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Ask HN: Anyone else using Hacker News as a `dopamine hit`?

• FroshKiller 8y ago
  You need to diversify your news diet. Buy one of each of your local & regional newspapers (if you have any) and pick one to read as regularly as you can. Watch a local news broadcast or at least read their website every few days. Do the same with national papers. Avoid cable news, in my opinion. Pay attention to the sources of the material you find most useful or entertaining from here and other aggregation sites. You will wind up drilling through multiple aggregators. Find the sites and people, and keep up with them directly. You're definitely just using Hacker News as a dopamine hit, and you're probably not really learning anything from it. You know what will help you break the habit? Create something, and make posting here about what you create your goal instead. It might blow up, or it might fizzle, but it's a better use of your time in either case.
  • paulcole 8y ago
    > You need to diversify your news diet. Why exactly? If somebody doesn't like reading/watching local news what's the big deal?
    • FroshKiller 8y ago
      > I love HN. It's my only news source.
    • slenk 8y ago
      Diversity. Local news. Non-tech news.
      • paulcole 8y ago
        > Diversity. Local news. Non-tech news. Still just listing things not benefits. Why do people who aren't interested in non-tech news "need" to seek it out?
        • craftyguy 8y ago
          To develop/maintain a healthy dose of perspective.
• HiroshiSan 8y ago
  I deal with it by taking breaks from browsing. Then I just read the top articles of the week or month. A lot of articles are fun tidbits but not life changing or relevant for me so there's no real loss in doing the above.
• mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  In your real life group of friends, make sure you don’t engage with people who emphasize a spirit of one-upsmanship in regards to who is the most “informed” about every esoteric, up-to-the-minute or bleeding edge development in every topic. Usually these folks have a shallow understanding of most of the stuff they go on about. Enough to sound smart in an isolated sound byte at a party, to make other shallow people go, “wow, how do they stay so informed?” but which completely falls apart with even just a few cursory depth questions. I think scanning Hacker News links begets this shallow way of thinking and emphasizes name dropping new topics as if it makes you seem like a zeitgeist genius. Read just a few things that interest you, and try to read them a little more deeply. For all the other stuff, just ignore it. If it’s really that important, it’ll come up again and again. You’ll read it eventually. Anybody giving you a hard time about not having already seen it is probably a shallow time waster who only “knows more” about it in the most superficial sense. Social media is like a petri dish for these people too. So, as should be immediately obvious by this point in history, just stay away from social media.
  • FLUX-YOU 8y ago
    >Enough to sound smart in an isolated sound byte at a party, to make other shallow people go, “wow, how do they stay so informed?” but which completely falls apart with even just a few cursory depth questions. People can get into that habit because the industry has been branded as a fast moving one in which we all must stay up-to-date. I'm all for calling out shallow people, but let's not pretend there isn't also a bigger force at work as far as that kind of signalling goes. And naturally people that do these things tend to herd together where no one is going to rock the boat.
    • mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      I don’t know. It’s usually a hallmark of a worthwhile business partner / team member / friend / network connection when someone is willing to just admit candidly that they don’t know something, that they aren’t an expert at XYZ and so their political opinion or design opinion, etc., should be discounted and they don’t have (and don’t need to have) something constantly poignant to say. Networking with a bunch of people who just constantly regurgitate the same constantly poignant pseudo-intellectualism to each other doesn’t really pay off. You get a big network on LinkedIn and you show up at events and in the end you don’t get any actual job opportunities / leads / VC intros, etc. etc., because the self-reinforcing circular facade doesn’t have any substance with which it can possibly turn out as a payoff to you. I think even from an expected returns point of view, just simplifying your life, minimizing the shallow chatter, networking sparsely but judiciously, is just way healthier and offers better payoffs.
• NVRM 8y ago
  Norepinephrine
• Dirlewanger 8y ago
  Of course. Why would you think HN is different from any other social media/news aggregator?
• likesfood 8y ago
  Yes and isn't the same true for all things you do?
• 0x4f3759df 8y ago
  If you use http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ you won't miss anything. Since you've turned the site into a bad habit, moderate your consumption with a rule like 'I only read it on the weekends'
• tarboreus 8y ago
  I think I've figured this out. I basically have two modes, hunt and eat. When I'm at my computer, I pull in the list of HN titles via RSS. I go through the list (just titles, no upvote numbers, rankings, or other brain hackery) and select the ones I'm actually interested in. I pop those open as tabs. Once I have the articles I want, I quickly go through them in a sorting cycle. Weird games or apps I might take a quick look at. Paywalls get busted down, bypassed, or ignored. The articles I'm interested in reading go into Pocket using the browser extension. When I'm out and about or lying around, I read articles using the Pocket app. I have the articles I want in front of me and so my brain isn't looking for more quick hits. Completing articles is the hit in that context. Actually, I pump most of the articles into my head as audio, so I can do laundry or walk around or cook. That's when I get most of them read, plus books and such. Might be overengineered but it works for me. According to Pocket, I read over 8 million words last year. I'm actually thinking of pulling back a bit as there are dcreasing returns. Not sure how it counts words, as that seems like a lot, but there's also a ton I read that isn't in Pocket.
  • saltedshiv 8y ago
    What are you using to convert articles to audio? Is that a feature of the pocket app?
    • hemantgoyal 8y ago
      Yes. Pocket does that. I used to do the same, but recently I have been using OneTab - another chrome extension. I can always open it later when I want to read them. Give it a try :)
• mrlyc 8y ago
  For my dopamine hits, I prefer Reddit (frat party) to Hacker News (church).
• gkya 8y ago
  I have three news/link sources: HN/Reddit, RSS feeds, email newsletters. I browse stuff on HN/Reddit, speed read stories if I ever go past the comments (I'm mostly here for the comments, which are almost always more interesting than the story). Sometimes it's really interesting, then I read most or the entirety of the article. Same with my RSS feeds. I filter and find the stuff I wan't to actually read, most of the items are either irrelevant or it's enough to read the title and maybe skim the article. Same story with the newsletters (which, except a couple ones, I prefer to be posting at most a couple times a week). I find and filter stuff from these sources, then either I read them immediately (seldom), then possibly bookmark; or they linger as tabs before they are read or go into a reading list. Basically, I read the stuff asynchronously. If sth. is really interesting, I skim or read it; otherwise it gets shoved into a reading list. If it's important enough, I return to it. I also schedule a "lists review" task every seven days in my agenda, so I sometimes go through my lists to find interesting stuff. This way, I'm aware of many interesting stuff and events/news; but I'm not procrastinating away buried in articles or caught in wiki-walking (unless I want to, that is).
• mabynogy 8y ago
  Why should you read the whole page? Some people think they should always read a book until the end. Same for a movie. If you don't read the whole article, it's probably because it's not so interesting.
• jumper_F00BA2 8y ago
  No. That's not how human behavior works. The "dopamine-fix/pleasure-addiction" concept is deeply flawed, and serves only as Pop Culture's mental crutch, occupying place where an explanation for a deeper problem belongs. It's hand-wavey, unverifiable magic that fits in broadly with anyone's self image, without contaminating the circumstances by laying blame or guilt at the feet of the individual. The truth is that many of us have a lot of down time, and we don't know what to do with ourselves. We don't know what to do with ourselves, because so many other optional behaviors have been rationalized away from us, and removed from any normal equation. If you were reading a book or knitting a sweater or mowing the lawn, your behavior would similarly directed into yet another pointless passtime, gifted with a deceptive sense of seeming purpose. But the cause-and-effect relationship interacting with electronic media, while intellectually occupying, suffers from effects that evaporate as soon as you pull the plug or as soon as the battery dies. This leaves a gaping feeling of wasted time, as soon as the power goes out, when there's no more electricity. So, what if we turn our attention to activities where we can cause some sort of effect, which has no basis in electronic systems demonstrating evidence of the effect we have? Surpise! 99% of what you're legally permitted to do is essentially pointless time wasting, where you spin your wheels until you die unfulfilled, only to pass a world of questions to the next generation, with no answers to match. One might say that our society, our culture is hollow, empty and meaningless, but with enough of a deconstructivist outlook, everything starts to look like that. When you take things apart (a bicycle for example), disassembling recognizable objects or concepts to their fundamental building blocks (handle bars, pedals, chain, wheels), often this destroys something beyond recognition, only to leave one with a feeling of regret at the loss of the thing they once knew. With advanced technology, we've disassembled fundamental aspects of human civilization, at a pace where the people who have lived through previous decades, now must cope with a near total reorganization of typical modes of behavior, while also raising the next generation, without having many answers for what comes next. On both sides of this equation, this feels like a near total loss of control. And for some, it actually is. Gee, what to do with all this spare time you have on your hands, now that communication is near effortless, crosses the globe in an instant, discounting inflated prices built to accomodate a previously well-understood overhead cost, of staying organized in a world where staying on the same page with someone hundreds of miles away used to require carefully concerted planning? Beats me, partner. Just don't hurt anybody. The times, they are a'changin'. Maybe knit a sweater?
• CM30 8y ago
  You're not the only one. For many people here (myself included), Hacker News is basically Reddit for tech/startups, a list of list of random links to scan when you're bored for two minutes on a commute/lunch break.
• smittywerben 8y ago
  HN is my final frontier of premature optimization.
• solarkraft 8y ago
  It's even worse with me. I check the site a lot, skim the article (on an interesting headline) and go right to the comments on here because I often find the discussions fun to read.
• amorphous 8y ago
  You are drinking from the water hose. Do this long enough and your ability to concentrate will atrophy, it is a muscle that needs regular exercise. The first step is to understand what you are doing to your brain. Try this: instead of merely skimming articles, make it mandatory to summarize everything you read in a few sentences. You'll very soon figure out that most what you read does not really interest you. Understanding requires work and deeper motivation to do so.
• xaedes 8y ago
  When reading a lot of those articles and papers you learn how to skim faster and more precise. For example the authors message is often found in the end. You learn when passages of text start where a lot of fancy words are used to tell a story and vivid images, these can be skipped through faster when looking for concepts and ideas. But can be important to put together the collected pieces (concepts,ideas) and give it a context. I sometimes think a kind of text structure "syntax highlighter" would be interesting to learn to spot the structure. The comments on-page and on hackernews are also part of the article for me and often the most interesting things can be found there. When you learn something new your brain tries to connect it to your world view/model, like a puzzle piece. Over time you put more and more pieces you have more and more docking points and so it gets easier with time to take in something new. Because you can easier relate it something you already know. But so does increase the things you could learn, yet you only have limited time. Yea that is kinda annoying, I also wish I would have the time to learn and master it all. But there is only so much time and an infinite sea of things to explore.. But hey, it is fun while it lasts so why worry? Just continue with the quest for knowledge and understanding and have fun while doing it!
• taf2 8y ago
  Just use it to pass/kill time when traveling, waiting for kids, waiting in hospitals, or passing time while relieving myself - besides that it’s great place to stay current.
• badgerlion 8y ago
  Using it right now for the rush. I quit reddit, like it’s on my block list, but HNews seems wholesome enough so I’ve kept it. The problem is the dopamine rush
• ghrifter 8y ago
  I love /r/pcj. It's my only news source. But I'm finding that more often than not, I'm not taking the time to `fully` read the comment sections. I spend most of my time identifying interesting posts, reading the OP, skimming a bit, looking for the pcj memes, getting some quick brain stimulation and the moving on to the next post. I want to focus and read the whole comment section but I feel like I'm using /r/pcj as a brain stimulating dopamine hit instead. I find myself overwhelmed the sheer number of satirical masterpieces. Most of these comments are written by sheer experts in their fields. How does one spend the time to learn it all? I wish I could get a PhD in everything. Anyone else have this feeling/problem? How do you deal with it?
• danusa123 8y ago
  I use it as my dopamine hit just like mtn dew. Dan https://dansawesomestore.com/ https://dansawesomestore.com/