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This has helped with my standing in the company i work at, since i usually know every technology people are talking about. I don't know of anyone in the company with a similiarily broad knowledge.
Personally I come to HN because it’s one of the few places you can have a discussion and read comments without having to dig through dozens of memes and low attempt jokes.
HN does not engage in nefarious methods of keeping you engaged. It does not send you alerts telling you about what you've missed, it does not curate the home page to place you in your own personal echo chamber. These for me are it's strengths.
However, like any large social gathering, there will always be people whose views you cannot stand, and people who you feel closely aligned to, and this is healthy.
Whenever I see comment threads spiralling into toxic views I simply click away to another thread. For every bad comment section there will always be another good one. The key thing is, as a user I drive how I consume HN, not the other way around.
I may not be the original target demographic for HN and I've certainly not had any more than my 5 minutes of fame here, but I still find myself coming for the posts, and staying for the comments.
I love reading technical blog posts. Raw tech rather than tech besmirched by the business development department.
Not everything needs to be part of the hustle. Make time for you!
Reading HN and conversing with a friend of mine in a CS program at Uni are what motivated me to turn my hobby into a new career, at 31 years old. It was through HN that I realized that I knew a heck of a lot more relevant job skills than I thought I did. Threads on HN also connected the dots for what it would take to make this my profession.
The career change itself only took me about 3 months, but reading HN was years of time invested.
I've also had some constructive interviews, on both sides, as a result of the monthly job threads.
Language-wise the quality of posts here is much better than what I would get on reddit, fb or similar.
Not sure if this counts, but it's a major reason why I visit this site daily.