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Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

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Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#61

Post by valbaca »

I read about 8 articles a day, mostly from HN and Lifehacker.com, usually just Productivity "Junk Food" Articles

Depending on my energy and/or how long my build is taking, sometimes I just skim articles headings and throw them to Pocket. Then when I have medium energy and more time, I open up my Pocket, filter aggressively, and read the rest. Really long articles get tagged with #someday and go to the weekend.

I've been trying to focus on C & C++ related articles, as that's what I want to and will be doing more. But I also find articles about Functional Programming very interesting.

I couldn't care less about start-ups or the culture. I can't even open most policy or political posts now because it's just a punch to the gut every day. I read less than 1 comment on average per article.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#63

Post by magic_beans »

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.

I just read HN for the comments.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#64

Post by justboxing »

> How many articles do you read each day?

0 - 1 Articles

100+ Comments on 20 - 25 articles.

I use the comments as a curation tool, to decide if the article is really worth reading, or click-bait. Sometimes the comments also do a TL;DR; summary of the original article, so that saves me time (esp. on rambling articles that write 1000 words to prove a couple of points or make a statement / take a stance on something).

> They're usually related to your job or to some side projects?

Job, side-project and technology related. I'm here only for the comments as I see gems from software industry veterans and experts whose knowledge on various tech topics far exceeds mine.

> Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it's focused in 2 or 3 topics only?

Usually 2 to 3 - I mostly come here for "Show HN", "Ask HN" and technology related announcements / findings. I come here to find inspiration and motivation to ship my side-projects.

> Do you usually read during some time of the day or it's usually random?

Random, throughout the day. It's gone up more ever since I gave up reading mainstream news after the elections. ( Nov 10th 2016 to be precise). I try to avoid political news on HN also. The mods have done a great job of flagging and removing them, so I am very grateful for that.

Related Reading: http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-news/

P.S. I also use https://hckrnews.com/ It loads super fast , has a very clean pleasing UI and helps me quickly scan the top stories on HN and decide which ones to come and peruse.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#65

Post by rabboRubble »

I read, or peruse, too much. You can thank Digg RSS Reader...

Fun stuff : xkcd and the like, 4 sites

News: Chinese edition NYT and the like, 11 sites

Technical: Hacker News, Venture Beat, ARS Technica, etc. 12 sites

Daily I maybe read / peruse ~100 articles out of what is summarized in the RSS feeds. Meaning, I see an article headline, it interests me enough to actually click to open the underlying website article. Maybe half of what I open I spend 10 seconds looking at only to immediately close. Half of what remains gets a speed read scan through. Maybe 5-10 articles a day get a thorough slow read. I try not to comment as much as humanly possible. I need to do other stuff in life youknowwhatimean....

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#66

Post by cjf101 »

mastax wrote: post #57
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.

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

The one I've seen (and been impressed with) uses http://smmry.com/ to condense articles to a tldr.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#68

Post by importantbrian »

I actually read 3-5. I read the comments on another 3-5 without reading the article. Like WA said above. Sometimes I care more about the comments than the original article. I also find that if I'm not totally sure if an article is worth my time or not there are usually a couple of high-quality comments that will let me know if I should. I really love HN for that. I will also usually bookmark 10-20 articles with the intention of coming back to read them later, but I almost never do.

As to the type of article, I'm all over the place. Sometimes it's work related, sometimes a side project, sometimes just something I've got a passing interest in.

Re: Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits

#70

Post by mythrwy »

3-4 articles per day.

Probably split equally between tech things I think might be helpful ("Python, Bash, SQL how tos" etc.) and non-tech things which are novel.

Like "Guy frozen in ice brought back to life after 600 years" (which wasn't a real article but if it had been you bet I would have read it).

I avoid most article from major news source (I keep up with the news anyway) and most Medium stories and anything with a social justice type slant (nothing wrong with that, it's just not of interest and not why I'm here). Also skip most "Our startup is doing XX or shutting down or whatever".

Skim comments for many more articles (~20) and if they look interesting read more in depth.

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