Hacker News Reader

Comment by brigadier132 | Hacker News Reader

I don't use it at all. Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it? I include HN in there.

The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit used to be up there but a lot less now because I don't get recommended anything good. They really upped their reliance on the "algorithm" so after I clicked a "drama" link once my recommendations got destroyed with trash.)

HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Youtube is either very high value content or very low value content. No in between. Sometimes I find myself getting recommended garbage and I click into it and get mind trapped for a few minutes but catch myself and get myself out of it. I don't want to have to navigate these "dopamine traps" every time I want to watch an interesting lecture or video on a topic I actually care about.

edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless but I still click in a semi autonomous way.

View on HN

Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. There seems to be a pattern. Like I've been researching hardware designs for real time image processing lately. Over time the same search terms reveal more and more relevant links. Overall youtube search is completely useless.

And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet).

One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".

I've had a similar problem with YouTube. What helped me was a) disabling the history; b) heavily curating my subscriptions. I only try to consume content that comes from either my specific searches (e.g. "how to change oil in a motorcycle") or from the channels I follow. You still get occasionally sucked into "recommended" videos, but it is much better than having to rely on the front page of my account feeding all kinds of garbage.

Using the "Not Interested", and "Don't recommend this channel" options on recommendations you don't like does seem to help a fair bit too.

I strongly recommend RYS: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/>

You can achieve close to the same thing using uBlock element zapper, without installing extra plugins. I use the same trick for SO ('Hot Network Questions' darkpattern) and other sites.

Well, yes, but only assuming that YouTube does not change anything. If they do, then your uBlock rules won’t work, but RYS will presumably be updated to still work.

>Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube.

As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.

Kagi does not have regex but it does have some basic booleans, wildcard, and most important, exact word searching that actually has an effect: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html#se...

(Not affiliated with them except as a very happy customer.)

Please pay Kagi then, it would be a better world online and offline if we started rewarding the good-faith actors for once. That you're already willing to cough up for it is encouraging, just take that last step. Their browser is sick too (Orion) if you're of the Apple persuasion.

I pay for kagi and think it's great. Their browser has been too buggy for everyday use but I try it occasionally to see progress.

I was surprised to hear that the minus was meaningless, but turns out that no, it does still work

I tried multiple times and it hasn't worked for me in years. I tried again now and it seems it "sometimes" works. Specifically it seems that it works for some keywords and not others.

You might like Kagi in that case. I've not really used them, but they have a lot of customisation options and they charge for their product.

>Discovery is a big problem with youtube

youtube is for long-shot the best discovery(maybe tiktok) is not uncommon now that you get high quality videos for channel whith sigle video and dont show trash content from known creators,the new problem is maybe that the high quality content require high quality teams means more money and more pressure to monetize but youtube video quality is leagues ahead from what it was 10 years ago, now you have science, philosophy, history content than produce consistent research by various people content, such as Asianometry.

use instagram reel or twitter and most content is trash, the latter rquiring you to follow the correct people, thats virality. discovery is hard that why you use more netlfix than hbomax, tiktok than instagram

ML-powered discovery based on shared activity, I believe, without significant randomness mixed in, tends to get trapped inside local maxima.

I am reminded of Pandora stations that eventually loop and play the same 15 songs over and over again. Same problem today in other systems, though.

I tried to navigate youtube search by simply sorting by view count, since I figure that's at least moderately more difficult to game, and not subject to the algorithim.

But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)

So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.

> view count ... not subject to the algorithim

That would seem like a way to deliberately cream off the most algorithmically pushed videos!

I wonder what might be a good anti-algorithm indicator - maybe a mismatch between two metrics that normally correlate with highly pushed content. View count over time might be interesting. Big spikes might be bad sign indicating external push. Playlist inclusion might be good to pick up on some human curation. Some measurement of link sharing on other social sites might be helpful... like what google used to do. Sigh.

Well that's of course the case but I meant it in the sense of algorithms used to pick what shows up on my screen as opposed to others entering the same search query.

Ideally there would be such a facility to allow for the removal of at least one layer of algorithmic suggestions.

PageRank for videos is a neat idea though, maybe call it VideoRank?

Youtube recommendations are really good if you exercise self-control over what you watch, conscious of your view history shaping your recommendations. Never click on any video that uses a clickbait thumbnail or title, even if it seems relevant to your interests. The algo will pick up that you enjoy clickbait slop and give you more of that. Ideally, don't even use an account in the first place; use a browser cookie with no account, and delete that browser cookie to start over if your recommendations ever stray too far from your desires. Seed the recommendation system by searching for specific videos that are relevant to your interests. And again, never click on crap, even out of momentary curiosity.

Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop even if they don't start that way; having a cameraman/producer/editor on payroll pressures a channel to perform well to pay for those people, so such channels will tend to pump out shallow content to keep revenue steady if not growing. As soon as a one-man channel hires a cameraman, that's usually a good time to tap out. Particularly if the host is chummy friends with the cameraman; the pressure to perform by compromising quality will be greater when the channel creator is paying his friends to help. This is why I had to stop watching NileBlue; as soon as he got a chummy cameraman his video quality took a steep nose dive with sensational gimmicks taking precedence over substance.

> Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop

Right. I really wish there was some “average joe” filter. The noise/signal ratio would surely still be high, but a hell of a lot more manageable than the inauthentic and affiliate nonsense that gets gamed for the algorithm.

Obviously anecdotal but my favorite review videos all r ones by someone recording off their laptop, all with a noticeable noise floor. It’s unfortunate that the very well produced vids seem to be negatively correlated with quality of substance, so I’ll keep sticking with my annoying noise floor videos

I've gone so far as to only go to YT with a browser that clears everything on close. I don't log in to YT, all I do is keep a local file that I use as my home page where I keep the link to the video tab of content creators I enjoy.

When you go in "fresh", the world is your oyster for approximately three videos, maybe four, then the algorithm has completely made it useless. So, I either go through a link to a creator and see what they've been up to lately or I go to a fresh YT homepage and search for what I'm looking for. The first search is probably still heavily curated, but it seems to give me more interesting options. When I find a video I like, I go to the creators page and add the link to my home page.

I don't log in mainly for privacy reasons, but it also causes me to only be able to search my particular bubble, pretty much. Going in from the outside gives me much better results, at least before I've watched too many videos in a chain. I'm a patron on patreon for a few my favorite creators, which I generally swap around every now and then for those who have Patreon accounts. I don't think I've ever bought anything from a creator's sponsor. It weirds me out that randos on the internet are now expected to be commercial shills and personal brand curators as well as video creators.

I consider the fact that people use it like TV to be a problem. YouTube (at least the way I perceived and used it) was a thing where your friends tipped you off for what to watch or look for or you needed a visual demonstration or explanation from a "real person" where it would otherwise be much harder to get up to speed by yourself. And it was a lot more of a bona fide social experience because of that (you were not NOT going to totally reminisce with your buddy that told you about it later), just not within the confines of the direct interface/site itself.

They also completely broken the search functionality. If I look for a topic I get 10 videos the algorithm decides are relevant and after that I only get random stuff.

So many times I remember to have seen a video about something and I just can't find it even with the right keywords. If I'm lucky I find it on...bing search filtered by videos.

Someone explained magazines to me a decade ago as discovering stuff you don't know you don't know about. That's the value of HN.

I also find that keeping up with the news on the regular basis is a waste of time and it's mostly regurgitations of the same, but when I tried cutting it completely, I find that in a couple of months I am completely out of the loop and it takes quite some time to catch up.

This is not a useful example, but it's a funny one. I was out of the country and away from tech for 3 months and when I opened my door on returning to the US, the delivery guy was a teenager, and says "Man, you have so many good Pokemon in your yard!". I had NO idea what he was talking about and said "Oh, cool". Found out Pokemon Go was a thing a few weeks later.

At least reading the headlines of news is important for chatting in social situations.

Perhaps in the sense that now you're misinformed together, rather than being uninformed.

I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram. Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section. Points aren't even shown next to the nickname so people are more or less equal in comments. Personally I don't have "friends/followers" on this site nor I seek them (which seems the main drive on sites like facebook/Instagram/twitter).

Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)

>I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram

I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me.

>Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section

There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix.

>I don't see many negatives of sites like HN

Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back.

I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.

I don't include HN as 'social media' either mostly because it doesn't constantly ping me when I get a reply. I have to check manually. It also don't change much so checking it once or twice a day for ten minutes isn't a big deal.

I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment.

Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.

There isn't any clear definition out there of what "social media" is I'm aware of, but I'd say the basic criteria include some combination of:

- User-submitted content

- Individualized experience based on algorithmic curation, follows/subscriptions, or both

- Ability to directly interact with other users, whether publishing to some kind of profile or "wall" of theirs or sending direct messages

- Users have some kind of durable persona (at minimum a human-readable, memorable account name, but usually a multimedia profile of some sort)

Hacker News mostly has none of these things. A very small proportion of top-level content is user-created and there is algorithmic curation, but not individualized. This is really more of a newspaper without writers or editors. The stories come from other platforms instead and every reader's letter gets published automatically.

Reddit isn't social media, either. It's a discussion board. There has to be something that made MySpace and Facebook different from phpBB and Usenet or why'd we come up with a new word at all? People seem to be using "social media" as a general derogatory name for any potentially addictive, high-noise, low-signal time sink that encourages mindless consumption of undifferentiated "content" and creates bad incentives to creators of such content to abandon truth and artistic integrity in favor of flashy gimmicks and trend surfing.

But that describes virtually all of pop culture.

Nothing gives me more anxiety than HN so I personally think it's much worse.

re: Reddit

A lot of the main subs you see on the homepage are not explicitly political subs, but they end up having almost nothing but political content (/r/whitepeopletwitter, /r/facepalm, /r/therewasanattempt) and Reddit seems to ignore me when I block subreddits. So, even though I WAS a reddit addict for 10 years, they changed the formula and now I'm just not hooked anymore. Thanks Reddit!

The one I got recommended once (despite not being subscribed) was AITA. Which is cheap (and I'm certain 99% fake) reality tv content. I clicked it once and now that's it, that's all I get.

Yeah, it is really terrible. Any sub with user submitted drama stories were terrible. Many are fake or ragebait, or at the least extremely one sided accounts meant to garner sympathy. You click on one and it starts feeding you more. The comment sections are really terrible in those subs as well, there is no reasoned discussion going on.

So much of reddit is such obvious ragebait that I'm surprised so many people fall for it

Half of the posts are "My friend said I should murder this guy but I said no, AITA?"

Reddit and the subs themselves may not be explicitly political, but the site leans incredibly heavily to one side and seemingly can not shut up about politics for even a moment. I honestly think it might be one of the most toxic, worst for your mental health social media sites that exists.

use reddit enhancement suite in conjunction with old reddit, and 'filter' subs you don't wish to see from r/all.

Reddit is so much nicer with all of the toxic crap filtered out.

As someone who did this for years, it’s like methadone or a nicotine patch. Harm reduction, but you really are better off quitting. There really is nothing of value left on r/all, and outside of some small niche or highly moderated exceptions, almost nothing of value left on the site.

I'm happier not using it at all

Not just politics, exclusively american politics.

> edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless

I don't much care for the upvotes (nor the occasional down) but the responses are not always worthless. In fact a count of responses (in total or since last visit) would be more useful to me in the top right of the page where the vote count currently sits.

Someone might be correcting or refining what I've said in a way the I'll find useful, or someone could be asking for clarity on what I've said which, assuming I have time to respond back, might be useful to others too, or might highlight that I'm not as sure as I thought I was originally which again may help my understanding.

This isn't true elsewhere of course, HN is one of the few places online, other than private groups, where responses have a reasonable chance of being useful.

I agree, in addition, it's recommendation engine has rapidly devolved into "suggest only the most popular books in this genre" type recommendations.

Say, if I want to read grimdark fantasy novels, and I've already read all of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Larwence books and didn't like Glenn Cook, good luck getting anything else out of the algorithms. There's no discovery, just regurgitation of whatever has been blessed by the masses.

And that's when things aren't manipulated. Take any popular category and it's all gamified. Someone is manipulating the most recent book to the top of the "best of all times" list, even recent self published crap gets into the top recommendations for popular categories. It's all manipulated garbage and Amazon doesn't seem to have any interest in changing it since it gets them sells or Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for that self publisher.

I've fallen back on critics and awards to curate my read lists. It's not as specific, but looking back on what I've enjoyed reading most recently, almost all of them have been awarded a hugo award. So now I just go through the award winner lists and pick something that looks interesting. I recently discovered the Imperial Radch series this way and really enjoyed it.

You don't have to visit the youtube website. People recommend videos here and I sometimes use a search engine to find them. To watch them I use youtube-dl or VLC. It's marginally less convenient but I avoid a world of nonsense.

Addon: Whitelisted because found up voted on HN

can you link it? The only relevant searches are related to adblock whitelisting.

> Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it?

Is it though? Don't you think maybe the billion of social media users around the world are getting some value out of it? It's a pretty shallow take.

I do agree that "social media is uniformly bad" is too broad a stroke. That said, humans aren't exactly the best at discriminating something that feels good from being unhealthy or at least unproductive.

Yeah I agree. It's easy to list some negatives of social media (doomscrolling, bullying, building unrealistic expectations for your life), but the simple ability to connect many people all over the world is pretty hard to argue against. Social media companies push shallow, easy to digest content, but that doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of meaningful interactions happening every day.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that"

Yeah, the same way people get value out of gambling.

I have added RSS feeds of limited channels to my miniflux instance and I browse youtube from there.

That is the most sane way to consume YouTube content. I’m doing the same on reeder. I have all the channels I care about in a folder and that’s it. Only thing that bothers me is that the RSS feed has both videos and shorts mixed together and I really dislike shorts.

I actually block all social media besides youtube on my pi-hole, and I unblock it manually for 5 minutes when I want to consume some hn/twitter.

HN is high value content surrounded by delusional and unempathetic tech bros.

> HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time.

Wonder how we could make it more effective. I’d love a keyword filter. Or an algorithm I can train myself to teach it what I like and don’t like. ChatGPT summaries of the comments to filter the wheat from the chaff would be helpful too.

HN works well because the top stories are same the top stories for everyone. Having the #1 story be unique and algorithm-driven for every user would be detrimental to the site and the sense of community.

In what sense would it be detrimental? If the top news for the day is a new Google product, and I don’t care about Google, why would it be detrimental to anyone if I didn’t see that?

I think you are conflating externally driven, top down algorithms, with users expressing their own preferences over what they see.

I disagree, HN is like a broadsheet newspaper, it encourages a sense of discovery and often learning that things you didn't initially have an interest in, can be interesting or perhaps a parallel to something with which you are engaged.

Further, no personal preferences means the site isn't expected to be tailored to you specifically, this promotes a certain sense of deference where people are exposed to lots of ideas, concepts, industries, experiences and viewpoints -- nobody is an "expert" here and on any particular day, there may be multiple things for you to weigh in on, or none, and that's ok. Along with fair, objective moderation, the discussions here are mostly well-behaved, non-partisan and civil, which all the sites you can personally customize fail to achieve.

I've been thinking of this for a while - something like an advanced keyword filter that would work across most webpages, using a smaller LLM maybe?

Personally I'd love to put in the names of some American cult of personality figures - Musk, Trump, the Kardashians etc.

Ideally it would filter out all posts and comment trees on HN or reddit that are about these people and a handful of other topics. Even if it only worked on those two sites it would be a huge improvement to the internet for me.

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