HN is mostly like a good day on Facebook but once in awhile it transcends every other social media. IMO it is going downhill fast though and the really good discussions are getting drowned out by China hate, nationalism, brand loyalty, etc. more often than not. All in all 30 minutes of Tiktok is likely to make me smile a lot more than HN but then there's not any real discussions so hard to compare the two.

All of Reddit makes me hate the world. No sub doesn't. If it does just visit it one or two times more and bingo.

I've found the following to be free of negativity: r/bread r/oatmeal r/RICE r/nutrition r/velo r/Zwift

HN is still relatively balanced, but I see a lot more reddit style comments. Usually 20 min on HN I find nothing really new, tons of polarizing topics, discussions are decent but ultimately pointless, I really feel like I need to take a break.

Even niche reddit communities end up being full of newbies and self promotion spam. There are exceptions (/r/steroids comes to mind back when I was into that) but programming/tech subreddits are just noise.

r/steroids used to be great but the pandemic really turned it toxic imo. Pandemic made so many subs polarized and awful to read. everything was trending negative before but now it's another level feels like.

HN is a slow-cooker, where TT is a microwave.

I spend time on HN if a post I read also results in a meaningful conversation among the commenters. Usually I will try to add a comment as well, so there can be a bit of back and forth. It's not all one-way the way it is on TT.

Of course it's not always that way. I know to steer clear of posts related to H1B visas, because the exact same conversation plays out each time.