6 ms·

If you are commenting here, you haven't really quit "social media".

Shared404 6y ago
While I agree, I personally give HN a pass due to the fact that conversation is typically better here and the fact that it's technically focused.
- WA 6y ago
  It’s still a random search for new information, distraction, entertainment.
  - feanaro 6y ago
    Yes, but random search for information is not always a bad thing. There's a time for exploration.
    - WA 6y ago
      I agree. HN is net positive for me over the many years I’ve been around. But if you want to cut social media, you probably should include HN ;)
      - hacknrk 6y ago
        At some point I decided that abandoning social media as a whole would be a tremendous task because of years of being 'trained' by tech... Now I separate useful and useless social media. Shaping my perspective this way helps regulate my Internet use a lot.
  - lornemalvo 6y ago
    Isn't reading a book the same, by this definition? You could say that when picking up a book you do control the topic (while in social media it is others), but this is an illusion if you do not read that book for the second time.
  - rococode 6y ago
    I think if you're disciplined in your HN use - like, check the front page twice a day, not a few times an hour - then it's basically a community-curated newspaper. And while newspapers may not be particularly healthy, they're probably better than most social media. HN content tends to be longer-form which I feel is quite different from the typical infinite scrolling for quick dopamine hits on sites like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.
- serial_dev 6y ago
  HN is also in a strange category for me. The articles and the conversations are better quality than on any other social media with the added bonus that what I read is relevant for my daily job and career. At the same time, it's still distracting, I almost never finish an article and go straight to the comments, thinking "entertain me, comment section". I feel productive, but in reality, it's superficial knowledge, and spending time here is time I don't spend on actually working on my goals. In the end, it's all about balancing the pros and cons. For Facebook, Instagram, it's easy, I don't use them. For Twitter, I focus exclusively on tech so that I don't end up in a pointless yet vicious fight. For HN, it's spending 10 minutes on the top articles, keeping up with important industry news every second day.
  - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
    I feel the same way. I've spent countless hours in the last ~5 years on reading seemingly useful articles, and comment sections. I cannot pinpoint even one instance where anything helped me IRL. Something might've helped indirectly, but the connection is not clear.
    - theK 6y ago
      Does it need to be a "direct" benefit? I think sometimes the things we do out of our own volition shape ourselves not only directly but also indirectly. As a personal example, I have noticed how my way of discussing heated topics has changed based on discourse I have seen here. And this would not have happened if I didn't invest time similar to yourself.
      - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
        Yes in your case you identified a specific way to improve your communication skills by immersing yourself in the HN environment. This is a hit or miss though, because you either identify specific ways to improve or not, and you may or may not actually improve those identified skills by reading trough the comments (and not taking action). If improvement is the goal, then there are more efficient ways to eg. learn better ways to discuss heated topics (like reading a specific book on the topic, or attending a "Nonviolent Communication" workshop). The more I think about this the more HN only seems like a place to get a specific flavour of entertainment (which I personally like), but nothing more.
johnchristopher 6y ago
HN has no user/private profile bubble which is the distinctive feature of social networks in my opinion.
- INTPenis 6y ago
  HN has never sent me a notification.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Neither has Facebook, reddit or any other social media I use. That doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction.
    - INTPenis 6y ago
      Their whole model is built around getting people's attention by making them addicted to notifications. If you disable the notifications, that's good for you. But you're a small exceptional minority. HN afaik has no such feature at all.
      - raziel2p 6y ago
        How did you know that XorNot replied to your previous comment? Notifications, addictive design and gamification are really bad practices that we should try to avoid - but the underlying drug of social media is that someone noticed and reacted to your content, and HN provides that just like Facebook or Twitter.
        bonoboTP 6y ago
        Most people on here and Reddit are lurkers. They still keep coming back even though the see no tasty upvotes.
        tharkun__ 6y ago
        I think all three of you are actually hitting the nail on the head. Large headed nail I suppose ;) Take ne as an example. I could've had a really low user number on Slashdot if I had registered right away. I never actually did but I read Slashdot for many many many years. I turn off notifications on my phone for almost any app. It's just way too annoying. I'll get to it when I get to it! I guess I'm part of that minority mentioned above but as you say I do keep coming back too. It's not black and white but we can stay on the healthy side. If I try to find an analogy, it's the difference between sitting by the fire in the evening and chatting with other people vs. spending the entire day running around listening to and actively spreading rumors.
atoav 6y ago
HN to me at least is an place I actively go towards when I have the time and I want to. I don't believe in dogmatism, if you want to reduce the impact social media has on you, just reduce your usage. You don't have to become a recluse and you won't become a heretic for going to social media once in a while, if you make it a conscious choice. Just like that if you want to eat less meat because of the environment, just eat less meat. If you eat selected meat once in a while on selected occasions this won't make you a heretic, because you are still reaching your goal of reducing your impact on the environment etc. The people who say "if you want to reduce X you are a heretic if you don't abstain 100% from using X" are projecting their own lack of dicipline onto others — they feel they wouldn't have the discipline to do it, but also realise it would be good for them to have it. So they have to invent an excuse why this is a goal that cannot be reached, not worth reaching etc. Being a free thinking and acting person fundamentally means also to notice when you are manipulating yourself by making your thinking fit the image you already have of the world. I for example often fall into the trap of "if I can't do it perfectly it might not be worth doing at all", and because I know that, I try to work against it. So what your comment does here is undermining another people's effort to be in control of their social media environment. Why you deem such an act necessary should be something you should know yourself.
wpietri 6y ago
How helpful to have a person who knows nothing about my situation police my behaviors because of a vague congruence and an apparent desire to score internet points. No, for the purposes of what I'm doing, HN was not included in that. From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way. No personalized, UAM-optimized algorithmic feed, no infinite river of small content bites, no rich mechanisms for interaction. And, very importantly, it has the noprocrast feature, which I long ago set to low usage levels. And as others point out, it's not like I took some sort of vow of internet chastity to a god who will now smite me because I looked at HN. The point was to partially undo some bad habits that had built up during the election cycle. I'll often make some 1-month change at the beginning of the month. For me it's valuable mainly as self-experiment and a way of getting back to some baseline.
- gambiting 6y ago
  "From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way." I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. Every time I see my total Upvote count go up, I get excited and I rush to see who has agreed with me again. If it goes down I immediately get angry and defensive that someone is downvoting what I said. And surely, you participate in the same process, even if you don't feel as strongly about it - otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again? It might not have been designed this way but it's exactly what it is. And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.
randomsearch 6y ago
Who made you the judge? I don’t consider HN to be social media anymore than a discussion forum on gardening is social media. HN is not a SV startup selling ads spying on you manipulating your behaviour to sell crap or breaking democracy or depressing teenagers into suicide, it’s just not comparable and these false equivalences are just so tiring. Stop trying to bring other people down.
kodah 6y ago
People have tried to define what social media is. Rather than responding immediately I tried to think about what makes places like Facebook and Twitter so toxic. For some context I don't consider things like forums to be social media. As an early internet denizen I had lots of thoughtful discourse with folks that reminds me of what I experience at HN. I continue to use IRC, which I also don't consider to be social media. So what makes them different? I think it's the underlying technology. The graph, our ability to search it and correlate immediate (mostly irrelevant) commonality is what makes things dangerous. Humans are full of dumb or awful thoughts. They'll combat these ideas or thoughts with alternatives regularly which end up referring to as cognitive dissonance. The result is that these lesser ideas widdle away or drop off completely. On social media, the graph doesn't forget and continues to tie you to people, ideas, and thoughts that are increasingly useless. While this sells ads and generates interest in new products it doesn't align well to the way humans have discourse, socialize, or just relate in general. That to say, HN isn't social media to me.
suifbwish 6y ago
You are a dunce if you think anonymous comments on a page is social media in the same way Facebook or Twitter are.

While I agree, I personally give HN a pass due to the fact that conversation is typically better here and the fact that it's technically focused.

WA 6y ago
It’s still a random search for new information, distraction, entertainment.
- feanaro 6y ago
  Yes, but random search for information is not always a bad thing. There's a time for exploration.
  - WA 6y ago
    I agree. HN is net positive for me over the many years I’ve been around. But if you want to cut social media, you probably should include HN ;)
    - hacknrk 6y ago
      At some point I decided that abandoning social media as a whole would be a tremendous task because of years of being 'trained' by tech... Now I separate useful and useless social media. Shaping my perspective this way helps regulate my Internet use a lot.
- lornemalvo 6y ago
  Isn't reading a book the same, by this definition? You could say that when picking up a book you do control the topic (while in social media it is others), but this is an illusion if you do not read that book for the second time.
- rococode 6y ago
  I think if you're disciplined in your HN use - like, check the front page twice a day, not a few times an hour - then it's basically a community-curated newspaper. And while newspapers may not be particularly healthy, they're probably better than most social media. HN content tends to be longer-form which I feel is quite different from the typical infinite scrolling for quick dopamine hits on sites like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.
serial_dev 6y ago
HN is also in a strange category for me. The articles and the conversations are better quality than on any other social media with the added bonus that what I read is relevant for my daily job and career. At the same time, it's still distracting, I almost never finish an article and go straight to the comments, thinking "entertain me, comment section". I feel productive, but in reality, it's superficial knowledge, and spending time here is time I don't spend on actually working on my goals. In the end, it's all about balancing the pros and cons. For Facebook, Instagram, it's easy, I don't use them. For Twitter, I focus exclusively on tech so that I don't end up in a pointless yet vicious fight. For HN, it's spending 10 minutes on the top articles, keeping up with important industry news every second day.
- faeyanpiraat 6y ago
  I feel the same way. I've spent countless hours in the last ~5 years on reading seemingly useful articles, and comment sections. I cannot pinpoint even one instance where anything helped me IRL. Something might've helped indirectly, but the connection is not clear.
  - theK 6y ago
    Does it need to be a "direct" benefit? I think sometimes the things we do out of our own volition shape ourselves not only directly but also indirectly. As a personal example, I have noticed how my way of discussing heated topics has changed based on discourse I have seen here. And this would not have happened if I didn't invest time similar to yourself.
    - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
      Yes in your case you identified a specific way to improve your communication skills by immersing yourself in the HN environment. This is a hit or miss though, because you either identify specific ways to improve or not, and you may or may not actually improve those identified skills by reading trough the comments (and not taking action). If improvement is the goal, then there are more efficient ways to eg. learn better ways to discuss heated topics (like reading a specific book on the topic, or attending a "Nonviolent Communication" workshop). The more I think about this the more HN only seems like a place to get a specific flavour of entertainment (which I personally like), but nothing more.

johnchristopher 6y ago

HN has no user/private profile bubble which is the distinctive feature of social networks in my opinion.

INTPenis 6y ago
HN has never sent me a notification.
- XorNot 6y ago
  Neither has Facebook, reddit or any other social media I use. That doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction.
  - INTPenis 6y ago
    Their whole model is built around getting people's attention by making them addicted to notifications. If you disable the notifications, that's good for you. But you're a small exceptional minority. HN afaik has no such feature at all.
    - raziel2p 6y ago
      How did you know that XorNot replied to your previous comment? Notifications, addictive design and gamification are really bad practices that we should try to avoid - but the underlying drug of social media is that someone noticed and reacted to your content, and HN provides that just like Facebook or Twitter.
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        Most people on here and Reddit are lurkers. They still keep coming back even though the see no tasty upvotes.
        tharkun__ 6y ago
        I think all three of you are actually hitting the nail on the head. Large headed nail I suppose ;) Take ne as an example. I could've had a really low user number on Slashdot if I had registered right away. I never actually did but I read Slashdot for many many many years. I turn off notifications on my phone for almost any app. It's just way too annoying. I'll get to it when I get to it! I guess I'm part of that minority mentioned above but as you say I do keep coming back too. It's not black and white but we can stay on the healthy side. If I try to find an analogy, it's the difference between sitting by the fire in the evening and chatting with other people vs. spending the entire day running around listening to and actively spreading rumors.

atoav 6y ago

HN to me at least is an place I actively go towards when I have the time and I want to. I don't believe in dogmatism, if you want to reduce the impact social media has on you, just reduce your usage. You don't have to become a recluse and you won't become a heretic for going to social media once in a while, if you make it a conscious choice. Just like that if you want to eat less meat because of the environment, just eat less meat. If you eat selected meat once in a while on selected occasions this won't make you a heretic, because you are still reaching your goal of reducing your impact on the environment etc. The people who say "if you want to reduce X you are a heretic if you don't abstain 100% from using X" are projecting their own lack of dicipline onto others — they feel they wouldn't have the discipline to do it, but also realise it would be good for them to have it. So they have to invent an excuse why this is a goal that cannot be reached, not worth reaching etc. Being a free thinking and acting person fundamentally means also to notice when you are manipulating yourself by making your thinking fit the image you already have of the world. I for example often fall into the trap of "if I can't do it perfectly it might not be worth doing at all", and because I know that, I try to work against it. So what your comment does here is undermining another people's effort to be in control of their social media environment. Why you deem such an act necessary should be something you should know yourself.

wpietri 6y ago

How helpful to have a person who knows nothing about my situation police my behaviors because of a vague congruence and an apparent desire to score internet points. No, for the purposes of what I'm doing, HN was not included in that. From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way. No personalized, UAM-optimized algorithmic feed, no infinite river of small content bites, no rich mechanisms for interaction. And, very importantly, it has the noprocrast feature, which I long ago set to low usage levels. And as others point out, it's not like I took some sort of vow of internet chastity to a god who will now smite me because I looked at HN. The point was to partially undo some bad habits that had built up during the election cycle. I'll often make some 1-month change at the beginning of the month. For me it's valuable mainly as self-experiment and a way of getting back to some baseline.

gambiting 6y ago
"From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way." I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. Every time I see my total Upvote count go up, I get excited and I rush to see who has agreed with me again. If it goes down I immediately get angry and defensive that someone is downvoting what I said. And surely, you participate in the same process, even if you don't feel as strongly about it - otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again? It might not have been designed this way but it's exactly what it is. And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.

randomsearch 6y ago

Who made you the judge? I don’t consider HN to be social media anymore than a discussion forum on gardening is social media. HN is not a SV startup selling ads spying on you manipulating your behaviour to sell crap or breaking democracy or depressing teenagers into suicide, it’s just not comparable and these false equivalences are just so tiring. Stop trying to bring other people down.

kodah 6y ago

People have tried to define what social media is. Rather than responding immediately I tried to think about what makes places like Facebook and Twitter so toxic. For some context I don't consider things like forums to be social media. As an early internet denizen I had lots of thoughtful discourse with folks that reminds me of what I experience at HN. I continue to use IRC, which I also don't consider to be social media. So what makes them different? I think it's the underlying technology. The graph, our ability to search it and correlate immediate (mostly irrelevant) commonality is what makes things dangerous. Humans are full of dumb or awful thoughts. They'll combat these ideas or thoughts with alternatives regularly which end up referring to as cognitive dissonance. The result is that these lesser ideas widdle away or drop off completely. On social media, the graph doesn't forget and continues to tie you to people, ideas, and thoughts that are increasingly useless. While this sells ads and generates interest in new products it doesn't align well to the way humans have discourse, socialize, or just relate in general. That to say, HN isn't social media to me.

suifbwish 6y ago

You are a dunce if you think anonymous comments on a page is social media in the same way Facebook or Twitter are.