9 ms·
Ask HN: How do you manage to go through so much of good content posted on HN?
A lot of good content is posted on HN. However, I am unable to read/watch most of it. I do use Pocket to store articles for future reading. But the list gets big too quickly and I find it overwhelming to finish all of it.
Any specific technique or tool you use to manage all this content?
- mkbkn 9y agoI made an IFTTT recipe that would email me the links to the HN story based on specific keywords in its title like "learn", "how to", "books" etc. And I check my emails mostly once a day, so by the time I click the link in the email, most of the time, I would find a good number of quality comments to read and enjoy.
- teaneedz 9y agoI follow @newssyc20 and @newssyc300 Twitter bots (there's also 50, 100, 150). They deliver the HN headlines that reach those many points to my Twitter TL. [update] Then, if I click through to the HN post from the tweet, I read the first few comments at the top and then the bottom most comments. Finally, if I'm still interested, I'll read the actual article.
- gtirloni 9y agoI don't have a technique to manage all this content. I've been working on the opposite. Here are some disconnected thoughts. First, realize you don't need (or can't) known everything. There's too much content out there. You'll get overloaded and burn out. Not everything is useful to you. Sure, it's always good to read about things outside one's bubble to get new insights, but that will occur naturally if you're a curious person. Fight that urge. After trying to minimize the amount of things that go into your to-read bucket, you'll notice you still have too much to read. Filter again and be okay with missing something. When you actually have an issue in front of you, you'll know how to find the solution. No need to cram everything into your brain.
- exolymph 9y ago> Filter again and be okay with missing something. Yes, this is key. You just have to accept that there is vastly more interesting material in the world than you can ever possibly digest. Then be very discerning about what you pick.
- exolymph 9y agoI mainly read the comments, rarely the articles themselves. (That's not to say that I don't read articles in general — I do, but I mostly find them via Twitter.) Usually, I'm much more interested in what the community has to say about a given topic or issue than I am about the object-level news.
- jvzr 9y agoSame. I use hckrnews.com to have an up-to-date list of recent topics discussed on HN, quickly skim it for headlines that stand out, but mostly focusing on highly-commented posts (50+ when in the morning, 20+ later on in the day), and I read comments first.
- sbmthakur 9y agohckrnews.com looks cool. Thanks for sharing.
- piva00 9y agoNormally I don't do this but: third here, didn't expect it to be so common. Probably the difference for me is that I live in Europe so I tend to catch up to a bunch of posts from the evening/night in the US during my morning coffee and then open hckrnews.com again by the end of the afternoon when some new posts begin to crop up. I'll read the articles with interesting headlines but always jump to the comments first, some articles that I really think could help me in the future (or deserve further reading or research) I will save to my todo-list or in my Pocket account and then set a reminder to re-read/research in a given day when I'm free.
- galfarragem 9y agoI would also add: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ (HN daily top 10 links archived since 2010) https://hnews.xyz/ https://hnews.xyz/ (HN with thumbnails -> deeper HN skimming)
- tebugst 9y agoWoow. I too do the same. But I browse only 1st page in morning (30+) and later I went thr' other pages.
- shahbaby 9y agoI try to limit myself to things that actually pertain to me.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoAny specific technique or tool you use to manage all this content? I am medically handicapped. I spend a lot of time convalescing. HN helps minimize the degree to which I go stir crazy while doing so. I don't recommend it as a method. I know from long experience that the assumption is that those doing a lot of X are overachievers to be emulated and their perceived accomplishments to be aspired to. Such perceptions aren't necessarily accurate.
- ochronus 9y agoI also use Pocket - each evening I go through my RSS reader (HN is included) and click what looks interesting, I skim the article (10 secs) and if it indeed looks interesting/useful/valuable I save it to Pocket and I add a label. Labels help me to revisit Pocket in a more systematic way and I also re-filter Pocket from time to time.
- greenmana 9y agoCan you or anyone recommend some good RSS readers these days? Thanks.
- _hao 9y agoInoreader is by far the best option!
- srhngpr 9y agoNewsblur - https://www.newsblur.com/ https://www.newsblur.com/ -- been using it since Google Reader was discontinued and never looked back!
- ochronus 9y agoI'm a pretty much happy user of Feedly
- LVB 9y agoIf you happen to run your own server, give https://tt-rss.org https://tt-rss.org a try. It is straightforward and has all the essentials I expect in an RSS reader. There are mobile clients too. I’ve used it for a number of years with good results and almost no maintenance.
- flear 9y agoI use http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ as an interface. Depending on how much time I have, I filter by Top 10 / Top 20 or "All posts".
- m4tthumphrey 9y agoMy technique is to simply keep checking back every few hours and never go past page 1.
- imron 9y agoIgnore most of it! In the grand scheme of things, most of the 'good' content really is not that good. It might be interesting - or more interesting that what you should be working on, but a year from now most of it will be irrelevant. You can save a lot of time by ignoring it.
- im_dario 9y agoI use http://serializer.charlieegan3.com/ http://serializer.charlieegan3.com/ as filter.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eqtn 9y agoI use feedly to manage rss. I like to read comments about the article more than the article itself.
- eimg 9y agoRSS reader. I use Feedly to subscribe HN altogether with dozen of other sources and receive somewhat around a hundred posts daily. I read through all headlines. But only go through a few that really interest me. It doesn't help much with filtering content but it help you make sure you don't miss anything interesting.
- n17r4m 9y agoFirefox mostly, but I get what you are asking for. Ultimately my brain, I know I should bookmark more great links, but I guess in the end I just hope I remember them. Besides that, just have my own forked merge of exolymph's and m4tthumphrey's replies. As in another discussion, it's just part of life.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16338723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16338723 . If it wasn't HN, it would be slashdot, or ars, or medium, or searching deep into the web for ghost hosts.
- n17r4m 9y agoExcuse me for replying to myself, but on a different topic. What ever happened to bookmarklets? LPT for those that enjoy going insane by reading things at super speed: http://spritzinc.com/get-spritz http://spritzinc.com/get-spritz . [no affiliation]
- voltooid 9y agoI open up links to articles that seem interesting to me at that moment, skim through and find out if it is indeed still interesting, leave it in a browser tab to come to later. I come back to my browser tabs and ask myself if I still am interested in the article. Close it if the answer isn't a resounding yes.
- pm 9y agoI read through half and then bookmark everything. I have years of articles to go through. So, I don't actually manage it, and really need to.
- blindpixel 9y agoI scan HN once in the morning and before going to sleep. I save interesting links to pocket and then listen to them at 1.5x speed during my commute or free time. BTW Pocket's TTS has definitely gotten better now barring a few obvious errors. The experience is largely good.
- gamapuna 9y agoI use hn.algolia, if there's some topic I am interested in searching there usually fives me the most relevant HN link
- nippples 9y agoI ignore most of it.
- prorsum 9y agoI've created a slack channel and configured an RSS reader that periodically sends new posts to that channel. I find it quite useful because it is push model rather than pull, which avoids switching context just to check if there is anything interesting. Another positive thing posts remain in the slack which allows sharing, threading, pinning, favouriting, searching etc.
- dotdi 9y agoIn the morning, I get a coffee and open up all the interesting articles into tabs on hckrnews.com, which I then stack (using Vivaldi browser). I'll go through these tabs during the day when I need a break or have some downtime. The HN tab stack is helpful because I know the other open tabs have something to do with work. If I'm intrigued by what I read in the article, I'll read comments on HN, but often I completely ignore them.
- fsloth 9y agoI ignore most of the articles posted. I get this intuitive "itch to read" when I see an interesting topic and that is a sufficient filter to me. It's not like this is important, anyway, it's mostly only news and blogposts :)
- jgtrosh 9y agoA life-long practice from lower-tier websites like Reddit of seeing way too much content go past to ever try and catch up with everything. When I was young and 9gag came to existence I remember being able of seeing everything that was posted by checking it out once a day. I learned to give up back then, and now on a vastly more interesting website like HN I enjoy finding interesting bits every day but don't expect to know about everything that happened.
- thisisit 9y agoOkay this might get weird. I was (am) kind of perfectionist. So I used to feel pressured by the sheer amount of content and feeling what I was missing. I have been doing mindfulness for a month now and it has helped me come to terms with this overload of information. Now, I don't get bogged by the fact that I missed reading something. Previously I used to read every topic possible - cryptocurrency, finance, technology, blog posts or writeups - even about technology which I am sure I am never going to work on. Now I focus on stuff that really matter to me - finance (mainly personal finance) and technology. Others, like politics etc I simply ignore.
- ninjakeyboard 9y agoCatch the highlights! There are some tools that will send you eg newsletters with the top items. You can't read everything! Better to both consume and to also produce. Doing one or the other too much is worse than doing the right amount of both.
- weego 9y agoI learned very quickly that most of it isn't actually very good (ie its outside my sphere of understanding so if it's well written it can seem good when actually later you come back to it and realise it was garbage) or relevant to me so I ignore most of it.
- partycoder 9y agoI think it's not about "good" or "bad" but rather relevant or irrelevant. What is relevant to you is in part for you to decide.
- ninjakeyboard 9y agoIf you read hackernews from emacs, it doesn't matter if you read everything. Everyone around you will fear you. https://github.com/clarete/hackernews.el https://github.com/clarete/hackernews.el
- placebo 9y agosame way I manage other things, which is sort of the opposite of what one might do in SEO management - I drop the long tail, and only focus on what's left. Of course the contents of what's left depends on your personal priorities of what you find to be important. Now if that also becomes too much, rinse and repeat.
- dwaltrip 9y agoThis reminds me of the explore vs exploit dilemma: https://joshkaufman.net/explore-exploit/ https://joshkaufman.net/explore-exploit/ I'm still working on understanding this trade-off better... It seems to be a pretty good lens for looking at things, though.
- enraged_camel 9y agoI first filter front-page submissions based on number of comments. Out of those, I focus mostly on things that will be immediately useful or relevant, and avoid reading stuff that merely piques my curiosity. With these two criteria applied, I find that I only have two or three submissions per day to read. It's quite nice.
- andyjohnson0 9y agoI don't even try to read most of it. Just let it flow past. On a work-day morning while I'm drinking my coffee and waiting for my brain to boot-up, I go through the current pain page and open the comment pages for any interesting posts/articles. I read the comments to see what the community here thinks, and then maybe flip to the article itself. The decision to do this is mostly based on how the comments look, so I'm using them to get a precis, but sometimes I go to the article anyway. Then I dip-in several times during the day, treating the main page like a twitter-style firehose. Just snack on a couple of articles and reactions, then back to work. I sometimes read HN at the weekend - when in my experience it has a different vibe, with more thoughtful, longer content. Then I find myself spending more time on the articles and less on the comments. I mostly just try to let what I read filter into my kind of ambient awareness of HN-type subjects, rather than remembering it. I occasionally flag something a favourite, and even less occasionally bookmark something, but I very rarely go back to old content as there just isn't time.
- danellis 9y agoWhy do you think you need to finish all of it? There is a lot of content out there that you haven't seen, and I presume you don't worry about that. The fact that some of it has been posted to HN shouldn't mean that not seeing it suddenly becomes a problem.
- rayalez 9y agoConsider subscribing to the weekly email newsletter of the most upvoted posts [1], or finetune an RSS feed [2] (you can filter posts with 100+ upvotes for example, or only Show HN posts, or whatever). If you're using mastodon, you can follow my HackerNewsBot [3], or the same thing on twitter [4]. [1] https://hndigest.com/ https://hndigest.com/ [2] https://hnrss.org/ https://hnrss.org/ [3] https://mastodon.social/@HackerNewsBot https://mastodon.social/@HackerNewsBot [4] https://twitter.com/newsyc100 https://twitter.com/newsyc100
- kjullien 9y agoWatch the headline, Like it ? Skim the article with interest. Read the comments. Meh ? Skim it fast. Read the comments. Nope ? Read the comments. My brain works in a very strange manner, I cannot chose what it remembers, it does that for me, and most of the time what I will remember won't be that important or useful to me, since I have no real control over that I like to learn and discover as much as I can in the hopes I might remember something interesting to pop out in a conversation and such.
- usrme 9y agoI also use Pocket, but when the list grows to be too big (around 10 items or so) then I will not consume any more articles by way of Feedly or Hacker News until the list is groomed. I find this to work well for me as I have an incentive to keep my Pocket empty or at the very least not overwhelmingly filled.
- kapauldo 9y agoMost of hn is skimmable. There are about 5 good discussions a day.
- latte 9y agoI use the RSS feeds (https://hnrss.org/ https://hnrss.org/) for the HN front page and also for the Show HN (I find the average quality of all Show HNs to be surprisingly high - ever of those that don't make it to the front page). To read the feed, I use Feedly, that fetches pictures from the linked pages that sometimes give a bit more context about the submissions.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoThis is almost exactly what I do. I recommend it. Except I use a feed direly on HN... I didn't use an third party scripts or websites. I can't figure out how to get the URL out of feedly though. As a pro tip for anyone reading. Pressing "j" will go to the next article and "k" will go back one so you can really quickly skim headlines. One pet peeve is that the RSS feed doesn't contain anything useful in the body so when skimming you have to reply entirely on title.
- thinkjson 9y agoI use the Hacker News trigger in IFTTT to filter out top articles related to TypeScript, Python, or Go, and send them to my private slack. https://ifttt.com/hacker_news https://ifttt.com/hacker_news
- msutherl 9y agoSkim, read comments, and for things I want to remember, add them to an appropriate Are.na channel. For longer articles I want to read eventually but know I won't get to for a long time, I use the "Save this page" feature of Inoreader[2]. Since I've started using Inoreader, I haven't gone back to any of these articles, but I'm ok with this – I tend to review the cache every 6-months to a year when I happen to have uninterrupted free time (like between jobs or on vacation). Previously I had Are.na channels called "To Read 1", "To Read 2", and so on. [1] https://are.na https://are.na [2] https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/
- andersonnnunes 9y agoMy feed reader uses a massive blacklist to filters headlines. I only click on headlines that appear interesting to me.
- ty0ki 9y agoI use hckrnews.com. And I dont get involved in the comments section.
- ab071c41 9y agoI use an RSS feed, skim the headlines for what's interesting, and either read it then or save it to pocket. This also means that after a few days, I end up with 1000+ articles, but I can skim them 100s at a time.
- seba_dos1 9y agoRSS reader (self-hosted CommaFeed), quick glance at comments when a headline catches my eye, then opening the article or not, most likely in a new tab to check out later. With those two big filters, the amount of stuff that's actually interesting to me seems manageable.
- mark212 9y agoLiberal use of the “hide” button. If the headline doesn’t grab me (or I know it’s a topic I find tedious) click hide and it disappears. Come back to the page later in the day and see what’s fresh, repeat. There’s enough great stuff that I wouldn’t find any other way to make it worth repeat visits. And often the comments are much more valuable, like when someone has a link to a website or SaaS or software and the comments are like “this sucks you should try X” and goes off in exhaustive detail as to why that person holds that conviction.
- j45 9y agoYou don't. I try to only read things that are applicable to what I'm trying to do now. The rest, if interesting or useful later, can be bookmarked using tools like diigo, pocket, etc.
- JabavuAdams 9y agoDon't. It really doesn't matter. Productivity (if that's your metric) is limited by your ability to continually make good decisions. You can't integrate and apply all the knowledge in any useful sense. Trying to probably makes you less productive and/or happy.
- bionsystems 9y agoI skim quickly through articles at work, and those I think may be interesting I email them to myself so I can read them in the evening. I never read any of those in the evening. But for some reason I keep doing the above. :)
- lamerman 9y agohttp://www.waybackhn.com/ http://www.waybackhn.com/ - it shows you only 30 most popular articles for this day.
- MK999 9y agodon't waste your time go build something instead h n is very repetitive
- dpkrjb 9y agoI share to pocket on my phone and create a backlog of interesting articles. Since they're cached I'm able to read some of the lighter ones on the tube to and from work. Worth noting that my backlog grows faster than I can read it. Unlike the top comment on this post I mainly dont pay attention to the comments apart from an initial glance and I only save the article link to pocket. That's the opposite of my browsing habits on Reddit where I usually pay attention to the comments more than the articles.
- matt_the_bass 9y agoMostly I just reminisce about getting then monthly print version. Those were the curated days when I didn’t need to worry about missing an interesting article.
- tebugst 9y agoI keep checking titles of submission. If it seems appealing, then go through comments. If initial comments are interesting then go through original article.
- 0x54MUR41 9y agoI have no specific technique to manage all of good contents on HN. If I find a post or thread that has a good content, I usually upvote or favorite it. But, as you said before, it will grow bigger and bigger as a list on your "upvoted submission" section profile. I think using Pocket or other bookmarking tool is one of the method because you can give a tag or keyword to your bookmarked content (searchable). Well, at the end, I agree with someone who said you don't need know everything. Our brains have a limit. Choose the topic that suits with you.
- book_mentioned 9y agoMaybe try a pull method rather than push - just use https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com search!
- slake 9y agoI just scan the titles on Feedly, Open the titles I find interesting. Read the ones I really find interesting and bounce out of the ones where the titles were interesting by the item is actually boring. But I can't catch up if I miss even one day. So there are periods where I have a 1000 unread items and I just skip them.
- AncoraImparo 9y agoThere isn't really that much good content anymore... So it really is easy nowadays. A few years ago I used to constantly have to be saving stuff to read later... but now it is constantly just non-tech related crap, unfortunately.