The top comment on the current poll "How often do you visit HN?" suggests that there might be a big variation in how much time people spend on HN on each visit. This should help shed light on that.
Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#2Mostly just to scoure the first page (maybe the second) and grab some new content, which I then Instapaper for reading later.
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#3WTF is with questions these days ?
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#41-3 minutes. I open the front page, glance through the stories I haven't read yet, open them in new tabs, then click on 'threads', check if there's any replies to things I posted earlier, then click on 'new' to see if there's any interesting posts in the 'new' queue that are about to be overlooked.
I then ignore the HN tab until I've read through the articles I was interested in (in some cases, I've opened the comments... not sure if that counts as strictly an HN visit). Usually the whole thing takes about 5 minutes including reading the article (I read fast and I'm very harsh at skimming and discarding stuff that had an interesting headline but no substance... working on swombat.com has helped hone these filters even more).
When an article makes me want to comment, I go back to HN, find the article, and comment. Also, sometimes (rarely, I think) I'll get quite involved into a particularly heated discussion and spend a sizeable chunk of time on a thread (e.g. 30-60 minutes). That's a bit compulsive and I try to do that less.
For reference this comment took me about 2 minutes to write. It's on the long side.
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#5Ah, it seems you're suffering from a cognitive bias. ;)
Some people on HN do not fit your self-reflected view of useful, busy and productive. Reading continuously is a good way to keep the mind sharp and moving even when the body can't do much. On good days I can type a few pages, but other days, I can barely operate a trackball to use the web. In addition to books, code and other tech/science/research news aggregation sites, HN is a real blessing.
I'm happy to say I often spend all day here reading on HN. I'm physically too useless to be a real hacker or entrepreneur any more, and I can't contribute too much to HN, but someone has to flag the spam in the 'newest' queue so the rest of you don't have to see it. I actually happy to be your janitor. It's a whole lot better than not being able to be your janitor, and it's often the only way to say thanks for all the interesting articles and insightful posts.
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#6I have it as an App Tab in Firefox 4... I don't know what you count that as...
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#7Mostly just to scoure the first page (maybe the second) and grab some new content, which I then Instapaper for reading later.
Same way I do it. Too much good stuff to distract from work otherwise.
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#8i check through out the day periodically
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#9I never leave.
Re: Poll: How long is your typical visit to HN?
#10Mostly just to scoure the first page (maybe the second) and grab some new content, which I then Instapaper for reading later.
Same here. For me, the big time sink is not HN itself, but the articles. Thanks to Instapaper, I can postpone reading the long ones until I've time to kill.