I have more HN points than you, but a couple of things makes me feel like it doesn't matter:

The lack of any visible sign of new replies removes a lot of compulsion. I only stay engaged with the conversations actually interesting enough to get me to keep reading them.

Compare with Reddit where the best thing I learned to do was to decide when I was 'done' and open the list of unread messages while looking away and closing the tab...

> Compare with Reddit where the best thing I learned to do was to decide when I was 'done' and open the list of unread messages while looking away and closing the tab...

This is so true. I'll often delete a reddit comment a few minutes after writing it if I think it's potentially inviting some troll or person with shit reading skills to respond back negatively. Even the so-called "good" small communities have a couple people like that, which is enough.

Apollo has had a bug the past few days with iOS 13 where the mail icon doesn't light up. This has honestly been really nice.

I use a user script in chrome to hide my HN karma count from myself. Super helpful for focusing on what is important when contributing (along with a lot of constructive feedback from the mods over the last 8 years).

Is this publicly available? I've been looking for something like this.

Install Stylus or another css extension and then add this style filtered to news.ycombinator.com:

  .pagetop {
      visibility:collapse;
  }
  
  .pagetop * {
      visibility:visible;
  }
  
  .score {
      visibility:hidden;
  }

This would be a great HN feature actually, fitting in spirit with the existing settings (eg showdead etc). @dang, if you read this, what do you think?

If you use an adblocker like uBlock Origin, you can use the following filter to remove the top navbar:

news.ycombinator.com##.pagetop

I do a similar thing blocking it with ublock origin

I did the opposite, I left a very toxic environment after over 4 years, which caused a lot of people whom I used to consider mates, or even friends to cut off any contact with me (I suspect they might have been influenced by some bad actors but this is outside of my control and will to be controlled anymore).

I started being more active on social media (only to an extent - for example I use the built-in Instagram timer to only allow up to 15 minutes of usage a day) to cope with the lack of interactions I used to have at work and around it. Some of the old 'friends' found and started to add/follow me but there was no other meaningful interaction from their side. Before they would call and ask to go out and do something after work - not anymore. I reached out to some of them a few times but felt that there is an imbalance in both quality and quantity in communication from their side. Since I found that to be very shallow, I started regularly wiping my contacts who are there just to leech on my private life and give nothing in return.

Some people aren't your friends, they just happen to spend time with you because of common activities in your and their lives - they're simply stuck with you in the same place and time. I cut these people off from my life and trust me, it has been over 2 months and I have less relationships but only the high quality ones survived - it makes me much happier, less drained on a daily basis and more content knowing that they're the few good ones.

There is no need to be attached to people who aren't attached to you. And there is no need to force anything - it will only cause harm.

I've gone the same way with Twitter -- from massive amounts of tweeting to posting fairly regularly on here. Though not to the 17,000 points scale... I was around the 700 mark last time I looked (I don't look at the number very often).

The difference for me is, on Twitter you get people quote-RTing you to ask their friends to hate you. Here... it's a relatively polite reply explaining why I'm wrong (and I often am!) in their perspective. Or that I've missed some key point which utterly skewers my argument.

Maybe it's more like giving up meth and replacing it with codeine...

> Here... it's a relatively polite reply explaining why I'm wrong

I've never found this. It's generally a three hundred word roundabout way of saying "You're an idiot" to fit in the faux civility guidelines.

Yes. Somehow you have to play along, otherwise someone will point out that "non-substantial comments are not welcome here".

Point is: Sarcasm works best when writing somewhat snarky. But probably most HN readers don't understand sarcasm and that's the problem. (See what I did there?)

I have always been curious about this: Are you for real saying you can take an "You're an idiot" comment with the same equanimity as the 300 word option? Email/Forums etc already loses a ton of context. Merge that with semi-anonymity - I don't know how you can do it better with a short form answer.

IOW - Your comment is ignorant :D

Twitter is a toxic cesspool and I can't fathom the value people get out of it. I don't CARE about influencers think, I don't WANT to see the most re-tweeted comment.

Whereas FB is more "flat"; I see what people who I actually care about post. Nice vacation, hey, your kid did something unremarkable, cool, you got a new dog.

If your usage pattern is to try to game the system and gather likes and shares, you're probably not someone I'm interested in, hence my distaste for twitter, or, generally, 'following' anyone I'm not personal friends with. Twitter seems to be setup for the latter; I keep trying to like it and use it, but I get uninteresting shit from the "public" figures I try to follow; eg, race drivers I'm interested in, cybersecurity figures, etc.

Twitter is for the most part as toxic as you make it. You have to be willing to aggressively cull the people you follow, and there are always promoted Tweets in there possibly crapping over your nice timeline, but you can make a pretty nice place by being selective in who you follow.

Also, if you care at all what your "score" is on a social media site you will grow to hate it. No matter what the site is remind yourself it always has Who's Line rules: The points don't matter. If you're not an asshole they tend to just come naturally with time. If you're being hidden because your score is too low then you should probably step back and ask if you really want to be part of that community, since you seem to be so at odds with it.

If you want trade the cocaine that is HN with a weed variety, you should blog. It's really fufilling.

I blog publicly but also journal privately using git and vim. I have been on and off for about 5 years.

The raw thoughts rarely show the light of day, but sometimes I synthesize my journal entries as blog posts or HN comments. I refine my true self for the public. This saves me from letter downvotes sway what I believe.

By the time I post on HN I've already collected my thoughts in my other journals.

I do feel very disconnected from people these days.

It's been about a little over a year since moving my of my status updates to Mastodon from Twitter where I follow exactly one IRL friend from high school, a friend from two jobs ago, a person who found me randomly, and a customer for Remarkbox.

When I do post on Twitter it's often a link to my Mastodon post, or a link to my blog, or side project I'm working on.

It's sort of selfish but I only read tweets on my timeline up to the first ad, which is typically a scroll and a half on my phone.

In this way, I sort of use Twitter as a broadcast, like updating a RSS feed with something I'm proud of. I rarely digest the tweets others put on there. This seems selfish, but really it's not.

> you should blog. It's really fufilling.

In what way? Do you write for yourself then make it public not caring if anyone sees? That doesn't sound fulfilling; I have blog posts over the years which I have no idea if anyone ever saw and it feels a bit of a waste. Do you write as if you're trying to contribute to the world? Then doesn't that depend on feedback to know if you are succeeding or failing, and put you in the mind of "I have to create something good" as a competitor in the world of content-creation competition?

There's this quote from Kundera's The unbearable lightness of being. Perhaps it makes sense in this context.

    We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to
    the kind of look we wish to live under.  
    The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other
    words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American
    actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. He was accustomed to his
    readers, and when one day the Russians banned his newspaper, he had the feeling
    that the atmosphere was suddenly a hundred times thinner. Nothing could replace the
    look of unknown eyes. He thought he would suffocate. Then one day he realized that
    he was constantly being followed, bugged, and surreptitiously photographed in the
    street. Suddenly he had anonymous eyes on him and he could breathe again! He
    began making theatrical speeches to the microphones in his wall. In the police, he had
    found his lost public.  
    The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by
    many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are
    happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the
    feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all
    of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always
    come up with the eyes they need. Marie-Claude and her daughter belong in the second
    category.   
    Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly
    before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation
    of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the
    room will go dark. Tereza and Tomas belong in the third category.   
    And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the
    imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for
    example. He traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped
    along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare.

From the comments I get on my blog (shameful plug, I run Remarkbox, hosted comments for static sites) I know I have changed the world, if at least just a bit.

I write primarily for myself, but I do put my words into a form that others could digest, understand, and learn from.

The words on my blog may be the butterfly flapping her wings.

I do not and likely cannot measure how much my writing changes the world and trying to do so often discouraged me from writing. Do book authors really know how much their work changes the world? To me, it seems like an infinitely complex relationship.

I can tell you I have saved many people time on their research and learning and I'm sure I've swayed some to think differently, more like me.

My blog is the storm, ans is cast out to the world and left to chaos and entropy to find who it must.

Links in my profile.

I really do feel like I get a lot out of having conversations with random people on the internet. Especially a place like this, filled with intelligent people.

It's really healthy to have people challenge your ideas sometimes, which happens a lot more on the internet than in real life in my experience.

And there is obviously some degree of benefit in being a software developer who is tune with his fellow tech dorks.

Having my ideas challenged by strangers on the internet has been very valuable to me over the years. I do wish conversations on forums like this were transient though. It's one of the reasons I really enjoy IRC. I fear that my opinions from $CURRENT_YEAR might come back to bite me someday in the future. I should probably not use my name as a username, but ultimately I think that the BigCorps can resolve usernames to real identities without too much hassle either way.

Personally, I've decided that if somebody bases their opinion of of me off of an internet comment I made a couple of years ago- their opinion really isn't worth considering. So I've decided not to care about it.

Whatever stigma exists online with people who have the "incorrect" opinion- I haven't really seen reflected in real life.

The logbook of my opinions is actually really interesting for me to look back on. See how I've reevaluated some opinions, or take a critical look at older arguments that I hadn't considered recently. Of course- I do some sanitation as well, removing certain things that may have been particularly dumb.

How did you get 17,000 HN points?

Did look something like this: https://serendipitygreece.com/wp-content/uploads/comforting-...

To me, this is the problem with seeking validation through these systems. You are rewarded for saying pleasing things and for conforming to group think.

Why don't you spend down your points by playing devil's advocate? Then, when you run low on points, you can fill-up-the-tank by saying nice things that everyone wants to hear again.

Spend down? You mean get flagged and banned? Because that's what will happen.

In an interview, Evan Spiegel described Facebook with the single best succinct description in my opinion: “Facebook is a market for attention.”

HN can be too, and I like to think that I am asynchronously contributing stuff that may lay off the typical radar of the Venn diagram of typical HN readers.

Most of the Internet’s economy is a market for attention. HN in particular tends to glorify this as the vast majority of people here make their money from other peoples attention in some respects.

I don’t think seeking attention is bad as it’s the process of individualization. The opposite is far worse. Being expressive is the only way to connect with others, and often shameless, provocative or wild expression can be charming and relationship building.

The problem is our mindsets, our shallow culture and our lack of resilient thinking. We’re being provocative about the wrong things and we’re focusing our creative wonder on only the superficial.

So I've never had "Social Media", but I read Hacker News too much, and contribute a bit.

I'm wondering if Hacker News is better or worse than Facebook/Instagram.

At least on Facebook and Instagram, you usually interact with your friends, right?

Here, I feel like I read a lot of insightful posts and stories and have good discussions. But I'm not making any friends or strengthening any friendships.

Is it worth the time? I don't know. I'm definitely addicted.

I think it can be as addicting, but HN is far less vapid. Does this make it better? It's hard to say. With FB, I'd find myself reloading, and looking, and not being happy I spent any time there, all to do it again the next day.

Have an upvote, 17001 now. Seriously though, good luck to you. Have you checked out HN's rate limiting features (maxvisit, minaway, etc.)?

Imho no need to stop. Just moderate.

Suggestion: give up your 17000 HN point mabbo account and start from scratch. Only with moderation this time :-)

Agreed. The answer to doing something too much isn't to cut it out completely and move onto something else that you'll end up doing too much, that doesn't even attempt to address the issue.

I post not for points. I post because I have something to say. Expressing my self is validating, who cares if others read or agree.

I post for the same reason, but getting negative points does discourage me from posting half formed thoughts.

I do try to save the hip shots for twitter.

"who cares if others read or agree"

Too many people.

Why not just post to a text file if you really don't care?

I've found that for me, caring about such things is a larger pattern of 'holding on' too much.

So I've made it a conscious decision to constantly be getting rid of things I accumulate.

For HN and other such sites, I regularly open new accounts. This is both for ego reasons, as well as doxing: rotating through accounts and usernames helps leave less of a trace.

I override HN's css to not display points just for that.

You can check out of Hacker News but you can never leave. No seriously, you can’t delete your account.

Just try the noprocrast options in your profile. I have it set so I can basically browse for a bit in the AM, maybe do a comment and then I am locked out until the evening.

It's a useful feature for those of us working on discipline + distractibility issues.

I tried it several times, but I am usually a slow typist and English is not my native language, so I sometimes think twice about how to formulate a sentence. Sometimes when I wrote a posting, I ended up hitting the timeout, just when I was about to post. This is the only reason I turned 'noprocrast' off again, otherwise it is a super useful feature!

> What is wrong with me psychologically that I crave that more than my own privacy?

The alternative view is that you are perfectly normal and that craving validation from strangers is what built human society.

I've used a combination of tampermonkey type scripts and "ublock origin" block elements to remove all karma from here and reddit. I find it a lot nicer.

I remember about 15 years ago, having a MySpace profile. I poked around for a while, but just didn't understand it, and eventually stopped using it. (All your friends are here, they said. The only one I could find was my idiot friend.) When Facebook/Twitter/et al. came around, I avoided them, and about 5 years ago, realized that I made the right call.

I know this is a bit like saying "just stop having a problem!", but if you stop caring about the number of likes/upvotes/whatever, it's a much more relaxed experience, where you just read what informed, insightful people (and me) have to say. I imagine having to look at upvotes can make it a much more stressful experience.

Never heard of you before mabbo, and I read the comments here every day. If that gives you any motivation to quit.

I have 50k here and 36k on electronics.stackexchange.com. It's a good thing I'm too ugly for Instagram.

I routinely nuke my reddit account every year or so, so I stop caring about things like karma. And I've found that my experience hasn't changed one bit, except the relief that I know my older posts can't get linked back to me except with tremendous effort.

Maybe concede that the need for validation never quite goes away?

You can remove all externalities but then it becomes an internal barometer. “Did I do enough? Was what I said funny/insightful/smart? Do they like me?”

The voice is always there. It just doesn’t have a number assigned to it.

Well HN is less a validation peddler and like other aggregators offers rapid doses of news, little info-hits that can leave us feeling scatterbrained when overindulged. It can be too distracting but from a healthiness standpoint seems vastly superior.

This reminded me of dickfromaccounting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20068269

Just turn on the procrastination monitor. I did it and with my reading habits, I can only post something like one or two comments a day.

There's a big difference between superficial mostly-visual social status sharing and having discussions on a tightly moderated text-only forum which de-emphasizes personal identity and has no notifications.

FB tends to be a net negative while HN is the opposite (at least for me) because of the content and engagement.

I don't think there is a substantial difference. I had an account (which I've since deleted) with thousands of karma points. I was becoming obsessed with the validation of getting upvotes. And I'm somebody who never cared about likes on Facebook. But validation from the smart people here? It was addictive and really tainted how I interacted with HN. I went into an emotional tailspin if I started getting downvotes.

I think caring about that kind of validation is a separate issue from the content itself, and requires self-discipline regardless. At least discussion on interesting and educational topics is better than sharing yet another batch of vacation photos.

I'm not so sure. If it's something that impairs you, I think it's negative.

I think i do the same. I shouldn’t have posted this

maybe just turn off the upvoting bots

I'm going to downvote you, but only because it's what you would have wanted.

I want but I can't

Same, That's exactly what i was thinking seeing this comment ironically at the top.

As someone addicted to checking my upvotes on hacker news, please don't upvote those of us that admit that to you ;D

Half a million Karma in < 2 years? Here, have some downvotes :P

ngngngng's karma is a little over 1.5k. You're looking at their about field.

I absolutely am. D'oh!

I have to say I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that "social media bad." I've learned tons of things from communities I follow, including this one, and a number of reddits. I keep in touch with friends of varying distances, and even make plans in my own town.

I'm not saying that the way social media tries to suck you in doesn't make you unhealthy, or their ideal patterns of engagement won't make you miserable, but in my mind that's like saying that Smirnoff's ideal of your consumption will make you an alcoholic, therefore alcohol is bad. Alcohol and social media are perfectly able to be consumed responsibly; perhaps not by everyone, and I would never begrudge someone not partaking if they don't want to. I just get tired of the drumbeat that "social media bad, delete your facebook, don't post on instagram" when I've had and have Facebook, Instagram, Hacker News, Reddit, on and on and they don't make me miserable because I don't obsess over them.

Just saying.

17000? Damn, I really am a nobody.

Meh. HN points are pretty meaningless. I have way more than 17000 and I am still a nobody. I wouldn't put much stock in it.

I'm a nobody and I have 35,000 HN points (please don't check)

It's too bad there isn't something you can do with HN points. If only they were like airline miles or something... :-)

You can change your "topcolor" (the orange bar at the top) at some point. It's something.

296 man, it's like not even worth this reply.