[Sebb767]

Probably "productive" distractions, since you can do them a lot more before feeling bad and going back to work. Especially if you can silently get into the "fun" territory.

I've actually had this with HN in the last days; I've ditched Reddit for HN because it contained a lot more worthwile content and valuable discussions [0], but with the Twitter shitshow I've come to enjoy a lot of snarky, unproductive discussions again. Maybe it's time to enable noprocast.

[0] Actually, it was mostly ideological reasons, but having HN as a "drop-in" replacement/upgrade helped a lot.

[LAC-Tech]

Yeah, HN is such a double edged sword. Great technical discussions as well as time sucking passive aggressive discussions about "divisive social issues", which I cannot help but click.

Wrote this script today, that just stops me seeing submissions from sites I know won't have good technical discussions. Might be useful for others.

    const boringDomains = ["twitter.com", "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com"]

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a"))
        .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain)))
        .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
        .flatMap(elem => [
            elem,
            elem.nextElementSibling,
            elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]
        )
        .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

[kettleballroll]

> I've ditched Reddit for HN because it contained a lot more worthwile content

I found that at least for myself, this was just a lie I kept telling myself. HN contains almost zero actionable content, and I've not been an epsilon better off for reading it. I come to see it as infotainment.

[tracker1]

It varies... I'll often see mention of interesting/useful tools/sites/applications mentioned in more technical discussion. I don't always find these things immediately useful, but often even a year later if I can remember enough to search and find what I was looking for. Sometimes just knowing something exists in extremely useful.

[Bedon292]

For me the benefit is honestly just less content. There is only so much that makes it to the front page here and the lack of infinite scroll means I rarely see beyond it. It helps me waste a lot less time. But reddit was also a real problem for me. Way too many hours each day and I had to quit it.

[rjh29]

Some HNers believe the site is superior to Reddit, if you compare it to the smaller and high quality subs, there isn't any difference.

[asddubs]

there's been a few times where I read something that I was really glad I found out about through here, and probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. But yeah, easily >99% of it is just passing time

[eastbound]

HN was my MBA back in 2010-2013, that’s where I learnt how to create a working startup. There were blogs like Kalzumeus or Joel On Software, people were still debating technical or business issues about startups.

Now it’s more a news aggregator. It’s my fault too, I don’t blog about the company I’ve created, and people can learn how to create proper startups in many places.

[VLM]

HN is great for discovery but 90%+ of the comments have declined to ChatGPT levels.

[electrondood]

HN comments are less sarcastic, cynical, info-free than Reddit comments.

[jasonladuke0311]

They can be, but not always. For example, any subject even tangentially related to Twitter or Musk summons a spate of low-brow, boilerplate comments.

[antihero]

I’ve discovered a bunch of neat libraries and projects through it.

[Cthulhu_]

> Probably "productive" distractions, since you can do them a lot more before feeling bad and going back to work. Especially if you can silently get into the "fun" territory.

I feel like this is the case for a lot of productivity tools; every once in a while I find myself browsing the status-quo of the next generation of todo apps that have had far too much design work spent on their website for what it does. 9 times out of 10 it's a grift to sell a $15 / month subscription for syncing across devices and its added value is tiny compared to just using a text editor, lol.

[tracker1]

Have to admit, the change to Twitter in terms of personality the past few months has been as fun as Twitter around a decade ago... I mean, a lot more snark, memes and generally fun. Not perfect, but definitely more entertaining than when people were getting banned for parody accounts.

[mrcartmeneses]

I made a resolution to just close my eyes instead of going on Reddit/HN. Went well for about 20 mins...

[philippejara]

"oh I need to structurally modify these 20 lines, might as well craft a regex to do it"

30 minutes later... well got to keep my regex skills up to date else i'll lose them