Ask HN: How do you stay informed without social media?

4 points·KarimDaghari··8 comments

Like most HN users here I'm a software engineer (full-stack JS if that matters) so by "staying informed" I'm not referring to general news (what you'd find typically in say The Economist, WSJ, etc...), rather I'm referring to tech-related news.

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Coming from the perspective of someone with no social media presence: What does social media provide in terms of tech-related news that HN, lobsters, and slashdot do not?

Personalization/Focus.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean?

Sorry for being unclear.

Social media acts like a news aggregator.

You get to choose what to focus on, say news related to ReactJS (so you’d follow the official account + the people working on it to get a better of perspective).

Oh OK! Hmm, I think I remember some sort of online services that allow you to monitor news sources for keywords you're interested in. Almost like RSS with regex...

Kind of a cop-out, but I use https://fraidyc.at/ to follow some of the interesting people I missed when I ditched Twitter - I've added a bunch of twitter accounts and feeds to this, but have it set to update a lot more slowly.

It's a lot more calming than the normal social media torrent, but still can find out the latest-and-greatest JS web framework I can ignore ;)

What makes you think social media keeps you informed? (Honest question)

To stay in the context of React (although this applies to pretty much most JS-related info) : Back when components were class-based I first heard of hook-based components on Twitter (and later watched the talk, again, through twitter) which allowed me to 1) be informed of where things were going, 2) be better prepared to migrate when hooks-based components shipped and not be taken by "surprise"

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