Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

It might be this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398381

I posted a comment on a thread about side hustles - it was about a new business I had just started. That got me a small but significant for the time number of sales (which were doubly important because most of my sales before that had been to friends or friends of friends).

Between the sales and a lot of positive comments, it really made me think that my product was something people wanted, and I decided to stick with the business and go full time.

Back then I was doing a few sales a week, now I'm at ~20/day, and that's just because I'm at my limit in terms of production capacity. I'm now looking to move to a contract manufacturer ASAP. Once I do that, I can crank up the FB ad spend (that's my main customer acquisition channel, and I've got one ad that's extremely effective) and really get rolling.

So yeah, pretty possible that a comment on HN will turn out to be fairly life-changing. Hopefully that makes up for all the definitely-not-life-changing time I've frittered away on here.

Curated information discovery and sharing that I genuinely cannot get anywhere else in a public manner - maybe Lobsters is a competitor, but that's focused exclusively on software development. I have more than a handful of articles and comments favorited here that have helped me either help others or help myself either professionally or recreationally; they've directed me to create personal projects, given me conversation topics, helped me get the most out of interviews with companies, identify social habits and trends.

There's a lot of noise in regards to the signal-to-noise ratio, and I have my own biases and petty views (i.e., it's common for users to post articles from people I dislike sharing the same industry with), but there's simply so much to open yourself up to in terms of even reading the comments for a submission I flat-out dislike or otherwise don't particularly care for.

There haven't been any miracles on this website in terms of feeling part of a unified community or experiencing random bouts of generosity in person-to-person interactions, but I consider spending time on HN so valuable that I'd willingly pay a membership fee to preserve some kind of member standard like SomethingAwful hoped to do with the "10bux" membership fee (paying $10 to access the site's forums).

Kids?

Don't you know the very bad ROI they have??

(unless you count in cuteness)

Oh no. Pls don't. Because it probably would be highly successful. Or well, much used. (Not necessarily leading to couples, though)