Should we consider HN as social media and should we quit it?
HN has the "anything that's interesting" policy, which means I see a lot of stuff that only serves to distract me. I waste too much time reading newsy posts here or I catch myself following clickbait titles. I want to stay on top of the latest tech and that's all really. I've started using reddit more these days. Following subreddits gives me links that are more focused.
Two, I find it far too easy to be downvoted into oblivion here. I frequently type up a post, just to close the window before I hit reply. I know I'm just going to get downvoted/hidden/deleted for having a point of view that is from somewhere outside the primary demographic here. I then realize I've wasted my time and additionally I feel ostracized as well.
And the third.. this may seem kinda silly to most here.. is the name: Hacker News. Completely innocuous to computer programmers, but if "normals" see someone browsing a site named Hacker anything, it raises eyebrows. I was recently blocked from visiting this site in a foreign country, and I really can't describe the sort of sinking feeling I had when that happened. I suddenly realized where I was. My inner monologue went something like: "So now I'm going to be dragged to some foreign dungeon, for visiting a site that doesn't really care for my voice, to read articles that just distract me from focusing on my true interests. Why am I so stupid?"
Yeah, I'm calm now that I'm back home, but I'll sorta worry when I have to go back there again.
(I very nearly closed the window again. Hitting reply this time. You should hear the truth occasionally. Even if it's only a fleeting glimpse before I am deleted.)
The good part is that I have become a significantly better programmer from the articles and comments on HN. Although, most of the improvements came from the first year of using HN and then it's started to taper off since.
I should probably use HN less, but I think it has genuinely improved my life more than any other social media website.
But this is pretty damaging, wouldn't you say? Not too long ago, I would follow several consumer tech blogs, and jump right into the comments, because the stories were increasingly page-view driven garbage that needed 8 separate blog posts of ~200 words each to describe one story. The comments tended to provide much more insight than the actual "article".
With HN, (which I've been visiting for <2 years), I'm noticing that the articles posted tend to be long-form and generally thought-provoking. I make an effort to read the article, collect my thoughts on them, and only then view the comments.
They may touch technically very good topics, but the aggregate content, in my eyes, has become shallower. It's almost like the HN crowd is being systematically baited with superficially interesting tech posts.
(A very enjoyable exception: nautil.us - for me the posts are either entirely irrelevant, or readable and interesting with a high probability. I don't remember experiencing much of a middle ground yet.)
So, when my time is limited, I tend to check the discussion before hitting the link. Usually the first few posts are enough to confirm whether the link itself is worth visiting or not.
And sure enough, a primary motivator for this is that finding non-clickbaity titles is increasingly rare. HN thread activity and tone acts as a pretty decent bloom filter.