Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
I've been trying to spend less time on time wasting stuff. Not necessarily to work more or be more productive, but to only spend time consuming quality content or necessary stuff.
So I've blocked about a few websites on my computer(from social medias, to forums, clickbaity news sites...)
So instead of wasting a few hours of my time between reddit memes, pointless flamewars, and stupid articles about made up issues, I spend them between hackernews and linkedin.
But is that really better or just an equally addictive illusion? Isn't this just a facebook for techbros?(me included)
After years of browsing HN daily, did you reap some benefits out of it?
What's your take on this?
104 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadI tend to have a lot of meetings in my life anyway where my presence is required, but little else, so that is where a lot of my HN time comes from.
The biggest problem for me personally with HN is that the front page updates every few minutes. To counteract this I made https://hackerdaily.io, it's Hacker News, but only with yesterday's posts. This really helps me to not check it every time I'm bored and want some dopamine and to actually read more of the articles and discussions.
However when I am drunk, someone is wrong on the internet (https://xkcd.com/386/).
As for whether this is positive... If I'm being objective, I can't say that having even more well-curated content available is a positive influence. But my difficulties in curbing a tendency to binge on reading material aren't the site's fault.
Though, it would be helpful if I could set the front page to only show 10 or 15 items instead of 30.
There is a large techbro demographic here, and certain topics to avoid. But the tech part rubs off. I avoid browsing daily though; it's too easy to get sucked into arguments, complaints, and gossip.
I love HN and derive a lot of benefit from it, unfortunately during the Great Scare I found it impossible to stay away from the associated threads.
That sort of stuff seems to have died down now though, so we're good.
If I could just censor any mention of it I'd be much happier, I'd add it to uBlock if I could, heh.
We probably maybe not really sure saved 0.5%-1% of the population, so it was worth 2-3% of our lives worrying about it, 10% inflation, public transport becoming financially unviable, various career paths literally disappearing, an irreparable political split, education being deleted for a bit, etc.
Thankfully, slightly later on, ~all then got it anyway so now there's at least a critical mass of people who realise this was all a load of shit and I don't have to adblock it by self excluding from all social networks.
hanging out here is incredibly fun/useful to me
Our world is so rich, and I feel that by reading HN only you miss out on a lot.
But the opinion in replies can be one sided sometimes.
Read, but assume there are *more* opinion/topics other than what's available on HN.
Basically the same should be done on any forum/social media.
I 'waste' a lot of time here because i have a lot of empty time these days. I would like to have more diverse communities on the internet, i 'd take 10 forums instead of the duopoly reddit/hn taking all my attention. There is value in participating in separate the bubbles vs participating in watered down groupthinks.
- I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often.
- The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness. Humor is frowned upon and people are way too serious.
- HN definitely has a techbros vibe. I guess that's by design but it's not very inclusive.
- Moderation is a double edged sword. It's good at silencing the offensive and silly comments that make reddit such a dumpster fire. But you get a bit of overzealous "this conflicts with my world views" style moderation too which results in cancel culture style snuffing out of contrarian views. I've been down voted a few times where I struggled to understand why. I wasn't being offensive. I wasn't being contrarian. I was merely being inconvenient to someone who was what I would classify as in of the highly polarised camps in US politics that was out to cancel anything conflicting with their narrow world views. I'm from the EU so I might be a bit tone deaf on that front. I struck a nerve basically and I was being cancelled. Moderating the moderators should be a thing. I've went from negative 2 to positive 10 on the same comment in some cases. Basically people strongly agreeing or disagreeing with the same thing. Moderation should be strictly about weeding out the bad stuff not snuffing out debate. Moderating the moderators seems to be not a thing.
What does this mean?
Which is good if you want to know the latest Google gossip or many tech questions. But not as good when we are talking about topics that are less directly in the experience of the above people.
As an example when you are talking about public transport they have experience that comes from living in the US. Rather than somewhere a bit less car-centric.
A tech example might be that money and VC dollars are plentiful but programmers are expensive and that non-programmers are less important in a business.
There are plenty of people that are not like that, but the site has a definite bias that way.
I appreciate the clarity. What I don't understand is that given "stereotypical" and "typical" are definitely not synonyms, why do you think your stereotype reflects the actual demographics?
The conjunction fallacy and all that.
In my experience, forum moderation is Sisyphus-complete and utterly thankless. The fact we have had this refuge that functions as well as it does for as long as it has, well, res ipsa loquitur. Thanks, mods, fwiw.
1.) I prefer the https://hckrnews.com/ "an unofficial alternative hacker news interface." .. So If I have less time - I can check the top articles+comments in the last weeks.
2.) If I have to research some topics - I am using https://hn.algolia.com/ "Search Hacker News"
These days I still check HN every day, but for some reason I find most of the content dull or uninspiring, and the seeking job/freelancer postings are less interesting. Moderation is still awesome though.
1. I sometimes stumble upon random strangers who do something related to what I'm researching or working on and usually you can just comment and they will reply. This level of accessibility to the actual tech people is rare. Imagine trying to reach a Google software engineer through their end-user support channel. Won't happen. But you might e-meet the same person here.
2. It's great for conversation topics with peers, especially if all of you check the headlines in the morning.
3. I just love the long-term prediction articles and especially their discussions. Of course, the predictions will most likely turn out wrong. But understanding how people reached those predictions can be very valuable for making sense of the arguably messy tech landscape affecting all of us.
I avoid otherwise because of the "Hacker" (i.e. tech bro) vibes.
I also check the 'new' postings (see top of the page). Often times, there are interesting posts in there that for one reason or another don't get enough traction early to make it to the first couple of pages. But they have interesting content. It's also, in a small way, a service to the community to get in there and upvote worthwhile content.
My biggest gripes are the endless "rewriting X in Y" stories and the comments from people who are smart in their own field who think that any other field is amenable to their armchair reasoning.
For me, that's one of the most annoying things about HN. These people would often use a very authoritative tone, so it can be difficult to spot the BS unless you're an expert yourself. Always take everything you read with a grain of salt and remind yourself of Gell-Mann-Amnesia.