Hacker News Reader

Comment by kettleballroll | Hacker News Reader

> I've ditched Reddit for HN because it contained a lot more worthwile content

I found that at least for myself, this was just a lie I kept telling myself. HN contains almost zero actionable content, and I've not been an epsilon better off for reading it. I come to see it as infotainment.

View on HN

It varies... I'll often see mention of interesting/useful tools/sites/applications mentioned in more technical discussion. I don't always find these things immediately useful, but often even a year later if I can remember enough to search and find what I was looking for. Sometimes just knowing something exists in extremely useful.

For me the benefit is honestly just less content. There is only so much that makes it to the front page here and the lack of infinite scroll means I rarely see beyond it. It helps me waste a lot less time. But reddit was also a real problem for me. Way too many hours each day and I had to quit it.

Some HNers believe the site is superior to Reddit, if you compare it to the smaller and high quality subs, there isn't any difference.

there's been a few times where I read something that I was really glad I found out about through here, and probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. But yeah, easily >99% of it is just passing time

HN was my MBA back in 2010-2013, that’s where I learnt how to create a working startup. There were blogs like Kalzumeus or Joel On Software, people were still debating technical or business issues about startups.

Now it’s more a news aggregator. It’s my fault too, I don’t blog about the company I’ve created, and people can learn how to create proper startups in many places.

HN is great for discovery but 90%+ of the comments have declined to ChatGPT levels.

HN comments are less sarcastic, cynical, info-free than Reddit comments.

They can be, but not always. For example, any subject even tangentially related to Twitter or Musk summons a spate of low-brow, boilerplate comments.

I’ve discovered a bunch of neat libraries and projects through it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com