Hacker News Reader

Comment by hamasho | Hacker News Reader

For me, it's not just social media but also Hacker News.

I often open Hacker News, scan the titles, and open all interesting threads in separate tabs for later reading (I opened this thread the same way). Each thread usually contains insightful discussions and useful references on topics I enjoy, like music, programming, and recently, LLMs. Unlike Reddit, I often read the original articles instead of just shit-posting on clickbait titles.

Most of the discussions and articles are information-dense, requiring a significant amount of time and mental effort to read through them all (and close all the tabs). It's not uncommon for these dozens of open tabs to drain my willpower just by being there all day long.

I feel like I'm driven by FOMO rather than sheer curiosity. Maybe some information diet helps?

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FOMO and curiosity are just different sides of the same coin for me.

I can say what does not help much: I mostly open just one HN tab and mostly proceed sequentially inside of it. If there's a rabbit hole, all of it happens in that single tab (a lot of back button).

Still, the consumption mode itself makes it harder to switch back to work mode or to creative mode.

I like this, this is probably a simple solution that could help with the problem that GP (and I) have with opening up many many tabs at once.

This also is probably good advice to use with any site. Sometimes I'll open up 3 tabs of interesting-looking youtube videos from my home page. It would probably be best (and would make me watch less youtube) to restrict it to only 1 tab per site.

That would work great if it weren't for every site breaking back behavior or at least using it to regenerate the page with different results.

For Youtube I will only queue up (by way of new tabs) interesting videos on a single row and only after finishing or discarding those will I go back to the YT tab to find another time burner. Essentially that sets my VIP (Videos in progress) limit to 4.

Since I feel the same, and my habits are really similar to yours (I'm forcing myself to read more articles compared to when I used reddit), I want to comment something I felt lacked in the article analysis.

For me, what's missing is intent. Most of the time I feel I could be doing better, I stop and think: wait, this is my resting time. Or, wait, this is my hobby. I feel even though I fall in one end of the balance, many times this articles fall in the other.

If I tried to deep dive and study as much as is suggested, I'd have no energy for other things that I value more right now. Reading author articles it seems to me others have different energy or their effort is focused differently, but I'm always cautious because burning out it's not something I want to ever repeat

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