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As a counter point, I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit. In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). Twitter absolutely does wonders for st

by city41 6y ago

As a counter point, I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit. In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). Twitter absolutely does wonders for staying on top of tech trends (especially TweetDeck), and has shown me lots of tools, libraries, techniques, etc that have made my software endeavors much more successful. I do agree with you overall though. I have a virtual desktop dedicated to social sites, and a separate desktop for work, and I keep myself always aware of what "mode" I am in. Facebook is utterly useless, I deleted my account years ago.

Cyph0n 6y ago
> In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). For me, it's the exact opposite. In the case of Reddit, you can filter it down to only subreddits you are interested in, which increases the signal-to-noise ratio significantly. Twitter would be the first thing I would get rid of tbh. It encourages shallow retorts and memes more than anything else. The only thing I still get from it is news, but Reddit gives you that with potentially interesting discussions on top.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  I don't really participate in it, but Reddit's the only place I can easily find opinions about products that're maybe not paid shilling, now that smaller sites and forums are practically un-Googleable unless you already know their names—i.e. they won't come up for a search for anything general that they write about or discuss, unless you include their name, and even then it's iffy. Actually that's also true for a lot of things that aren't exactly products. If I want to know about a vacation spot but I don't want blogspam shill bullshit then I'll probably head to Reddit. I do a lot of "reddit [thing I want to know about]" in DDG, just to kick the Reddit results to the top over all the webspam. Not "!reddit [thing I want to know about]" because Reddit's internal site search is, like most, worse than DDG or Google.
justaguyhere 6y ago
I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit Are these learnings useful in your daily life and career? I too have learned a bit from these sites but I really do not know if that knowledge is useful in practice. Sure one can argue that our ability to think and connect things improve, any knowledge is useful etc and there is some truth to it. But at what cost though? Looking at the amount of time I spent on Reddit over the years, anything I might have learned seems miniscule. ROI is so low.
- city41 6y ago
  I would say they are for me. Reddit has really upped my vim and TypeScript games for example. Twitter is much smaller bites but still lots of useful stuff IMO.
keenmaster 6y ago
The virtual desktop idea is really interesting. How did you implement it/which tools did you use?
- city41 6y ago
  I use i3 on Linux. But MacOS now has native virtual desktops and I think Windows does too.

by city41 6y ago

Cyph0n 6y ago

> In that order too (ie, Reddit is the least useful). For me, it's the exact opposite. In the case of Reddit, you can filter it down to only subreddits you are interested in, which increases the signal-to-noise ratio significantly. Twitter would be the first thing I would get rid of tbh. It encourages shallow retorts and memes more than anything else. The only thing I still get from it is news, but Reddit gives you that with potentially interesting discussions on top.

spanhandler 6y ago
I don't really participate in it, but Reddit's the only place I can easily find opinions about products that're maybe not paid shilling, now that smaller sites and forums are practically un-Googleable unless you already know their names—i.e. they won't come up for a search for anything general that they write about or discuss, unless you include their name, and even then it's iffy. Actually that's also true for a lot of things that aren't exactly products. If I want to know about a vacation spot but I don't want blogspam shill bullshit then I'll probably head to Reddit. I do a lot of "reddit [thing I want to know about]" in DDG, just to kick the Reddit results to the top over all the webspam. Not "!reddit [thing I want to know about]" because Reddit's internal site search is, like most, worse than DDG or Google.

justaguyhere 6y ago

I find I learn a lot from Twitter, HN and Reddit Are these learnings useful in your daily life and career? I too have learned a bit from these sites but I really do not know if that knowledge is useful in practice. Sure one can argue that our ability to think and connect things improve, any knowledge is useful etc and there is some truth to it. But at what cost though? Looking at the amount of time I spent on Reddit over the years, anything I might have learned seems miniscule. ROI is so low.

city41 6y ago
I would say they are for me. Reddit has really upped my vim and TypeScript games for example. Twitter is much smaller bites but still lots of useful stuff IMO.

keenmaster 6y ago

The virtual desktop idea is really interesting. How did you implement it/which tools did you use?

city41 6y ago
I use i3 on Linux. But MacOS now has native virtual desktops and I think Windows does too.