an hour later it is either down voted into oblivion or removed already.

I also use HN to pick technology. I search HN for threads relevant to the technology I am thinking of using and read the comments to see what people think. This helps me get a whole bunch of different opinions and thoughts that I otherwise wouldn't have access to.

I also love the minimalist look of HN. If they'd change it, I'd be incredibly upset. It's one of the last places on the internet that always loads in an instant and doesn't distract me from the only thing that's important: the content.

mkaic
I also rarely click through the links. Often the discussion of the headline draws enough people asking interesting questions and giving interesting, qualified answers that I learn far more from the discussions in the comments than from the actual linked page!