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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 guess it's hard to prove, but I think with fomo, anything truly important will eventually find it's way to you.
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.
One thing I started recently is a weekly digital sabbath: no screens on Sundays. I'm enjoying the change.
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...
Being here increases my chances of engaging with people looking closer - at anything.
It might be the next site I’m going to axe after YouTube.
So the short answer is no.
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.