Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

I get more benefit from HN than any other source. The signal-noise ratio is still poor, but it's still great. At the very least, there are excellent books, there are people who help you get stuck out of things, and there's good product recommendations.

There is a large techbro demographic here, and certain topics to avoid. But the tech part rubs off. I avoid browsing daily though; it's too easy to get sucked into arguments, complaints, and gossip.

I browsed a lot prior to 2019 and recently again. I used to work in software development but have moved out of the field recently.

I love HN and derive a lot of benefit from it, unfortunately during the Great Scare I found it impossible to stay away from the associated threads.

That sort of stuff seems to have died down now though, so we're good.

If I could just censor any mention of it I'd be much happier, I'd add it to uBlock if I could, heh.

The big danger with HN is that it's pretty one-sided, and reading it affects you even if you are aware of that fact. So while it's good to keep on top of tech news and tech politics, there's little beyond that.

Our world is so rich, and I feel that by reading HN only you miss out on a lot.

It is facebook for tech bros, with occasional nuggets that are really good. There 's a certain level of self-worship by the people who occasion here , but i don't think its that special. It's basically what reddit would be if its audience was 10-20 years older.

I 'waste' a lot of time here because i have a lot of empty time these days. I would like to have more diverse communities on the internet, i 'd take 10 forums instead of the duopoly reddit/hn taking all my attention. There is value in participating in separate the bubbles vs participating in watered down groupthinks.

It keeps me informed but it definitely has a few negative qualities.

- I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often.

- The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness. Humor is frowned upon and people are way too serious.

- HN definitely has a techbros vibe. I guess that's by design but it's not very inclusive.

- Moderation is a double edged sword. It's good at silencing the offensive and silly comments that make reddit such a dumpster fire. But you get a bit of overzealous "this conflicts with my world views" style moderation too which results in cancel culture style snuffing out of contrarian views. I've been down voted a few times where I struggled to understand why. I wasn't being offensive. I wasn't being contrarian. I was merely being inconvenient to someone who was what I would classify as in of the highly polarised camps in US politics that was out to cancel anything conflicting with their narrow world views. I'm from the EU so I might be a bit tone deaf on that front. I struck a nerve basically and I was being cancelled. Moderating the moderators should be a thing. I've went from negative 2 to positive 10 on the same comment in some cases. Basically people strongly agreeing or disagreeing with the same thing. Moderation should be strictly about weeding out the bad stuff not snuffing out debate. Moderating the moderators seems to be not a thing.