Ask HN: How to stop reading HN when you are already in bed? Jokes not aside | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to stop reading HN when you are already in bed? Jokes not aside

3 pointsdennisbalon8 comments

Jokes aside or may be this is a place to joke.

What is so addictive about HN? Can we say that litterally browsin HN is like scrolling through FB feed? Ornis there a difference.

What was the mosy funny situation when instead of doing something you just kept on reading HN?

Asking this just because I am newbie here :)

View on HN

I guess newbies don't read the FAQ and look at the types of posts inherent to the site before posting anymore. You'll be hard pressed to find giggly "Let's make this fun!!!" posts here (thankfully).

Jokes aside - I'm really not that much of a grump, and I appreciate that you did start the title with Ask HN:, so there's no expectation of the question itself being particularly informative. So I'll bite and try to provide an informative response:

What is addictive to me is that HN posts don't tend to devolve into nonsense, and you can learn something from people who expand on the topic at hand without hitting the dead ends that cynicism and lack of general etiquette from random bad actors derailing otherwise perfectly good and interesting threads tend to cause.

Your comparison with FB threads needs a re-think. I read the comment section in HN, but not FB, not Reddit, not CNN, definitely not Fox, etc., for exactly that reason. It's refreshing to see intelligent conversation that isn't polluted and killed off with goofiness or pseudo-anonymous one-upmanship. When I want that, I just go to Twitter (which I do). Twitter has "twit" in the name for a reason. Tell all the jokes and get it out of your system there. There is no written or unwritten law that says the entire Internet has to be memes and silliness.

Hacker News is awesome and different because it is News for Hackers. Right there in the name, and accentuated by the lack of all the trappings one typically finds at a goofy-positive posting site.

Hey! You are right about newbies ignoring what the HN was initially created for. I agree, my bad but to my excuse 3 outher submittions I made were pretty much according to the HN standards I believe.

Thanks for such a thought thorugh reply, the point about comments exactly something I wanted to hear.

I agree, HN much more feels like a silent resource of knowledge and knowledgable point of views. WHen reading FB I rarely even open comments myself.

And I agree there are way to many goody-positive as you said sites with pure flood instead of highly valueable on average posts.

Thanks again for your reply. I value your time a lot.

I like to say FB comments are for grandma to tell grandkid how cute they looked in that tie at the pre-Covid family reunion. I haven't logged in for a decade, so I don't even know what people do on FB now that you can't really take pictures of your restaurant entrée every day anymore.

> pure flood

Very good term for it.

I even like it when people disagree here, since they typically back it up with reason. It's not a stoic site - it's just not flippant either.

There should be a web forum Kinsey Scale for that.

Disagreeing is cleraly valuable for some but rather hard to accept for “FB commenter” types.

Thanks again for your time!

make a nightly cron job that blocks HN's domain during sleep hours

Or remove all letters mentioned in the domain of HN from my keyboard.

good question. Maybe ask the mods to block your ip?

I tend not to shoot myself in the foot. But good advice. Thanks.

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