Why I Quit Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Why I Quit Hacker News

nathanael.hevenet.com

8 pointsNathanael11 comments

News aggregators bring us news, but I for one feel my knowledge is best served by thorough analysis, which in turn is best consumed at a slow to medium pace. So I quit.

That's.. a good point.

Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast about publishing and they had a guy from Delayed Gratification on - http://www.dgquarterly.com/ .. it's a quarterly "slow journalism" magazine that summarizes the news of the last 3 months and follows up with that news (extra things that happened, reactions, etc.)

Maybe something similar would work for Hacker News. We have Hacker Monthly which beautifully brings together a handful of interesting articles, but it's not really analysis or summarizing the last three months in terms of trends, goings-ons and the aftermath of what occurred.

Should this exist? If not for Hacker News, then the tech scene in general? I'd subscribe to such a publication even if only for archival & reference purposes.

Thanks for posting the Delayed Gratification link. Sounds like a great idea.

This sounds like a great idea to me. I would certainly read it, and perhaps pay something for it. Hacker News and Reddit are useful for keeping up with the latest announcements, but there's definitely a place for more reflective content that summarizes and analyses what's been happening and how they turned out.

I think it would be useful for both the general tech scene, as well as specific technologies like Ruby and Rails.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE

(Edit: Sorry to be flippant but I thought it'd make a change from the hand-wringing of why these posts aren't a good idea. Plus, a bit of Queen can't fail to brighten the day.)

I don't want to overshadow the general point, because I think it has some merit, but one problem I had with the article was the quote, "If I read 10 or 15 interesting articles on different subjects in a row, what’s left of it an hour later? And how substantial can one Internet article really be? Books in comparison seem to have brought me much more." That may be true (it's going to come down to each person individually), but he shouldn't be comparing 10 or 15 articles in an hour (you can probably read more than that) to a book. A book probably takes you at least 5 hours to read. If you read 20 articles an hour, that's equivalent to reading 100 articles. So the real question is, does a book bring you "more" (however you personally want to define it) than 100 articles (or more) from a place like hacker news?

Not sure about HN but I dropped scanning news from my radar a few weeks ago and I am totally happy about it. My take is that news in general is usually long distance from where you are, so why bother about it? One can save time and energy by reducing the unnecessary noise out of the system.

But I don't think same applies to HN if your work and your world revolves around the same field. Consequently, I wouldn't have dropped the news from my daily habits if my life/work was dependent upon it.

ok, I know this will be downvoted to oblivion, but I have to say it:

"If you want to quit, quit, don't post"

but seriously, I suffer from the same addiction

I always think of these as "Leaving, forever" posts since that's what we called them over on PlanetCrap (which I haven't been an active member of in quite some time, though I still read Quartertothree.com a bit, and that has some significant overlap in users).

A big part of the meme is that people who post such posts before they leave are nearly guaranteed to come back, and sooner rather than later. (Though often under a different pseudonym if the forum allows it).

One could say the same about everything that will divide your attention from the task at hand - for me this is my RSS Aggregator (with HN, among a few others) and IRC.

Solution? Close every program that isn't needed for what you currently do and only open it up when you're done or having a break...

This needs some serious willpower though once you return from the break and in general..

There are less drastic options. Set up blocking software to give yourself limited access so you can get your fix without the distraction. LeechBlock & Chrome Nanny are what I use, there are lots of others.

I had this exact feeling as an inkling in the back of my mind - "I'm spending way too much time here".

Goodbye HN.

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