Really good points. IMO the web-surfing crowd's taste for news (as opposed to their capability when it comes to work) is deceiving. Their excitement for prospective high-leverage information creates a demand that biases community sites like HN and Reddit toward novelty, and the result is this massive FOMO loop: "Read it, remember to try it, forget to try it, aw damn a new thing already came out and it's better because X! Read it..." I love that the author of the article really speaks to this situation.

I have a relative who got really into this mindset. In fact he picked the "HN's Choice" software framework of the day for one of our co-creative projects a couple years ago. Mostly a fun project, but it could have gone somewhere, maybe. He got as far as setting it up so that we had some scaffolding, then basically he flamed out. I don't blame him at all; he'd never even used it before and expected himself to be able to just run with it. And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P, but he was ashamed to use it. It made me so upset to see him feel all this pressure and then collapse.

Personally I feel that pressure myself sometimes but being aware of it helps a lot. As a hobby side project, I decided to go back and do some 1990s MS-DOS programming and experiencing this FOMO stuff was part of the motivation. I needed to be free to work deep instead of thinking broad, so to speak.