HN Explorer

Ask HN: What sources do you ignore?

12 points by nondeveloper ↗ HN
When I’m browsing HN I tend to automatically ignore submissions based on their sources. Examples:

Medium and lately Substack: Often formulaic, low-effort, or self-promotional.

Aeon, Nautilus, Atlas Obscura: Long-form writing with little informational payoff, attention-bait.

The Atlantic: Culture war click-bait.

The New York Times, Bloomberg: Paywall, even if there is an outline.com or archive.[domain] link.

Conversely, I tend to check out submissions from personal blogs and more scientific/technical sources like Scientific American and IEEE’s Spectrum.

Does anyone else do this?

12 comments

[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 41.0 ms ] thread
Pick-A-Hill2019
I skip all Twitter links. To each their own, but the few of them that I have checked out have been mostly flame-bait, unsourced claims etc etc). I skip Reddit links too but for different reasons.
nondeveloper
Likewise. It doesn’t help that Twitter isn’t really easy to use if you aren’t a signed-in user.
rdtwo
It’s like Facebook even signed in the ui is hostile
zzo38computer
While I do not write on Twitter or Reddit, I will sometimes read when linked, although in both cases I have set up redirects (to Nitter and Old Reddit). I do not use Facebook at all.

(Some other people might find it useful to do this, too.)

young_unixer
I don't open links to TechCrunch, Vice, Medium, Twitter.

In the case of Twitter I make an exception when the submission title is extremely enticing, in which case I copy the URL and open it in that Thread Reader thing.

commonturtle
I ignore 100% of Medium, it's always low quality. As you say Substack is also heading in that direction. I like Atlas Obscura, even though it's just factoids and not information that I'll ever use.

Ignore most news outlets: NYT, Atlantic, Bloomberg, WSJ, Techcrunch, Vice, etc.

Will read: personal blogs, Substacks (for now), niche publications (e.g. Lapham's quarterly), twitter links.

wallflower
> When I’m browsing HN I tend to automatically ignore submissions based on their sources

In a world of infinite choices, I believe that making deliberate choices is a good exercise, whether you do it via a strict whitelist/blacklist domain filter or some other means.

Many times, I don't actually read the article and just read some of the comments. Instead of filtering by the domain where the article is hosted, I use the title and its underlying theme or subject as the filter for which article comments I will read. I'm not interested in every single subject posted on HN so I just look for the subjects that I am interested in. Reading the actual article can take time. For me, I find skimming some of the discussion in the comments as a quick proxy on what the article is actually saying or the value of the article.

With all filtering, there is always the risk of false negatives where you skip something that you would have found of value or really interesting.

I agree that some of the most interesting articles are from non-mainstream sources. For example, the recent article about weaving.

nondeveloper
I have exactly the same practice of reading the comments instead of the item itself if it touches on a discipline or subject I’m not familiar with, e.g., it’s fun to read physics people discussing a physics problem I barely grasp.
quickthrower2
Yes very similar. Also on the other end, quantamagazine submissions are a definite read!
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bot41
Quora (poor content, dark patterns), Medium (slow loading, poor content), facebook/insta (poor logged out experience), twitter (poor ux)
collyw
Wikipedia for anything with a political slant.