When I’m browsing HN I tend to automatically ignore submissions based on their sources. Examples:<p>Medium and lately Substack: Often formulaic, low-effort, or self-promotional.<p>Aeon, Nautilus, Atlas Obscura: Long-form writing with little informational payoff, attention-bait.<p><i>The Atlantic</i>: Culture war click-bait.<p><i>The New York Times</i>, <i>Bloomberg</i>: Paywall, even if there is an outline.com or archive.[domain] link.<p>Conversely, I tend to check out submissions from personal blogs and more scientific/technical sources like <i>Scientific American</i> and IEEE’s <i>Spectrum</i>.<p>Does anyone else do this?
> When I’m browsing HN I tend to automatically ignore submissions based on their sources<p>In a world of infinite choices, I believe that making deliberate choices is a good exercise, whether you do it via a strict whitelist/blacklist domain filter or some other means.<p>Many times, I don't actually read the article and just read some of the comments. Instead of filtering by the domain where the article is hosted, I use the title and its underlying theme or subject as the filter for which article comments I will read. I'm not interested in every single subject posted on HN so I just look for the subjects that I am interested in. Reading the actual article can take time. For me, I find skimming some of the discussion in the comments as a quick proxy on what the article is actually saying or the value of the article.<p>With all filtering, there is always the risk of false negatives where you skip something that you would have found of value or really interesting.<p>I agree that some of the most interesting articles are from non-mainstream sources. For example, the recent article about weaving.
I ignore 100% of Medium, it's always low quality. As you say Substack is also heading in that direction. I like Atlas Obscura, even though it's just factoids and not information that I'll ever use.<p>Ignore most news outlets: NYT, Atlantic, Bloomberg, WSJ, Techcrunch, Vice, etc.<p>Will read: personal blogs, Substacks (for now), niche publications (e.g. Lapham's quarterly), twitter links.
I don't open links to TechCrunch, Vice, Medium, Twitter.<p>In the case of Twitter I make an exception when the submission title is extremely enticing, in which case I copy the URL and open it in that Thread Reader thing.
I skip all Twitter links. To each their own, but the few of them that I have checked out have been mostly flame-bait, unsourced claims etc etc). I skip Reddit links too but for different reasons.