My girlfriend calls it "Slacker News" because I only come here when I'm slacking off.

She's a keeper.

Lol

I had a similar realization a few years back. All these petty average Joe scrolling selfies and trendy deals doing nothing.

I, on the other side, am scrolling hn, lambdartheultimate, Haskell subs and discords, hoarding caml research papers... doing nothing. I was mostly a snub variant of the above.

Except that on HN I have actually learned a things or two. I have been connected to useful articles on topics that have solved many of my tech problems in recent years. Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.

The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service. HN doesn't try to keep eyeballs on targets. (And HN is so tiny that it loads faster than anything on work connection out in the middle of nowhere.)

> Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.

Millions of people disagree, and frankly it's not our place to judge what is useful for others. It's not all snark and misinformation.

> The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service.

But that's just an opinion, that staying on-site on FB is somehow bad. They would argue that they're encouraging users to hold discussions with people they know, highly social and relatively unmoderated.

> But that's just an opinion, that staying on-site on FB is somehow bad. They would argue that they're encouraging users to hold discussions with people they know, highly social and relatively unmoderated.

Maybe, depends on your social circle, but the main reason I left facebook more than a decade ago was because everyone I had on facebook _didn't_ hold any discussions or post anything original. It was all just sharing random crap they liked, or reposts from Instagram. I don't care about some random blogspam article my cousin liked. I joined to find out what was happening in people's lives and none of that was on facebook, it was all on instagram or whatsapp. (So I totally see why facebook bought out those two companies)

I liked your first post but this is like saying a person who tells you not to go out and see the world because you've got everything you need on the compound is better than someone who tells you to experience new places and people. The former clearly has some shades of exploitive manipulation trying to foster dependence / imprisonment

I think what I'm saying in the two comments is consistent, though.

The average HN reader passes judgement on Facebookers (myself included), meanwhile we waste time on sites we're convinced are "better"... but often it's just a tradeoff. HN: external links to thoughtful and informative articles, apolitical, but very impersonal and humorless. FB: insular, but (in theory) you know people, and maintain your relationships with people you don't see in person.

I don't mean to say "both are the same" -- that would be too facile. But, I don't think one or the other is clearly superior in any absolute sense.

This is not specific to you, but in general people saying some social media site is "actually useful (TM)" is usually a cope to justify the staggering amount of life they've burned sucking dopamine from the website's teat. Can social media be useful? Yes. But there is a point where you get severely diminished returns, at which you would be better off doing something else, but we hide behind excuses to avoid feeling bad about ourselves.

> Nobody has ever gotten anything useful from a facebook news feed.

This might be far too broad. Facebook feeds have been really useful for me when I use it for obscure hobbies or to buy/sell used expensive things (think college furniture) based on region.

I may be in the minority, but I actually rarely visit HN’s homepage, but rather follow @newsyc150 on Twitter, and just get a feed of articles that hit 150 votes (there are other increments, too).

It’s not overwhelming — I generally feel it hits the sweet spot of signal-to-noise. I only pull up Twitter a few times a day, and scan to find interesting things there. My Twitter feed is generally light — I don’t follow any individuals, only sites I want to see updates on without having to poll them.

> but I actually rarely visit HN’s homepage,

I really like the HN front-page, it gives me a sensation of comfort (so to speak), of how the Internet should have been but unfortunately it is not: very fast-loading page, all text, a basic color-scheme that hasn't changed in a while.

I hate April Fool's Day, but this made me think how hilarious it would be if HN front page had a banner ad. And not even an over-the-top one... just a simple banner ad, quietly ruining HN.

HN is what SlashDot was 15-20 years ago.

I still cannot really recapitulate what made me leave, but tech journalism in general became quite insufferable. It all read like scam and advertising at some point. It went from "stuff that matters" to something else.

True. But the comments and community is what i meant, too.

Yeah, that changed too. But I think the reason for that is that many left.

spot on

Funny, but I do exactly the same. My source, however, is Telegram's channel @hacker_news_feed. As you said, the signal-to-noise ratio hits that sweet spot that keeps me out of HN's front page for a long time.

I am enjoying @newsyc150. It cuts through the cruft. Thanks for the recommendation.

I came here through @Hn251 on Twitter

You want this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-demetr...

It removes comment/upvote numbers from Hacker News and makes it far less able to exploit human psychological loopholes related to numbers.

I check HN once per day when I wake up and only rarely otherwise. I got the social media addiction out of my system years ago on a forum. It was horrible, I had to lock myself out using repeated sha1-hashing which required me to spend many hours of CPU time to get access back.

So glad to be done and over with that sort of addiction. Social media is as addictive as cigarettes or booze and we are way behind on treating it in the same ways.

You made me laugh, but also think what I might be addicted to. I can't think of a single thing except porn. Highly functional addict buy still one nonetheless. I don't think I can quit.

It's odd though that it's the only thing. I've always thought that susceptibility to addiction is a personality trait that make you usually get addicted to more than one thing.

Also mine. Have gone long stretches between relapses during which time I've felt noticeably better. What typically happens is I'll rationalize its use after a spell, but will find I'll want to watch the next day, and the next. Particularly if sleep suffers, just to get some deliverance.

From what I've learned, large sustained dopamine hits lead to deficits in baseline levels. I could intuit early on that some of my negative experience (including sleep) was linked to consumption, but managed to convince myself each time that I "just need to better manage it". Even if the truth stares you in the face it's hard. I like to think of it as a "mild" addiction owing to frequency (it wasn't always) but still an addiction, which is like playing with fire. It can always get worse.

I've been enjoying Huberman's videos on the topic of dopamine and other things - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU

I know a lot of immigrants/expats and Facebook is pretty much the one thing they have to keep in touch with family and friends back home.

Personally I loathe the company and would be happy if some fatal DNS or other issue took it down for good or if it were legislated out of existence by the EU/US. But we also need to be aware of the value it provides other than as a bullhorn for anti-vaxxers and other nutjobs and perhaps think of how to build a safer and more ethical alternative.

Wouldn’t something else fill that vacuum if Facebook went away?

Sure, maybe, but building that "something else" isn't trivial, is prone to the same problems as Facebook, and even if it were not, would not appear overnight.

Can you imagine if Facebook had like karma? Global GDP would almost immediately take a nosedive!

It basically does since it has likes/reactions for posts. Except it's worth because the only likes/reactions that matter are the ones people will see today which makes it seam like getting 500 or even 5000 likes per post is a totally normal 'goal'.

In comparison HN, the number of possible karma per post is pretty much an equal playing field (save for a few recognizable accounts).

Isn't that what follower counts are, effectively? In some ways, follower count is even more powerful than karma because it affects how many people see your posts/comments.

I’m just waiting till I reach 1000. I’m at 995... I get up to 999, and then I fuck up and make an anti-vaccine post and plummet back to the 980’s.

Once I hit 1000, I’m outa here. Promise.

FWIW, I found your past comments articulate and well-supported. Please don't take the downvoting herds too much to heart – there was no "fuck up" on your part :-)

BTW I upvoted a bunch of your comments right now, but apparently with no effect to your karma. You (or I?) may have angered the HN algo gods.

I’ve noticed this, too. I think HN karma is updated in some asynchronous fashion.

You mean 1024 right?

ouch... this struck home.