I 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.<p>It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.
I've noticed that a lot of writers in tech generalize their experience to everyone in the community. Several times a day I'm struck by someone who talks about his/her experience like it's a common experience, when it may or may not be. I think it would be safer and more relatable if the author had said "HN - Bad for My Well Being," but of course that doesn't sound as portentous.
Some might find it interesting that I consider part of my job as a tech strategy consultant is to keep up with what's happening on HN.<p>I try not to open every link or anything, because I procrastinate just like everyone else. However, some of the value that I provide my clients is knowing about changes to their competitive landscape before they do.<p>Tightly coupled with both experience and a willingness to offer strong, thoughtful opinions on the day's tech news, I am often able to be the most honest and disconcertingly knowledgeable person at the table... all thanks to scanning HN a few times a day.<p>I owe much of my livelihood to your often link-bait posts, so thanks. :)
Still not nearly as bad as Reddit. Subreddits have value, but look at the front page of Reddit. Zero value. On any given day, of any week, month, or year. Reddit's front page is 100% wasted time. I demonstrate this by asking to myself: Ten years from now what will Reddit's front page look like? Answer: The exact nonsense memes and image macros posted today.
I'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.<p>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).<p>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.
It depends on how long you've had an HN account. At some point the content seems to get repetitive. It's pretty easy to ignore the content that you've seen before.<p>But in the beginning it is a wealth of information, giving you insight into what should be expected when trying to start a barebones new company.<p>So you gorge on the articles until you rarely get new insights from them. Then, naturally, your addiction to HN ends. (Typically this starts the "remember when HN was good?" comments)<p>Now if you are addicted for other reasons, like you feel socially involved here, that I can not speak to. But if your addiction is content, that will fade once you've had your fill.
I have a different problem with it, which is that it invariably makes me feel pretty incompetent, because no matter what subject comes up, people with 10 times my level of skill in fields that I consider myself relatively competent in start discussing things and I suddenly feel quite completely devoid of any skill at all. Even on a simple thing like posts about typing I find people lamenting how they are only able to output 60wpm while I measure myself at 48wpm. Part of my problem is that I tend to be a generalist and know a lot of things quite well rather than single specialist topic at extreme depth.<p>How this all plays out in my head is a complex thing, but overall I feel like it is bad for my self-image. It is just very hard to keep the perspective in mind that I might be in the top 20% of people in a field but the top 1% will be the ones who start commenting on a specialised topic on HN. Add to that the different personality types hiding behind people's pseudonymous identities and you are getting a super distorted picture of the world.
While I think all of OP's points are valid (loss of productivity, focus on things that are too positive or negative, unactionable items, etc.), I think there is a flipside. I'm not saying you should spend an exorbitant amount of time on HN, but I think many come for the community and shared purpose. It's like getting your Reddit fix without having to worry about cat photos and memes. There are many tech-related articles here that aren't about frameworks or success/failure.
>><i>The solution is not to read absolutely no news at all.</i><p>A question: What makes you think so? I've gone months and years at a time without reading any news; it's a fantastic feeling, and if something is really important you'll hear about it from a friend.<p>Just as "read less HN" may not be applicable to everyone, "you should probably keep reading the news" may not apply to others, or at least others may have had positive experiences quitting the consumption of news media.<p>Scary, I know ;-)
There is definitely a flipside. I wouldn't be nearly as up to date with tech if it wasn't for HN, and last summer I managed to get an internship at a startup that I would have had zero chance of finding had I not seen them in a "Who's Hiring?" post on here.
> Something that can curate the top posts and send them to you on a schedule.<p>When you read a bunch of articles and upvote interesting ones (for whatever your value of "interesting" is), you contribute to the community by making a distinction between articles.<p>The problem with reading from a curated feed is that you're most likely no longer participating (because it's too late to meaningfully upvote), and hence delegating curation to all the other users. When a majority of all the other users are doing the same, then the power of curation becomes concentrated in fewer voters.<p>I suspect the value of HN is amplified by the meaningful participation of its users. There are many other ways to be a passive consumer of news.
I actually think the discussions on HN are pretty good, even the political ones. There are some well thought out people here, and then people who I would've empathized with years ago when I was younger and not more exposed to the way the world works. Both sides are helpful to read and be aware of.<p>But I mainly read HN for the tech news. I'm one of those people who will learn about Github/Twitter/Heroku being down from here. All the big hacks are posted here and thoroughly discussed. I probably would've never played around with CoffeeScript, Angular, Go, and Dart without them being endlessly discussed around here. I wish I had something like HN when I was in college.
Just looking at the current headlines, your characterization is completely off.<p>But I agree with the larger point -- HN is addictive and biased. Moderation is key.
It seems to me that often HN is an echo chamber for people who want to feel superior about their tech choices - an attitude that's inherited from it's creator PG. I mean, "Blub programmers"? Can you get any more elitist?<p>I view HG as a boy's club for programming fashionistas. It just happens that sometimes amongst all the posturing there's something genuinely valuable.<p>Regarding the OP - I think that HN is fine as long as you learn to skim and filter.
The loss of productivity and loss of focus in my work is exactly why I created <a href="http://HNdigest.com" rel="nofollow">http://HNdigest.com</a> .<p>However, the content that I get from HackerNews is priceless, so quitting makes no sense.
I actually took around 2 months off of Hacker News over the summer when we were coming up on a big deadline with the beta launch or our new game, and I must say I noticed a significant uptick in productivity over this period. Completely fasting; however, hasn't turned out to be the best idea since I'm now more addicted than I was previously. The newsletter idea is probably the best of both worlds.
HN is an online community, where people go because they feel that it fulfills them in some way (maybe because they plan to do a startup of their own one day and reading about other startups makes them dream, because they like debating with others, etc.).<p>I suggest the ridiculous notion that you should do what makes you happy, and if going on HN fulfills some part of your being - no matter how irrationally - then go for it.
Time is precious.<p>The issue I have with HN (and other Forums), is that there is a lot of repetition in the comments. In part on HN this is probably not helped as it's difficult to overview and digest threads, especially if the comment trees are large. Comment verbosity and positional changes also make it difficult.<p>I think that is why in part people come, post, then move on. Necro-posting, even a day late is pretty pointless if you want to add to the general discussion.<p>I think I'd rather comments have a character limit. Or to get people to post summaries of their posts as titles. And/or some tl;dr; post mortems on comment threads.
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.
actually i love all of this stuff on HN. i really don't agree with the argument presented here - as well presented as it is.<p>hn is a resource where the stories of the kind listed in this article are available at all. for me this is important because i want to read those stories, i want to learn from the mistakes of others and see what other people /think/ worked well for them. sure it hurts my productivity, but so does the beer i would drink, the movie i would watch or whatever else that i would do in my down time because that is when i read HN for the most part.<p>what is bad for my well being here is all the 'self-entitled prick with first world problem' stories. i have no respect for them and it saddens me that the community as a whole seems naive enough on average that this stuff is considered news and not just 'smart' people embarrassing themselves with an utter lack of common sense or life experience. it makes me genuinely angry. the worst part of it all is that these stories and promoting them feed the very cause you fight against... see just thinking about draws me into wanting to collectively slap the majority of the community around the face and tell them how it is, you know the good ol' sciency way by pointing at data and examples littered throughout history instead of jumping on some crazy emotional bandwagon.<p>enough.
Is it weird that I read Hacker News for none of the reasons he lists? I'm rarely interested in reading about startups succeeding or failing, or new frameworks or languages, but I am interested in reading about cool things people have done with technology, or even non-tech related news. I guess I'd probably be more suited to slashdot's content, but I prefer Hacker News' format so much more.
This is one of the few technical communities online where I post comments. The problem I have with reddit is that downvoting is too rampant. I also enjoy the focus here on startup companies, even though I'm not a founder. reddit seems to have this bias against startups which is overly cynical and even demoralizing. To me, the startup scene is (part of) what makes the software industry interesting and distinguishes it from, say, chemical engineering. If I ever do decide to become a founder, the information I've picked up here, almost by osmosis, will undoubtedly be invaluable.<p>Regarding posts about new languages or frameworks, I really don't think anybody is seriously suggesting you go rewrite your production codebase. That's silly hyperbole. Lots of people here actively work on side projects or they may be in the planning phase for a new startup with no code written yet--situations where they can legitimately consider using a newer framework or language.
I shall invoke Sturgeon's Law: ("ninety percent of everything is crap." )<p>Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap." It is derived from quotations by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic: while Sturgeon coined another adage that he termed "Sturgeon's law", it is his "revelation" that is usually referred to by that term.<p>The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art forms.
HN has been a blessing for me. It has taught me so much about startups/consulting and everything related. And the comments section is tremendously valuable. As an avid forum reader (self-proclaimed) I have the experience of knowing how to comb through the comments and be able to quickly extract what's important. Only a fool reads everything and interprets it on face value.<p>Sometimes in the comments what's written isn't important, but the thought process behind that writing could really help excel one's career (if one's able to discern it). I have to pay homage to the tremendously experienced consultants here, in which I've learned so much from, and has helped my career unequivocally.
I do not feel qualified to determine the psychological effects of HN on readers, but the author has some valid points. HN does leave one with the impression that there's this "get rich fast" club of 20-something entrepreneurs who are getting huge valuations and 8-figure cash investments for unfinished and seemingly unimportant niche products and unfortunately, you, the reader, cannot be part of it. This might be frustrating for people who work hard on their own startups and cannot get anywhere near this VC craze because they live on some other continent. Then again, it has no real impact on their own efforts, success is not made by VC or hype, it's the product that counts.
HN, like all news sources, is a mixed bag of content that has varying degrees of relevancy to its readers. Very few people have time to read all of the Wall Street Journal on a daily basis, much less benefit from absorbing that much information, and the same thing applies to HN. However, HN still provides a great source of current and emergent trends in the startup world. If one isn't able to consume this site's content in a way that's beneficial to them then the blame is squarely on their own lack of discipline. Writing blog posts extrapolating one's personal tendency to misuse this news source to some general rule of thumb is pointless.
I live in Tel Aviv, Israel.<p>Some of the stories I read at HN appears on "mainstream-media" a day or three later. In most cases, Hacker News makes the local technology news "no-news".<p>As for the author's opinion, media, by definition, usually cover the exceptional stories, great success or failures, but not the daily challenges each of us is coping with, while struggling to generate more leads or turn a lead into a deal (yep, same letters, reads backwards).<p>I love stay in sync with the remote Silicon Valley and HN, the stories and the comments help me get that.<p>Thanks PG and the other guys for putting this site together and maintaining this site for us, entrepreneurs all over the world!
I'd also add <a href="http://web-design-weekly.com" rel="nofollow">http://web-design-weekly.com</a> and (my newsletter) <a href="http://jobety.com" rel="nofollow">http://jobety.com</a> to the list.<p>Web design weekly definitely provides quality web design related content. I've also talked to the curator and he's a very nice guy which doesn't change the quality of the content, but does let you know your supporting a decent person.<p>My newsletter Jobety provides web design and dev related jobs once a week. I sort through a lot of different job boards and pick out what I consider to be the best ones.
John, thanks for the Hacker Newsletter mention!<p>Of course I'm a bit biased, but I think curated newsletters provide a lot of advantages, several of which are listed in the post. Another one that I would add is the ability to focus on a particular topic or area that you find useful. I created a (curated) list of a lot of them recently - <a href="http://www.kaledavis.com/2013/09/06/newsletters-newsletters-newsletters.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kaledavis.com/2013/09/06/newsletters-newsletters-...</a>.
I started reading Hacker News back in 2007. I got busy, really busy around 2010. I came back in 2013.<p>Nothing's changed. Still the same type of talk, same type of links, same type of mentality.
I rarely read every article on page one, and many of those that I do look at I only read a couple of paragraphs, as was the case with this article.<p>Ergo, I disagree with the premise of this article.
Is it "complain about HN week" ? If you got problem with HN stop reading it, simple as that. We don't need your "awesome" advices how to read stories on HN, we don't need to hear that HN sux.
I dont think anyone here got problem with filtering the content, if you dont want to read another startup stories you just don't. I do not see any problem here.<p>Hacker News is still awesome community, people here usually have awesome attitude. It keeps me motivated.
I'm not sure how many of you do this, but I often find myself looking something up on HN, just out of curiosity of what was discussed and what people thought about it.
I think it goes without saying that it's all about your objectives and perceptions. Objectively, HN is a valuable resource to stay informed of micro-innovations in the tech industry.<p>I'm not someone that's insecure about what I don't know or how smart I am, as I'm constantly trying to improve all areas of my life; as a result, many of the posts here are inspiring and help set a fire under my ass to get out there start <i>doing</i>.
This is the difference between consuming content and letting the content consume you. HN can't harm you unless you allow it to. Don't blame the content.<p>Sometimes there's no excuse for self-discipline, critical thinking, a healthy perspective on life, and self-esteem. I don't say this flippantly. All of the above are lifelong challenges for most people (myself included).
Something I've considered doing is taking HN and/or reddit posts and then applying a machine learning algorithm to figure out what kinds of articles I like/dislike and automatically filter out the ones that are likely to waste my time, or at least improve upon the existing sorting system and make it more personalized.
HN and proggit are two great sources of consuming technology related information. I usually spent 20 mins in morning and add the interesting looking articles on instapaper for reading in free time. I don't think it's making me less productive at all and HN comments are great at deciding what to read.
I must have missed all those articles about languages/frameworks you need to learn immediately. Generally I feel pretty comfortable with the tools I have now and don't feel threatened if I see some new cool tech everyone's excited about, but it does make interesting reading.
Your article did strike a chord with me, simply because I had the exact same epiphany that you write of, a few months ago, and have been spending less time on HN since.<p>So, point of my commment is, add me to your anecdata count, of another one that thought in the same way and arrived to the same conclusion.
I use HN as a kick in the butt. Whenever I feel down or demotivated I just browse to HN's home page, see what amazing work is being done in the tech world while I'm just sitting there, remember that I want to be a part of it, and go back to work with my motivation restored.
<a href="http://johnmurray.io/log/2013/03/13/Nothing-is-Interesting.md" rel="nofollow">http://johnmurray.io/log/2013/03/13/Nothing-is-Interesting.m...</a> How can someone answer any question in there if there's no any comments area?
My girlfriend is reading the Daily Mail like I read Hacker News. I don't know which website is worse for our well being but I try to read the day best voted submissions and it is enough to keep me updated with everything else.
I use HN to test if internet is working. Don't do this, worst idea ever, but it's built in my muscle memory. It also happens that I read HN in a tab, and then open a new tab and get on HN again. Muscle memory.
I think most people visiting HN choose to read what is relevant to their interests and goals, as well as submitting similar content or submitting something perhaps breaking news in the tech industry for the day
HN can be like FB - highlight reels that people sometimes compare to the full view of what they are experiencing.<p>There are also posts about failure but I'd say they are a bit less common than the ones about success.
Another post in the <i>do this, do that, because it's better for you</i> fashion. Since when people are going to stop writing with so much entitlement ? What do they know what works for me anyway ?
Technology ADD is a issue I have been struggling with for some time. The compulsive urge to chase every new framework is real and I do not know how manage it as it eats through my productive time.
Out of 250 Hacker News posts that cross my transom in a given week, I might open 30 links, decide to actually read 6 of those thirty tabs, and learn something from three of them.<p>This is still a better ratio than most websites. Sturgeon's Law applies. 90% of everything is crap, another 9% is of decent quality but not relevant to anything I need to do-- leaving 1% that is worth it for me to read. So I'd say that HN's numbers are on par, if not slightly above it.<p>See, I'd really like to dislike HN. Paul Graham used to be an iconoclast (with some serious technical chops-- go read <i>On Lisp</i>-- deserving of much respect) fighting the stodgy establishment of VC-istan. Having seen the failings of investors nearly destroy his business on several occasions, he tried to build something new and different: a fast path to funding and access so startups could focus on building instead of bullshit. But now that he is the establishment, he's not fighting hard enough. Then there is the issue of HN's abysmal quality of moderation, for which he must accept responsibility. So I really <i>want</i> to dislike HN and tell it to fuck off wholesale...<p>... but, the problem is that, in spite of these negatives, there's just a lot of really good stuff that ends up here. Reading <i>less</i> HN is good advice, but there's enough high-quality stuff here (in submissions and comments) to make it worthwhile.
If you're that weak that you can't even read HN without properly filtering shit in your head, you shouldn't use the internet. What a terrible and pointless article.<p>Very thin blogspam at the very least.