[mayankkaizen]

I am bugged by this question too. I've stopped reading newspapers 8 years ago. Closed FB account 7 years ago. Never been on IG or Tiktok. Never watched more than 2 YouTube Videos in a month. Twitter? 10 minutes in every three days and I only read tweets about STEM topics. Heck, I don't even join WhatsApp groups. Reddit and HN is what I browse. I very rarely post on Reddit and stay away from all political posts. The amount of time I spend on Reddit is gradually decreasing.

So that leaves me with HN. I like HN because topics I encounter here are not nonsensical or political. There are no memes, gifs or cheap jokes here. I find myself in awe of the knowledge people have here. I am forced to read stuff here rather than fast paced casual browsing. As a meme reads, "On Internet, typing is fun and reading is hard" but HN is exact opposite of that for me.

But deep inside my heart, I know HN is also a social media in many ways and I need to cut down the time I spend on this. I am addicted to this. I realized browsing HN is essentially a coping mechanism for my depression and lifelong failures. HN gives me a false sense of "look I am not wasting my time in frivolous stuff". HH helps me escape from harsh realities of my life in much the same ways drinking helps people cope with their life. In subtle ways, HN has polluted my mind and corrupted my ability to think in realistic ways.

[BatteryMountain]

HN is a social media site if you visit multiple times a day and post comments and spend your mental energy on the site, and allow yourself to into rabbit holes for hours.

If you want to cut down on time spent on HN, on F-Droid there is an app called Glider. Its a typical HN client. It has a feature/button called Catch Up, where it gives you top posts by week/month, similar to how you can filter things on reddit and typically reddit clients.

I highly recommend experimenting with batching time spent on certain sites to once a week and once a month, that is, 5 or 6 visits a month, and get a high level overview of what happened (instead of multiple visits daily, which interrupts your flow). Then limit yourself to only look at the top 5 top-level comments (and not go into comment rabbit holes). Same for reddit, or skip reddit if you can, its mostly noise. Skip other social media sites too.

[kinjba11]

I concur very much. HN is the only social media I use these days, after cutting reddit and others nearly a decade ago. I have had to set up blockers for the comments section, to limit my time, as I end up spending far too much time here. Even so, did I really need to spend the last few hours learning about corner-locked land, southwest's canceled flights, new rust features, wifi DFS, anecdotes about electric vehicles in winter, etc?

On the flip side, without HN, my life would be totally different. I likely would not have pursued the much higher paying job I have now. My enthusiasm for technology and software would not be as high, seeing the many ways tech is used here. I would not be aware of meditation, notion, chatgpt, ml, postgres, cloud, rust go, wait but why, the inner platform effect, and so much else. For better or worse, HN shapes my outlook on the world. Is knowing all this worth the time spent, or is seeking knowledge simply addictive? I don't know.