Comment by ImaCake
2 days 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.
2 days 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).