Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then back to watching the Larry David clips that YouTube is sending my way.
I, on the other side, am scrolling hn, lambdartheultimate, Haskell subs and discords, hoarding caml research papers... doing nothing. I was mostly a snub variant of the above.
The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service. HN doesn't try to keep eyeballs on targets. (And HN is so tiny that it loads faster than anything on work connection out in the middle of nowhere.)
Millions of people disagree, and frankly it's not our place to judge what is useful for others. It's not all snark and misinformation.
> The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service.
But that's just an opinion, that staying on-site on FB is somehow bad. They would argue that they're encouraging users to hold discussions with people they know, highly social and relatively unmoderated.
Maybe, depends on your social circle, but the main reason I left facebook more than a decade ago was because everyone I had on facebook _didn't_ hold any discussions or post anything original. It was all just sharing random crap they liked, or reposts from Instagram. I don't care about some random blogspam article my cousin liked. I joined to find out what was happening in people's lives and none of that was on facebook, it was all on instagram or whatsapp. (So I totally see why facebook bought out those two companies)
The average HN reader passes judgement on Facebookers (myself included), meanwhile we waste time on sites we're convinced are "better"... but often it's just a tradeoff. HN: external links to thoughtful and informative articles, apolitical, but very impersonal and humorless. FB: insular, but (in theory) you know people, and maintain your relationships with people you don't see in person.
I don't mean to say "both are the same" -- that would be too facile. But, I don't think one or the other is clearly superior in any absolute sense.
This might be far too broad. Facebook feeds have been really useful for me when I use it for obscure hobbies or to buy/sell used expensive things (think college furniture) based on region.
It’s not overwhelming — I generally feel it hits the sweet spot of signal-to-noise. I only pull up Twitter a few times a day, and scan to find interesting things there. My Twitter feed is generally light — I don’t follow any individuals, only sites I want to see updates on without having to poll them.
I really like the HN front-page, it gives me a sensation of comfort (so to speak), of how the Internet should have been but unfortunately it is not: very fast-loading page, all text, a basic color-scheme that hasn't changed in a while.
It removes comment/upvote numbers from Hacker News and makes it far less able to exploit human psychological loopholes related to numbers.
So glad to be done and over with that sort of addiction. Social media is as addictive as cigarettes or booze and we are way behind on treating it in the same ways.
It's odd though that it's the only thing. I've always thought that susceptibility to addiction is a personality trait that make you usually get addicted to more than one thing.
From what I've learned, large sustained dopamine hits lead to deficits in baseline levels. I could intuit early on that some of my negative experience (including sleep) was linked to consumption, but managed to convince myself each time that I "just need to better manage it". Even if the truth stares you in the face it's hard. I like to think of it as a "mild" addiction owing to frequency (it wasn't always) but still an addiction, which is like playing with fire. It can always get worse.
I've been enjoying Huberman's videos on the topic of dopamine and other things - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU
Personally I loathe the company and would be happy if some fatal DNS or other issue took it down for good or if it were legislated out of existence by the EU/US. But we also need to be aware of the value it provides other than as a bullhorn for anti-vaxxers and other nutjobs and perhaps think of how to build a safer and more ethical alternative.
In comparison HN, the number of possible karma per post is pretty much an equal playing field (save for a few recognizable accounts).
Once I hit 1000, I’m outa here. Promise.
BTW I upvoted a bunch of your comments right now, but apparently with no effect to your karma. You (or I?) may have angered the HN algo gods.