Hacker News Reader

Comment by jelly_dev | Hacker News Reader

About half way through my college education I decided I would only use Facebook for messages and otherwise eliminated all social media from my life aside from Reddit and Hacker news. Since then I found my outlook on life has improved dramatically and recommend most people do that.

The problem with social media is you only see the interesting parts of people's lives, so you're forced into a loop of thinking your life is pointless and boring, while for the most part everyone's life is pretty boring aside from some brief moments

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HN and Reddit arent that different from other social media sites.

All of them in my mind are "All You Can Eat" info buffet tables.

This is just the current approach we have of dealing with a new world overloaded by info. It will change as we learn more and more about how it effects people.

In the real world nobody healthy visits an "All You Can Eat" buffet everyday. Same thing will eventually happen with information.

The bulk of the problem is the linear-thinking brain. If we could devise a way for the brain to think exponentially (something computers are good at) - then we have a suitable way to deal with information overload. My only gripe with augmented brain capacity is that it could spiral away from us, and then lose touch with our original linear thought patterns. Something we have to eventually come to terms with.

We don’t think linearly (we’re extremely parallel) and computers don’t think exponentially (just quickly, ironically enough that’s because it was easier to run ten times faster than on ten things at once).

To get more pedantic technically doing things in parallel is easy - coordinating them is a pain with overhead - especially if you want them to keep their speed. I know back decades ago even cars went with plenty of microcontrollers to do what technically could be controlled by one since it was easier and better to be independent apparently - and auto companies are all about shaving nickels of expenses for profits.

Agreed that HN and Reddit are basically just replacements for Facebook. Former becoming more and more like the latter.

I disagree it’s “information”. The article is usually wrapped in opinion, and you’re in the opinion section now.

Maybe the appeal is that when the opinion is from some you know (a “friend”) you feel obligated to acknowledge it and on an anonymous forum you can more easily ignore it?

Reddit vs Facebook I think is just social media preference.

IDK... I’ve found myself skipping articles and jumping right to the opinion section in order to “save time”. Bad habit, but I just don’t have time to read everything.

>> obligated to acknowledge opinion

lol thats a nice way of putting it. It's an interesting point about why we are all so attracted to opinion. It doesn't require much mental energy or something I suppose.

Plus in an info overloaded world where even the experts have doubts about a lot of things it allows us to butt into debates where we would never be allowed to enter in the real world.

I think it's a bit different, on HN and Reddit it's much less about sharing ones life (there are subreddits for this, but in general, no). It's more about sharing interesting discussion and insight around content.

More than that, it's semi-anonymous, meaning it's not so much the relationship between people it's the relationship between content (or topics). This is a dramatic difference because it's harder to get into the loop of seeing other people happy.

Finally, there aren't push notifications for HN. I actually wrote a chrome extension to enable following discussions and push notifications.. I didn't really think it was appropriate to release because it would lead to more engagement, which is kind of a bad thing (e.g. lead to flame wars).

Anyway, they may not be "that different", except in a few key aspects.

I have been reading Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication and according to that book - seeing people happy or seeing peoples interesting thoughts or seeing their appearance etc etc can all lead to comparative/judgemental thinking which leads to all kinds of unintended side effects. He references Dan Greenberg's book How To Make Yourself Miserable.

Yet to be seen if sites can somehow employ mechanics to reduce comparative/judgemental thinking...but its something they all intentionally/unintentionally fuel currently imho.

These are well observed and key differences between social networks.

The power of these small changes is disproportionately strong too. On HN, your username is very subtly rendered, and that possibly hella people focus on the content, rather than the individual who posted it.

On Reddit by contrast the username sticks out, can have flair added etc.

The result is imo more personality based repartee.

Reddit and HN provide what I call “false novelty”. It’s a torrent of new information and entertaining images, but none of it really provides any sort of lasting impact beyond the first 5 minutes or so.

When you do new things in the real world, these become major events that anchor your memories and sense of time. You can probably vividly remember some vacations, concerts, your first kiss, and a thousand other novel life experiences very vividly. But while Reddit feels novel in the moment, in the rear view mirror it is just a featureless void of “Reddit was here”, with no strong memories left to justify the time spent.

But don't you find you learn things, get introduced to new concepts and so on?

I definitely think that HN has improved me as a software developer, if only to show me how much unknown stuff there is out there.

Reddit is a bit more questionable but I've definitely found useful things in some sub-reddits.

And sometimes all I want is something that will easily wile away a few minutes.

Sometimes.

First, I am far from being above using HN and Reddit, as evidenced by me typing this. So, this is not a “you should stop using X” rant, because I can’t stop using it either.

I think as a means of getting professional news, HN and Lobste.rs are basically unparalleled. These have been an unambiguous success for me

As a means for being informed in general it seems to work, but I’m dubious about the utility of being “informed” about things in which I have no stake or power to change things. Recent example is discussions about Swedish cashlessness. I don’t live in Sweden, nor will I travel there soon. So what utility does taking up some of my precious attention with this un-actionable information have? I genuinely don’t know, but I fear that the opportunity cost of such reading might be catching me in some subtle way.

As a means of entertainment, my original comment stands.

This is more for reddit than hacker news (although i would say hacker news is the same to a lesser degree). More and more I've been feeling that all that exposure does is make one feel like one is learning a lot but in reality its just a wide shallow understanding not really useful for anything. It's good to gain exposure but its easy to fall into the trap of mistaking exposure for thinking real hard and working to understand something deeply, at least that is how i feel.

My metric is “how actionable is this information?”

The answer is quite often “not very”.

> HN and Reddit arent that different from other social media sites.

I guess it depends on what you are measuring them by. I'd argue they are quite different and did something similar to the previous commenter.

To me, FB and Instagram make you feel lonely because you see people you actually know interacting and doing things which may make you feel like you're being left out or have a worse life somehow.

With HN and Reddit, you get news or some form of entertainment but that's more similar to Netflix or YouTube than to FB for me personally. I don't mind being entertained; it doesn't make me lonely. In fact I actually go on YouTube or Netflix precisely when I want to be alone.

Unless you have a lot of self control, cutting down on reddit may make you a lot happier too.

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