Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I had to block it because I realized it just completely overtook my feed and 99% of it was in that "interesting but ultimately forgettable within 30 seconds of reading it" zone that's filling up social media. I mean it lived up to its name - it's very "dull" if vaguely interesting.

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this is the part of the internet that everyone would be better off avoiding: not bad but no long-term value. When the internet was novel and your engagement limited these were rarer, cool things to share (often face to face!). Now this content is internet sugar that will be the health crisis of a generation.

Isn't that most of Hacker News as well? "Oh that's an interesting technical solution - which is completely irrelevant to the work I'm doing"

The standard on Hacker News is intellectually interesting.

“I saw geese,” ordinarily wouldn’t meet it (though in imagined contexts it would, of course).

Or as described in The New Yorker, HN is often about performative erudition, as perhaps is the case with this GEB’ish sentence.

Nothing is completely irrelevant. It's just very hard to point out when and where some post on HN about properly frobnicating a wickie [1] server in a data center in South Baluchistan will subtly help your development decisions at your current or future job.

[1] What is a wickie server? Damned if i know. But I'm sure there is someone on HN who has done one.

The neat thing about HN is that I can nearly always find at least one thing on the front page that's useful to me, especially if I read the discussion.

Just looking through now, Canine is interesting because it's similar to Dokku, which I already use. I might consider using Canine in a similar role in the future if I want k8s with buildpacks.

The Dull Men's Club groups aren't like that. The needle to hay ratio is far worse. It's all "huh, cool" coincidences and mysterious objects, but nobody really intends to show the world anything useful.

I cannot think of anything better than a 99% dull feed.

Part of the point of DMC content is a solace from everyday stressors. That's a factor in why divisive topics--politics, religion, etc.--are discouraged when "main points" of a post.

I'd agree with you if there was anything else of value on my facebook feed.

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