Ask HN: Would your life be better if you stopped visiting HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would your life be better if you stopped visiting HN?

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I've been reflecting on my online consumption habits, and I'm starting to question whether HN is a net positive in my life.

It's by far the most intelligent and interesting community I engage with, but if I'm being honest I think it has just made me cynical about technology, entrepreneurship and my own career.

I think my life would improve if I stopped visiting HN (and Reddit/YouTube/etc.), but it's definitely not easy to shake the addiction and the 'fear of missing out'.

That's my thoughts on the topic, but I'll put the question to you... Would your life be better if you stopped visiting HN?

View on HN

There are probably only 3 social networks I've gotten a lot of value from: YouTube, Reddit, and HN. HN has contributed massively to my career by exposing me to so many different ideas and concepts.

It actually filled a void that Slashdot left. Something happened around the time I started visiting HN more where ./ became this really weird echochamber and hot takes were abound. Believe it or not, it seems to me like HN is one of the few places where there is a lot of self-moderated and rational discourse.

Yes.

From my perspective the conversation here is generally awful. It’s the same tired faux genius rhetoric over and over again. How many times will I read “these companies are just way too bloated” as the top comment on a layoff post? It’s always written with perfect confidence as if the commenter understands the chaos of the tech industry better than anybody else. People upvote it because it sounds good without ever thinking critically about what they just read. Well written, confident, and reassuring to me (as one of the few competent tech employees)? Upvote!

How many times will people reply to the top comments with some vaguely related point they desperately want to make and that they feel is worth hijacking your attention for? Every single time.

How many times will a top comment ask questions that are clearly answered in the link? We’re not even allowed to tell them to RTFA because that’s against HN rules. Posting the comment isn’t though.

I stick around for those rare diamonds in the rough. The moments where an actual, proven genius logs in to post their yearly comment. Usually because somebody posted a link to their work and the top comment has hopelessly misunderstood it.

I know it's just one example, but you'll keep reading about the tech bloat while the companies are bloated. No one is pretending to be a genius, they just worked in it. The upvotes come from people who worked in it. They aren't random outsiders, they actually worked in these places. Big tech has been bloated for a long time.

Yeah, I’m sure the guy at the bottom of Google’s org chart knows for a fact that Discord is bloated.

I originally upvoted the commend you replied to, as it seemed to make a good point, but after reading your reply I had to take the upvote down and give it to you. Just wanted to share.

People have friends, co-workers than move on etc etc. If you work at a couple decent sized companies in the bay area there is a good chance you come to know a person or two at a lot decent sized companies.

And, the people at the bottom of the org chart often see it the clearest. They know what people are actually working on.

If you haven't worked in one of the super bloated companies, it's hard to describe exactly how wild it is. Really, people aren't trying to sound smart, they've just had their butt in a seat at one of the places.

I feel like you're really focusing on the negatives, HN has a lot of great content and I generally find it to be a big positive but it's not like, very positive on the whole, I just feel like you can mostly ignore the bad parts and have fun with the good (and I do occasionally engage with the bad too).

You're going to have to wade through garbage for high quality content pretty much everywhere, and HN has been consistent and valuable to me over the years for sure.

I think it's a testament to HN that your very-critical comment is at the top. I generally love HN and the discussions here. My life is better with it.

> It’s the same tired faux genius rhetoric over and over again.

> I stick around for those rare diamonds in the rough.

> The moments where an actual, proven genius logs in

so you are the one to judge who is a genius :). a little condescending?

imo hn has become quora-ified. anecdotal commentary has become common.

Unpopular opinion but I think unproven unbacked anecdotes need to be punished, here and elsewhere. In my experience many of them could be easily debunked by someone with a deep understanding of the subject being talked about, but newcomers are given the wrong impression.

That's for academic papers and textbooks. This is just a message board. It's akin to a pub - water tight arguments not needed.

> We’re not even allowed to tell them to RTFA because that’s against HN rules.

Yes you are, it’s not against the rules. From the guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

It’s right there as an example of what you can respond: “The article mentions that”.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I stick around for those rare diamonds in the rough.

It used to be that most posts were worthwhile. Sad to see what it's devolved to.

I'm aghast at how many comments these days are against a startup/company doing well. It used to be Startup News, I think the branding change was the turning point.

I noticed the same phenomenon. But there's a hack - look at the middle or near the bottom. On especially heated topics, I might scroll all the way to the bottom first.

I thought one topic was pretty amusing, where people were discussing financial planning for millionaires. The top was full of cynical replies or reddit style rants by people who aren't millionaires, like maxing out insurance. The middle had people who did make their money and lost it. The bottom-ish had the actual rich folk.

You gotta search for the geniuses. 90% of people are in the bottom 90%. Someone asks for the key to happiness. Your average person will say "diet, exercise, sleep". This is insightful to those at the bottom, and those who are above average won't disagree. Then some dude comes along and says "life is suffering" and rants about why chasing luxury is going to make you unhappy. That dude is going to be downvoted or ignored.

I try to limit myself to the first 3 pages once a day. I keep coming back to HN because over the years I have found more great information on it than anywhere else. There are now several blogs that I semi-regularly follow after having been introduced to them from HN.

However, I do have a gripe. Many posts negatively impact upon my self-esteem. Reading HN I get the impression that there are lots and lots of folks earning huge salaries at very important companies. Lots of others have founded startups, raised $millions and in many cases have had massive windfall exits.

> However, I do have a gripe. Many posts negatively impact upon my self-esteem. Reading HN I get the impression that there are lots and lots of folks earning huge salaries at very important companies. Lots of others have founded startups, raised $millions and in many cases have had massive windfall exits.

This is basically the worst part of any social networking service now. They highlight the breakout success stories, geniuses and outliers so much that it becomes easy to assume everyone else is doing much better than you are.

For average Joes it's seeing the influencers and celebrities on Instagram and TikTok, for developers it's Hacker News and Reddit.

I doubt it would be better.

I’ve said for many years now that my job is primary knowing what’s possible even if I don’t necessarily know exactly how to do it (today).

By reading HN nearly daily I keep my finger on the pulse of tech, or at least the parts of tech that most directly affect me. Countless times I’ve been able to say “oh, I saw a library/saas/etc that does what we need” in a meeting and it’s directly led to starting my own company. When a company came to me asking for software I was able to say “yes that’s possible and I’m capable of delivering it”, in great part due to following advancements/products/etc in tech even when I hadn’t used some of those specific tools before.

Personally I shine the brightest when I can pair my knowledge of technology with someone who is a subject matter expert (outside of tech) to create something they didn’t think was possible. I’ve often thought my dream job would be to go into non-tech companies, learn enough about their industry, examine their processes, and then suggest and/or implement solutions (revolving around the use of technology) to improve them.

I don’t know of any place, other than HN, that has high quality posts and discussions about technology and new things coming out.

Yes.

No doubt the community is intelligent, but compassion, honesty, intellectual honesty and willingness to accept other peoples viewpoint (and they yours) are more important.

Many people come to HN, myself included to distract themselves from other things. They bring that frustration with them. If I were to make a forum, it would be structured much differently. The first to post sets the tone of the "discussion" if we call it that. It is often a hoard of frustrated people (mostly men) screaming at each other in rhetorical combat.

I really suggest people set their maxvisit and minaway settings. My minaway is 180 minutes. I am ratcheting down my maxvisit.

How much of what you get from HN today has real worth for your life and/or career?

I think every community and platform has a limited growth-value for their users. At some point, you've seen it all, read it all, know all the shit and giggles going around the platform. And at this point, you shift into the doomscrolling-mode and start consuming stuff for the sake of consumption, and to find the one gem of the day which justifies the time wasted on the platform today.

By not quitting you are missing out on something else too. I quit playing an addictive RPG game on my phone in the evenings (no pay-to-win IAP fortunately!). Soon thereafter, I came across an interesting hobby and now focus on it in my spare time.

FB was making me feel annoyed. Quitting it helped a lot. With HN it is a bit harder because some content here is actually useful. I find avoiding comments on submissions about layoffs, Google, Meta, Apple, lawsuits, etc. helps me be more positive.

I’m developing a similar approach to Reddit (in theory)

Saying these sites are great resources for information, but not great places to express emotion.

IMHO Reddit is so manipulated nowadays I am not sure it is a great source of information.

I don't think it would make much of a difference. It's assuming HN makes any impact to my life as it is. If it wasn't HN then it'd probably be a video game or some other "time-wasting" activity in my downtime.

I gave HN a break for a bit, didn't make any difference. It's like having an interactive newspaper of news I might be interested in when there's not much happening with my RSS reader.

Yes because my life was better when I stopped visiting all those sites for a time. More productive, more focused, more present. I found myself “addicted” to other things though: work slack, discord, etc.

I made it about 1.5 months before relapsing. It was difficult at first but easy after a few days. It’s funny how when I returned 1.5 months later seemingly nothing had happened in that time. There was hardly anything to “miss out on”. I plan to do it again…but not at this exact moment :-)

I have found my best experiences with HN is when I never click the "next" button after 30 stories. Same with so very many other websites like Reddit or YouTube. The problem is I'm not engaging with the content, but anxious/bored/etc about something else and using HN as an escape. Hell I'm annoyed about something else completely unrelated and I landed here on page 2 at 11pm.

I"m taking this comment as a cue to call it a day as well. Take a break. I promise you won't miss anything that important for a few days, and you will feel better too.

My life would not be better if I stopped visiting HN.

my life would be better if I stopped visiting reddit, though. it's become way too much of a hive mind and anything contrary to the prevalent groupthink gets you buried or even suspended from the whole site. it seems like a bizarre social shift has occurred over the past few years, and perhaps I've gotten a bit older and wiser as well.

YouTube can at least be more productive and fun.

overall, less social media is good for me. I've even gone back to forums and IRC.

Uh probably not. In theory I might spend more time working on my side projects, but in all likeliness I'd just end up spending more time on social media sites with less interesting/intelligent conversations instead.

It's definitely made me a bit more cynical too, but to be honest... so has most of the internet. It's very easy to see the worst in humanity if you spend too long on any of these social media services.

Moderation would be the best. I have gotten a little bit of value from Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and HN. But most of that value can be captured within a few minutes a day rather than the few hours I spend. But moderation feels harder than quitting outright. I relapsed on Reddit recently and I found it easier to just have a zero tolerance policy.

Yes. It's exhausting reading comments from pseduo intellectuals who have never accomplished anything in their lives and yet speak with a lot of gusto.

No. It’s probably the last place on the internet where respectful discussion happens in the open like it does.

Whereas I felt the opposite the of Reddit. I cut out Reddit completely during that last debacle and I would say my life is better for sure.

Yeah, Reddit at times does seem like some bizarre group think type of thing in terms of how comments are downvoted or upvoted. Coming from Reddit, in Hackernews it seems people are more accepting of controversial ideas.

If votes were visible, and everyone was allowed to downvote, Hacker News would indeed probably be a lot worse

This seems to have gotten much worse in recent weeks and I don’t understand why.

On a wide array of subs, spanning many topics. Moderators seem to be very quick suddenly to quash decenting opinions.

To some extend, yes.

Hacker News, the _link list_ is still fine and surfaces interesting things at least every other day. The comment section however has fared less well, the heroic and thankless job the moderators have been doing notwithstanding.

At some point later this year given some time, I will probably reduce HN to that first part. Plug it into a custom link aggregator / filter / agent I have yet to write.

Delete my fifteen year old reddit account before the IPO. Find myself a nice, old school forum off the beaten path for the human element. And then I'll finally be free from the "modern" Internet.

2024 is going to be a good year.

Yes. I think the reason why most people browse HN is for those rare nuggets of knowledge that one can sometimes only find here.

Sure, the general quality of discourse here is greater relative to the discussion found on Reddit/Twitter/etc. But even then that is not enough to distract us from the repetitive cynical nature of the most upvoted comments.

You spend enough time here, sooner or later you'll be able to predict how HN feels about a certain topic based on the title. This is true for all communities but especially so for HN because of the depressing pessimistic atmosphere here.

No it would be much worse. Some of the material posted on HN is great and it's good to keep up with things. I check HN once every four or five days. The rest of the time I'm working, as you should be.

Yes, 100% better.

If I add the time I spend on NH over the week, some weeks it can probably reach 3-5 hours. That's 3-5 hours reading about something, checking comments, sometimes replying. But there is no substantial, measurable gain that would justify spending this much time.

If instead I spend the same amount of time reading a book, meditating, socialising, working, or even staring through the window - all of these would be time better spent, in my assessment.

Nope. I pick up most of the best things I've ever found in tech here. Books, courses. Lots of little things that I misunderstood about myself, others, and tech.

I think you have to go into HN with an open mind. You should be exploring and finding stuff, not waiting for it to come to you. Certainly not FOMO. Engaging with the people is part of the practice.

I hold on to the saying, "When the student is ready, the mentor will come." It's not that mentors are just lying around waiting for you to be ready. The mentors are everywhere, like buses on a route. It's more that when someone isn't ready to change their identity, they resist it. That's where the cynicism comes from. It's fine, because we can't be changing our identities every damn time. But when you're looking for the change, HN is a great pool of it.

This is super interesting. I've been visiting HN every day, multiple times a day for the past year. Over the last month, as I was preparing for interviews I removed the HN bookmark on my browser tab, and almost for weeks in between interviews I would go without checking it.

And honestly I think I was healthier, and happier. Reading, and bookmarking things on HN overflowed my brain with information, and created more anxiety in me I think. Just visiting back to see what I missed after not checking it the past week, and I was better off without it I feel.

I would recommend trying. I once quit HN for six months after a particularly nasty comment exchange, and I think I was the better for it. But one day I came back, and… well, old habits die hard.

Why not give it a try for a month?

I guess it's hard to prove, but I think with fomo, anything truly important will eventually find it's way to you.

I don't think 'life would be better', but i'd be more apt to get going on the projects that are piling up in the garage.

If we were all rich, we will never lurk on HN.

False

If I replaced HN, I would likely fill that time with some other low effort activity.

HN gives me insights into the tech world that I wouldn't get otherwise.

EDIT: This thread has got me thinking. What do non-HN users fill their time with? A lot would use some type of social media, a lot would spend time on YouTube or Podcasts. Others watch TV.

Absolutely not. Hackernews to me seems to have the most nuanced and intelligent people I have seen. I don't find myself being cynical either. I am not sure where it is exactly coming from? Are there cynical people here? Sure, but there are also optimists, builders and optimistic people.

I've been reading HN for about 10 years, I recently moved to Australia and my consumption has drastically reduced. Don't feel like I've missed much at all, especially atm when nothing much seems to be happening outside of AI.

I spend too much time on HN, but it is better than most things online. Certainly better than social media or YouTube.

One thing I started recently is a weekly digital sabbath: no screens on Sundays. I'm enjoying the change.

A: Not really.

I'm on it a lot but I liken it to a tech newspaper. Often times relevant and current news pop up on here and it's more curated than, say, reddit. Discussions are usually intelligent.

Reddit OTOH...

It probably would if HN stops allowing political spam.

Who you choose to engage with will make or breaks any platform.

Being here increases my chances of engaging with people looking closer - at anything.

I think there is a spectrum of possibilities here. It is not exactly like giving up candy crush to achieve your goals.

Yes.

It might be the next site I’m going to axe after YouTube.

No. But my life will be better if I stop visit any other URL though.

I wouldn’t put HN in the same category as reddit or YouTube, in any case.

For me YouTube would be the most beneficial by far, HN would be mixed but somewhat positive and Reddit would be a real waste in the past decade.

I end up finding a ton of useful ideas in the Ask HN section.

So the short answer is no.

I don't think so -- I derive a lot of pleasure from reading technical content and it's a great place to discover articles of note I may have otherwise missed.

But... I'm not that heavy of an HN commenter. I read them, especially on links where I have thoughts, but I generally stop scrolling once something annoys me.

hn is good but too much good thing is a bad thing too

Don’t Do That. Don’t Give Me Hope.

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