Regarding the curated content option, I don't think that would be a good option for me. I come here to learn about the unusual and non-mainstream tech stuff. Of the 20 frameworks, it's true that I can only really learn one, but I probably am not going to want to learn whatever one the curator decided was best, because the curator is going to choose the most popular/hip/mainstream one, since that's the one that would be of interest to the most readers. I come here not to learn what's popular, but rather to learn about the things that aren't popular.
Read less HN
41–50 of 136 posts
Re: Read less HN
#42I can see how HN is bad for the author's well being, but certainly not for mine. I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories. I don't feel any need to switch languages/frameworks when reading about new/hyped stuff. It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.
I'm with you. I'm here as a consumer. I skim most articles. I waste little time. Instead, I get a humongous wealth of information on a great variety of topics. Also, one quick skim of the article list gives you a good idea of what's hot in tech. Even that has great value, and helps you decide what you should and shouldn't read. About 10% of the time I jump into comments straightaway because they give you a good idea…
Also how many posts dont get voted to the top but are interesting in the new section? Plenty from what I have seen.
Re: Read less HN
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awareness. I'm development lead on my startup and just being aware of new tech, other startups, problems with frameworks, algorithms,... all help me be better informed for my job.
Exactly. Even a better reason to read curated content. You need to get awareness with what's going on in the tech community without sinking massive amounts of time. Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
This implies that the average reader is diving into every article. If my job (or interests or sideproject or...) happens to be Ruby or Lisp related, perhaps that's a useful article. Personally, I rarely-if-ever use either, so I tend to skip those.
And that's really the point. Sure, reading (or even skimming) every last article is a waste of time, but I don't think most of us do; we jump to the stuff that interests us. At least I do. And if I'm reading only curated lists, all I get is what interests someone else. There's some overlap, but I'll end up mentally filtering by title anyway, and there's a good chance I'll miss quite a bit that would be of real interest and value to me.
Re: Read less HN
#44Is it ironic this is posted on HN ?
I don't think so. Best place to target the relevant audience.
Re: Read less HN
#45TL;DR don't read HN if you're easily influenced.
Re: Read less HN
#46You may be right. (hits refresh)
Re: Read less HN
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is mostly because Reddit's choice of default subreddits are poor Presumably this isn't entirely a choice: I would expect a good subreddit to get worse if it was made default. (And I've heard that /r/atheism got better when it was made undefault, but I haven't actually looked.)
Thing is, those default subreddits were actually good before Reddit got too mainstream. What we're seeing right now is the after effects of popularity.
Ah, the Catch 22 of popular discussion based websites. You want to be popular, but you want to remain high in quality. It's shockingly difficult to do both.
Re: Read less HN
#48I can see how HN is bad for the author's well being, but certainly not for mine. I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories. I don't feel any need to switch languages/frameworks when reading about new/hyped stuff. It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.
Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts and what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
> Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts
No idea, I just do it for leisure. And frankly, I hardly read any TFAs posted to HN. I first read the headlines, if something seems interesting, I skip to the comments. If I still think it's interesting, I might skim TFA. I'm not trying to be time efficient or anything, that's just how I enjoy using HN.
> what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
I basically never read posts about new stuff, unless the title says it's from someone I respect. If something shows up repeatedly, I might get interested and Google it, maybe even skim that article about it.
All in all, I think I'm using HN a bit like Twitter: Lots of noise, with a little bit of signal in it I might want to follow up on.
Re: Read less HN
#49I've noticed a different bad thing that happens to me when I am active on HN. I become very argumentative IRL. On HN it's fun to engage other people, debating, disagreeing and arguing your point. It's constructive and usually we all get something from it.
I noticed that the more time I spend active on HN (in comments) the more I tend to correct friends when they make a mistake or vigorously argue a point of view on something not that important (these aren't bad things the but the frequency with which I was doing them annoyed me and my friends and it wasn't just the important stuff I was arguing, it was stupid things).
When I logged out of HN for a while this behaviour slowly started to improve. I couldn't stay away for ever though but I am much more aware of the effect and try to stop myself before I get too deep into a stupid debate/argument both on HN and IRL.
Re: Read less HN
#50HN can be like FB - highlight reels that people sometimes compare to the full view of what they are experiencing.
There are also posts about failure but I'd say they are a bit less common than the ones about success.