Hacker News Reader

Comment by kampsduac | Hacker News Reader

> no longer reading the papers and watching television

This is what I do, in addition to no social media except for certain personal alerts.

I ask my partner to relay any significant news/events to me.

I do support my local media group The Colorado Sun with a membership and sometimes read through their articles, which don't have advertisements so they are not incentivised to produce click-bait headlines and sponsored/addictive/entertainment content.

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> This is what I do, in addition to no social media except for certain personal alerts. I ask my partner to relay any significant news/events to me.

It sounds like you've partly outsourced the problem to your partner then. What does your partner do?

You don't consider HN to be social media?

I consider internet boards like HN a pre-cursor to all dark-pattern-laden "social" "media" today. So yes in a sense, we're all communicating and this is social media. Now, we wait while someone comes to dispute my personal interpretation of the words, but yeah my $0.02 have been deposited.

Don't you believe it has largely the same negatives as other social media like Twitter or Facebook? (At least in terms of the present topic that "news is addictive".) Why drop one but not the other?

Fair point, why not drop all and become an internet hermit relying solely on RSS feeds? But then again, aren't these feeds addictive? Don't they leave you asking for more? At what point in the discussion of internet content can we truly(as a userbase) call it non-addictive then? I'm the furthest thing from an expert on the matter so for me, a website that opens once a week at 17:00 EST for a duration of 2 hours might even do the job. Can't say it hasn't crossed my mind. This is a very tricky and subjective issue. What do you think?

I think HN is awfully addictive, though slightly less so than certain other sites due to a slightly bounded amount of content. Though I think it has helped my life in some ways, it's probably a net negative. My real problem is what should I replace it with? Trying to limit HN (and similar) time tends to make me increase my time on even-less-worthwhile activities like other sites. It's not that HN is good, it's just among the least-bad of the activities that tap this certain urge.

HN may not have teams dedicated to getting you addicted like Twitter or IG does, but it's still addictive.

Many people refresh HN multiple times per day and spend hours arguing about the same things over and over (seriously, I've seen the same arguments for 5+ years). I'm sure all of us have caught ourselves closing HN and then opening it again a few mins later.

This goes for all forums ever, so it's more of a personal change than anything 'wrong' with HN or others.

The big difference I see between HN, Reddit, and traditional message boards on one hand and Facebook/Twitter/Instagram style social media on the other is the relative prominence of personalities vs topics. HN/Reddit/boards are topic focused, whereas the other social media sites are personality focused, with the specific accounts that you follow determining your overall experience of the site and the topics that you are shown. In order to have an experience on those latter sites you must connect yourself into the graph.

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