Comment by neutronicus
1 day ago
You're on HN, though. In some sense, reeling in people like you has been a solved problem for decades, since forums were invented.
I apologize for what is doubtless egregious projection on my part.
I am like you in the sense that I seem "immune" to TikTok/Reels, especially relative to my wife, who can definitely get sucked into it for 30-60 minutes. However, I'm easily-snared by things like "the last year of drama in the NixOS community". I can easily spend an hour I don't have reading forum threads in which people are accusing moderators of abusing their position in a forum about a piece of technology I don't use.
So in some sense the tech industry didn't need to "innovate" in order to suck me in. I was getting sucked into reading about web forum drama 20 years ago.
HN is too boring though. Often I come here and there is nothing clickbait enough to get me to read it and I go elsewhere. It's great.
OTOH HN is all about the comments. And without reading you don’t know which ones are good.
I often spend way more time on those.
Each one 3-5 lines. Hundreds of comments in a near endless list.
I don’t think HN is that different compared to other social media
There's also the very real trap of traditional forum comments being ranked higher in your brain's algorithm for "relevance" since you can explain it as reading alternative perspectives. There's real FOMO in reading news without having comments for me sometimes, because what if there's a perspective that I'm completely missing here?
Of course, long term I know time spent this way is mostly wasted for the value I get out of it.
HN is yet another infinite scroll feed.
It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.
Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.
If HN was boring, it wouldn't have a "noprocrast" setting.
This forum is addicting to a lot of people. There are also clickbait titles (though less than elsewhere), heated debates, even flamewars in the comments.
I disagree. Debate, karma, religious tech wars, replies. All fun. I spent so much time here in the early days that I noticed my personality change. I'd been debating online so much for a few years that it was seeping into the real world me. I couldn't let people be 'wrong' without correcting them and, even if you're right, that's an annoying person to be around (I see the irony of this comment).