Perhaps it's apparent on some level to your audience that you're doing this to raise some sort response, not because you have a strong affinity for a particular position? The last thing I want to do is gorge on the junkfood emotion of false outrage.
Can you elaborate? Are they downvoted, or just not presented in the first place?
The main thing that gets downvoted is angry tirades without evidence, and it happens to most political views/religious views no matter what side they're on.
I only have an up arrow.
You apparently also need 31 karma to do so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437
Usually it's flame wars and nonsensical rants where the commenter appears to be off their medication
Meanwhile people are happy to have all sorts of conversations that will get you canceled elsewhere about gender, race, and vaccines (so long as the conversations are analytical anyway)
Try to see which comments are flagged and analyze why should they be flagged because of politics, spam, rudeness, ideology, not-factual, bigotry, etc. I'd say a significant portion of them are completely legitimate or interesting, just doesn't fit the ideology/politics here.
It's also possible to that I've changed, may be taken a red pill, I try to have a super sensitive self-introspection and try to objectively analyze what went wrong in flagged or downvoted comments.
Anyways, it's been mostly nice and to be honest, addicting. I still continue to visit HN, but will probably dial it back way down and just read weekly newsletters and avoid exposing myself to extreme-ideological positions here.
That's too bad! I usually find honing in on specific examples as the most effective way to explore a topic. But I understand the possibility that it could take the conversation down a rabbit hole.
> I'd say a significant portion of them are completely legitimate or interesting, just doesn't fit the ideology/politics here
I've yet to come across many flagged comments (or had any of my own flagged) but this feels like a strange motivation on its own. I feel like flagging should be reserved for comments that break the site guidelines?
What were some of the things you had to wean yourself off?
I can occasionally find an OK game to play for a little while, but the quality is really awful on phone games. Very frustrating considering my phone is probably 4x as powerful as a Nintendo Switch.
I love to read books, but can't find enough good ones to keep it up. I'm not a big TV guy and especially hate YouTube.
I feel your pain. As I've grown older I've found it more difficult to enjoy video games no matter what the medium is, and likewise the news seems to all read the same these days except for the "who" in the story.
I used to think that no video game or movie could scare me, and I craved to find that, but then I played Friday Nights at Freddy's on VR and quickly found my limits. I know now that video games can scare me - to the point of involuntarily crying out in a high-pitched girly voice (for reference, I'm a middle-aged grey bearded man). So that wasn't my thing either.
The games I enjoy these days (far and few in between - i.e. a weekend every blue moon) are pretty much the kind of games I made fun of fifteen years ago - Farmville type games. I don't want to examine a table and read the description of all of the worse-than-worthless items upon it (looking at you, heavy brass candlestick). I just want to water my plants and come back later. Maybe I'll come back fifteen minutes later while I'm still on my elliptical and get another round of harvesting in, or maybe I wont return for another month. These days I don't play games often, but when I do, I play very slow games. At this point I wouldn't put it past myself to play a game that revolves around paint drying.
I still have a blast playing games on my consoles/PC FWIW, I just don't like any of the ones I've found on phones lately
Machinarium, Samorost 3, Creaks, Pilgrims, Botanicula.
They are available on PC, gog.com, Steam, Apple Appstore.
They are hand crafted point & click games.
One thing I'm trying is to put books in places I would previously do my doomscrolling in, coffee table by the couch for instance. Sometimes I pick up the book instead of the phone, read a page or 5 and then go do something else. Small win, yay me.
The thing I have to learn is that the phone is a tool, not a way to spend time because I don't know what else to do, at least not the default way.
To anyone working on maximizing user engagement, think about what you're doing to all of us, please.
We'll see how it goes. I just don't need to be checking hackernews as often as I do.
I don't really intend to go back.
I skim enough to get a grasp of what's going on about once or twice a day (a la reading the evening paper of yore) but tend to stick to aggregated/curated sources and investigate personal curiosity rather than succumbing to salaciousness and surface-deep echo chambered "news" content about some dumb tweet from some misguided soul.
I am a lighter man, but part of me began to wonder what the cost was: will society pass me by? The longer I have spent operating in this fashion, the less I care.
I find I have so much more empathy, especially for my kids & wife. It has truly given me a fresh outlook, and allowed me to focus on spending my time in ways I actually value.
How? Please…
It took hard work to get there. I use Nextdns to block domains of websites and apps when I realize I spend too much time on them. Could I just allowlist domains, sure, and sometimes I do that when I need to look at something on Reddit for instance. But it's easy to just not cheat.
I stopped checking news sites at all and it's been an absolute blessing. Very little that's in the news actually matters to me or my family. Even the publicly funded media is full of clickbait and sensationalism, just not worth it.
I use local public radio to stay somewhat informed about things I should know, legislation for example that's relevant to us. Radio works because it's a limited resource so at least in my case, the signal to noise ratio is acceptable there, at least every now and then.
I've been doing that for a little while now and I feel much happier. I use my phone much less frequently and for less time now. I love it.