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by 082349872349872 947 days ago
I don't scroll anymore.

Entertainment —including HN— is pulled via RSS and presented as a list of plaintext, from which I actively select. The browser is open as long as I am actively searching (via engine or within-page search) for something, but if I find myself scrolling around passively, I close it.

1 comments

How do you find HN via RSS less distracting than the site itself?
When I accessed via https://news.ycombinator.com , I'd see the same stories repeatedly, just in different places, each time I visited that page. Via newsboat, I see each story at most once.

Also the HN frontpage scrolls on my laptop —if barely— but I have newsboat configured so that when there are too many new HN stories, I view them by subsets of alphabetical order (currently a-g, h-q, r-z but I should probably chop at e or f instead) so they will fit on a screen (~70 stories).

Some weeks I am involved enough with my personal projects that I forget to read HN for several days; in that case I have channels set up that show only 1, 2, 3, and 4 day old content — which can then be broken down by subsets, or manually even finer, so I'm only ever picking from less than a screenful.

(when I'm that far behind, I mostly mark entire screenfuls as seen, without clicking through at all: maybe the greatest value of this system is realising that one can very easily not click on attractive things and one's life is still full of more interesting things than one truly has time for?)