Ask HN: Do You Usually Visit the Same Small Number of Sites Every Day? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do You Usually Visit the Same Small Number of Sites Every Day?

5 pointsferros8 comments

I was thinking about how big the internet is, then my own browsing habits.

I realised I frequent a handful of the same websites everyday by habit. News, Sports, HN, e.t.c.

Do most of you use the internet the same way?

I imagine that there are also people that visit even less of the internet and stay within Facebook’s walled gardens.

In order to break the habit of going to the same sites, and to ween myself off social media for content discovery, I started my own personal Yahoo.

Yahoo originally started as a link directory. [1] So I built my own link directory that I browse when I'm bored.

It's hosted as a github page [2], and I update it whenever I find a site I like. I get a lot of use out of it and I hope the idea catches on; everyone should have their own link directory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Yahoo! [2] https://bmsauer.github.io/yayhoo/

I guess so. Though it's more a small number of sites for each topic rather than overall. So I'll visit three or four social media sites, three or four web development sites, three or four gaming news sites, etc.

Makes me miss the days when we used to just randomly search Google and see what came up. Or go through webrings/directories/affiliate lists/whatever.

I do. I call it my loop, or loops. I have a folder in Chrome's bookmark bar called Loops, and inside are four folders called Dev, Tech News, Politics, Sports, which each have links to 4 or 5 or 8 sites, a few of which are Twitter lists.

I usually open all the links in one folder once or twice per day just to see if there's anything readworthy.

(I also have an RSS reader with 100+ feeds, but I rarely launch that anymore; it's just too overwhelming.)

Yes, and that's because of the websites' need to increase "engagement" in order to drive their advertising profits (well, not the case of HN but most), and the feedback loops in the brain specific to each site which we crave after visiting said site has become a habit.

Usually, yes. At some point I created myself a little batch file to run on startup, which actually opens up the websites I frequently visit.

I miss the days when I had iGoogle as the homepage, getting one line updates from a small number of sites via RSS. Today's solutions seem to cluttered for my needs.

Sure, because only a few websites have new content every couple of minutes. No point in visiting a site daily that updates monthly. There's RSS for that.

Aside from shopping or specific searches, I only regularly visit a couple of subreddits, hn, xkcd, and fuckinghomepage.com. Every few months, highscalability.com. I only view Facebook once or twice a month to check notifications and check up on any updates from folks.

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