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Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

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Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#51

Post by vinceguidry »

fao_ wrote: post #14
vinceguidry wrote: post #6

I read mostly geopolitical articles and whatever TheBrowser kicks up to me. I used to read a lot of books, but these days a book has to be really attractive for me to get over the usual low signal to noise ratio that books offer. I've been on a reading diet for the last few weeks, I plan to kick back into high gear soon, with a project I'm building to ingest all my reading materials and present them to me in bite-siz…

Will you eventually open source these power tools? :)

I could, but it's all very custom work. The world doesn't need my xpath to slice up Stratfor or RubyWeekly emails. These small tools need a bigger toolbox to live in, someone needs to build that toolbox. I could open-source my toolbox, but it's not really anything special either, just a dumb interface to a dumb database, and a dumb API layer on top of it.

If it starts to look like something better than a shop piece, I'll definitely put it out there.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#52

Post by pagade »

Skim 5 to 10 articles daily. Interesting ones keep accumulating browser tabs till weekend. Mostly tech, personal interest. Have allocated time for cleaning up all the tabs on weekend. For long reads, I use TextAloud to quickly convert to audio and listen with faster speed.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#53

Post by cjf101 »

WA wrote: post #11

I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care about the comments of the JS folks.

That's pretty dead on to how I read HN. Full articles when I am curious about the subject matter, straight to comments when I am more curious about how others view the material. Sometimes the comment threads will prompt me to go back and read the source.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#54

Post by zemo »

check every weekday, but only click and read one, maybe two articles each day. I always read comments in the articles about Go to see the Haskell programmers having tantrums. I always read comments in the articles about JavaScript to see the Go programmers having tantrums. I don't ever read anything about politics from HN because people that read HN are not a representative sample of the real world; HN isn't exactly a wellspring of political diversity. I basically only look for announcements and stories about catastrophic failures in production systems.

also fwiw this is by nature a broken census since the people that will click this link are already gonna be the people that like the comment threads (since it's only a comment thread) and the people that respond are the people that post comments. so basically your feedback about how people behave based on comments is already going to select down to people that post comments on HN, which is likely a single-digit percentage of people that visit HN. asking users how they use a website on that website will always be subject to extreme sampling bias. so... this is fun by all means but let's not look too far into it ;)

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#55

Post by anpat »

I have subscribed to RSS feed on feedly where I skim through the list when I am idle/on the road/catching a smoking break and If I find something interesting save the link to pocket.

I usually clear my pocket reading list each weekend, even if there was something I dint finish reading (used to happen a lot), I just flush it out because that helps me determine my bandwidth for reading over a fixed time period.

Though mostly I am interested in comments section of tech/startups related topics, I also use feedly's reader count to decide whether to read or not articles on other topics.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#56

Post by tmaly »

I subscribe to some newsletters that aggregate weekly articles around some category or topic. This is a lot easier for me as I do not have to continually scan sources for new articles.

I also try to read a book or article on something new I want to learn. My most recent book I started reading is called the Mom Test. Its about doing customer development, and it touches on the subject of what type of questions you should be asking.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#57

Post by mastax »

jaySmith wrote: post #37
Kiro wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same and I've thought about this a lot. I so often only read the comments without reading the actual article. Surely the fact that so many people do this must mean there's an untapped opportunity somewhere?

Yeah, it would be cool if someone made a bot to extract a summary from the article and post it as a comment to help those who have not read the article.

There's a bot like this on Reddit that works surprisingly well.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#58

Post by detaro »

reitanqild wrote: post #40
jaySmith wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it would be cool if someone made a bot to extract a summary from the article and post it as a comment to help those who have not read the article.

Someone did. Or faked one. IIRC it was active for a few days but was told in clear terms to stop or be banned. Somewhat related: I have been using the HN bot on Telegram. That way I could even catch a glimpse of wildly popular stories that have been flagged of the site :-)

A TL;DR service could maybe be made as a browser extension that pulls it from some external source instead. Not visible for those that don't want it, and also removes the problem from having to hunt for the TL;DR comment when there are many replies.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#59

Post by Diederich »

WA wrote: post #11

I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care about the comments of the JS folks.

Same for me, with one additional piece: I'll almost always read the article before writing a comment.
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