[village-idiot]

Reddit and HN provide what I call “false novelty”. It’s a torrent of new information and entertaining images, but none of it really provides any sort of lasting impact beyond the first 5 minutes or so.

When you do new things in the real world, these become major events that anchor your memories and sense of time. You can probably vividly remember some vacations, concerts, your first kiss, and a thousand other novel life experiences very vividly. But while Reddit feels novel in the moment, in the rear view mirror it is just a featureless void of “Reddit was here”, with no strong memories left to justify the time spent.

[bambataa]

But don't you find you learn things, get introduced to new concepts and so on?

I definitely think that HN has improved me as a software developer, if only to show me how much unknown stuff there is out there.

Reddit is a bit more questionable but I've definitely found useful things in some sub-reddits.

And sometimes all I want is something that will easily wile away a few minutes.

[strikelaserclaw]

This is more for reddit than hacker news (although i would say hacker news is the same to a lesser degree). More and more I've been feeling that all that exposure does is make one feel like one is learning a lot but in reality its just a wide shallow understanding not really useful for anything. It's good to gain exposure but its easy to fall into the trap of mistaking exposure for thinking real hard and working to understand something deeply, at least that is how i feel.

[village-idiot]

My metric is “how actionable is this information?”

The answer is quite often “not very”.

[village-idiot]

Sometimes.

First, I am far from being above using HN and Reddit, as evidenced by me typing this. So, this is not a “you should stop using X” rant, because I can’t stop using it either.

I think as a means of getting professional news, HN and Lobste.rs are basically unparalleled. These have been an unambiguous success for me

As a means for being informed in general it seems to work, but I’m dubious about the utility of being “informed” about things in which I have no stake or power to change things. Recent example is discussions about Swedish cashlessness. I don’t live in Sweden, nor will I travel there soon. So what utility does taking up some of my precious attention with this un-actionable information have? I genuinely don’t know, but I fear that the opportunity cost of such reading might be catching me in some subtle way.

As a means of entertainment, my original comment stands.