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Lifehacks Stacks Exchange

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75 pointskamaraju22 comments

Surely being a life hack is a property of a solution, not of a question? What on earth questions are they inviting here?

All sorts of random questions impossible to moderate in scope.

I agree the term life-hacks has lost all meaning.

For me what destroyed it was a video about home-decorating 'life-hacks', and one was basically 'have a laundry chute' - great if you have one, but basically pointless otherwise as its almost impossible to retrofit to a house (or at least a standard UK home).

It was at that point I realised that to many people 'life hacks' are just 'things which are cool/I like' and not, as I understood, optimising your life (whatever that means).

In a multistory house, a laundry chute would definitely optimize ones life. If course it may not be easy to install a laundry chute. But I don't think that invalidates the life hack idea. To me it was the "here is some cheap way to do something that one could do better and easier if they spend $5(or some other small nominal charge)"

I was trying to find a good life hack for not wrinkling clothes while packing for travel.

One memorable “hack” was to have them professionally pressed when you arrive at your hotel.

I suppose there is a hack spectrum based on income.

> How to deal when the solid waste are stick on the toilet surface?

Truly a place to learn the best secrets to make your life better.

“You get a toothbrush and tie it to the end of a garden cane”

meanwhile, the rest of the world uses a, you know, toilet brush

I don't even know what a garden cane is.

Walking cane for plants!

>Any way I can get vomit out of my pants while at work?

I can tell this is going to be an amazing source of knowledge for people who are interested in great things.

I noticed most of the questions are household related tricks. I thought lifehacks was more about being productive at work, optimizing sleep, etc

I have a firm belief that Lifehacker created a trend that undermined the use of the term, resulting in a tragedy of the commons.

I don't understand all these highly specific micro-sites that popped up on Stackechange.

Part of what makes Stackoverflow good is that it covers multiple subject areas, attracting many eyeballs from many different areas, and thereby having a huge amount of momentum from network effects and "social gravity".

Meanwhile all these other little sites are way too specific and have accordingly very small user bases. For example, there was no need to have separate sites for Stats, Data Science, Open Data, and AI. Nor does it make sense to have Software Recommendations be separate from Superuser. It just hurts the smaller communities IMO by driving fragmentation, and (horror of horrors) leads to duplicated questions across multiple sites. So much for being a high-quality archive of knowledge! More like a feudal kingdom of squabbling lords.

Maybe I'm just a misinformed outsider and there are good reasons for this pattern. But as a general user and former frequent-answer-er, I don't get it.

Some true gems right there ;-)

https://lifehacks.stackexchange.com/questions/25085/any-way-...

It gets better (or worse).

https://lifehacks.stackexchange.com/questions/4280/how-to-cl...

If you like this you might also like the Reddit forum Explain Like I'm 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive

and r/howto

Yuck. This would have never gotten past Area 51 5 years ago. SE is slowly killing itself.

Some of the questions are from 2015?

Are you asking a question?

It got past Area 51 six years ago: https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/64409/lifehacks

It got past A51, and quite a few people disagreed with that. I don't think it meets the bar for an SE site, but SE is somewhat hesitant to kill sites today. That is a good thing in most cases, but this particular site is just not a good idea and inherently leads to bad content.

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