HN Explorer

Ask HN: How deep you go in reading HN news?

12 points by maremmano ↗ HN
I started following HN I think since 2014. Some time later I registered the account and started visiting the site daily. Over the years I have to admit that it was a great source of information but it also took a lot of time to invest in reading the articles.

In this period and for some time I have been visiting the site twice a day. In the morning and in the evening. Each time I go from page 1 to page 4 (and read more deeply 5 or 6 published "articles"). I open ALL THE LINKS. So I open 120 links in the morning and fast scan all of these. In the evening I open only new links (I think on average about 30 links).

HN level of reading depth: 4 pages Link opening (morning + evening): 120 + 30

I'm curious about your behavior.

17 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] thread
tsjq
Do you read the discussion or the articles or both ?
maremmano
I usually quickly read links and comments on topics that interest me less while I read more in-depth links and comments on topics that interest me.

However, I have noticed that often, comments to links that are not very interesting (for me) begin to follow a different and tortuous path that often makes the comments section unexpectedly interesting even for less interesting topics.

seotut2
Top half of the main page, top half of the ask page, usually only comments (not visiting the pages themselves unless it is something very interesting to me).

3-5 times a day. On average, I open 10 discussion pages a day, and visit around 3 links.

maremmano
Thanks for sharing. Many people seem to be more interested in the comments than the original information itself. this is not my case even if I've fond exceptional information in the comment section sometimes better than the original link.
cm2012
I look for threads on the front page with a lot of comments and then read almost all of those.
pearjuice
Hacker News news?
maremmano
Yes. I meant: 1) HN -> news.ycombinator.com (This is the website. Please notice the "news." third level domain name that carefully target the topic)

2) News -> Daily submitted links

I asked for: "news from hackernews" reading habits.

I will be happy to explain more. Sorry for my bad english I'm Italian.

mraza007
I usually read the discussions since they are really interesting and save the articles for read later

I most spend most of my time on Ask HN and on the new page

onecommentman
Scan all the last day’s post titles.

Open links immediately with what I believe to be content-rich credible information and perspective relevant to my background and interests, which are many and varied. Source plays a helpful role in determining whether it’s worth an open, but isn’t the sole determinant. Maybe one in thirty.

Read the comments on posts with titles that sound like agitprop, knee-jerkism, marketing or just biased nonsense. Then open the post if

1. it isn’t already objectively trashed and

2. it is impactfully misleading and

3. I may be able to contribute something of substantive value to correct or redirect the post or discussion.

Contribute if I can, otherwise silence is Golden. Getting angry at pixels always seemed silly to me...

More interested in the meta-analysis of why posts are being posted, and the reasoning (or lack of) underlying the post. Where are we in discussion boards like this in the year 2020: posts, audience, moderation, etc.? I cruised ARPANET and punched cards...so where are we in 2020 on HN as compared to USENET, BBSs, GEnie, Compuserve, The Well, mailing lists, blogs, Reddit...

Skip most (but not all) posts on current practice in programming, design, testing, implementation. When I was most active, change control was the brand new concept. I am very old. Open links on legacy systems and ideas.

Skip almost all posts with a living or cultish name in them, unless it is someone who just died and I knew of. Will read a post on Bill Gates’s death, but not anything before...of course hoping that will be a long way in the future. It’s all dust in the wind, folks.

maremmano
The well? very interesting. I heard about it while BBSing in the 80s. I was too young in the punch cards era, but I had a chance to see 8 inch floppy working in my school and used the 5.25 floppy a lot. Back to HN my behavior seems to be more compulsive than yours (unfortunately) and I am probably much more influenced by current rhythms. Thanks for your contribution which offers interesting food for thought.
wolco2
Two pages deep, the " ask me " when that runs out.

I'll read the comments of say 10-15 items and rarely the story itself.

dave84
I’ve probably visited every day since launch, I read what interests me and usually skim all the comments on the front page because they’re often only tangentially related to the post so there’s usually something interesting in there. I don’t contribute much but the amount of times I’ve been able to solve a problem with “I read an article about this on hn” is significant.
cercatrova
I almost never read the articles, only the comments. This is usually due to the comments correcting errors in the article, so usually I don't even need to read the article in the end.
joshxyz
I found 2 channels on telegram that gives me notifs,

Score above 75, @news_ycombinator

Score above 300, @ycombinatornews

But then sometimes i get bored and visit here to see other low scoring posts

Jugurtha
I receive an RSS feed on my Thunderbird mail client. There's the whole feed and there are specific feeds with topics of interest from hnrss where I ask questions and learn things from people here, or offer solutions on how we're doing things. I regularly visit Ask HN and chime in when there are questions I may have answers to based on what I know has worked for me (being more productive, management, getting to know a code base, becoming a better individual contributor, writing better code, B2B, building product, building an organization, etc).

Sometimes I'll reply with an "index reply"[0] that contains a collection of replies that are relevant to the Ask HN question.

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25367011

glazeshadow
>> Check HN 1-2 / week.

>> Each time, I scan through pages 1-10 opening any links that seem relevant by their title (~30-60 open tabs).

I then scan through the opened tabs: 1) Closing the ones that are not relevant or are mere updates (~60%) 2) Reading the ones that are super relevant immediately (~20%) 3) Saving the ones that are 'resources' for ongoing or future projects (~20%)

Hardest to keep up with #2. Reading text articles is time consuming: 3 mins / link on average.

maremmano
Thank you for sharing. Very interesting.