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I don't use it at all. Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it? I include HN in there. The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit u

I don't use it at all. Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it? I include HN in there. The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit used to be up there but a lot less now because I don't get recommended anything good. They really upped their reliance on the "algorithm" so after I clicked a "drama" link once my recommendations got destroyed with trash.) HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Youtube is either very high value content or very low value content. No in between. Sometimes I find myself getting recommended garbage and I click into it and get mind trapped for a few minutes but catch myself and get myself out of it. I don't want to have to navigate these "dopamine traps" every time I want to watch an interesting lecture or video on a topic I actually care about. edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless but I still click in a semi autonomous way.

throwaway71271 3y ago
I actually block all social media besides youtube on my pi-hole, and I unblock it manually for 5 minutes when I want to consume some hn/twitter.
Roark66 3y ago
I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram. Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section. Points aren't even shown next to the nickname so people are more or less equal in comments. Personally I don't have "friends/followers" on this site nor I seek them (which seems the main drive on sites like facebook/Instagram/twitter). Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)
- dingnuts 3y ago
  >I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me. >Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix. >I don't see many negatives of sites like HN Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back. I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.
- satysin 3y ago
  I don't include HN as 'social media' either mostly because it doesn't constantly ping me when I get a reply. I have to check manually. It also don't change much so checking it once or twice a day for ten minutes isn't a big deal. I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment. Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.
- Kiro 3y ago
  Nothing gives me more anxiety than HN so I personally think it's much worse.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
masfuerte 3y ago
You don't have to visit the youtube website. People recommend videos here and I sometimes use a search engine to find them. To watch them I use youtube-dl or VLC. It's marginally less convenient but I avoid a world of nonsense.
- FreshStart 3y ago
  Addon: Whitelisted because found up voted on HN
  - rfmc 3y ago
    can you link it? The only relevant searches are related to adblock whitelisting.
__loam 3y ago
HN is high value content surrounded by delusional and unempathetic tech bros.
sieabahlpark 3y ago
[dead]
marktangotango 3y ago
Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. There seems to be a pattern. Like I've been researching hardware designs for real time image processing lately. Over time the same search terms reveal more and more relevant links. Overall youtube search is completely useless. And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet). One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".
- Roark66 3y ago
  >Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.
  - asaddhamani 3y ago
    You might like Kagi in that case. I've not really used them, but they have a lot of customisation options and they charge for their product.
  - alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
    Kagi does not have regex but it does have some basic booleans, wildcard, and most important, exact word searching that actually has an effect: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html#search-operators-1 https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html#se... (Not affiliated with them except as a very happy customer.)
  - jezzamon 3y ago
    I was surprised to hear that the minus was meaningless, but turns out that no, it does still work
    - 3y ago
throw1234651234 3y ago
Someone explained magazines to me a decade ago as discovering stuff you don't know you don't know about. That's the value of HN. I also find that keeping up with the news on the regular basis is a waste of time and it's mostly regurgitations of the same, but when I tried cutting it completely, I find that in a couple of months I am completely out of the loop and it takes quite some time to catch up. This is not a useful example, but it's a funny one. I was out of the country and away from tech for 3 months and when I opened my door on returning to the US, the delivery guy was a teenager, and says "Man, you have so many good Pokemon in your yard!". I had NO idea what he was talking about and said "Oh, cool". Found out Pokemon Go was a thing a few weeks later.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 3y ago
  At least reading the headlines of news is important for chatting in social situations.
  - bavell 3y ago
    Perhaps in the sense that now you're misinformed together, rather than being uninformed.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
re: Reddit A lot of the main subs you see on the homepage are not explicitly political subs, but they end up having almost nothing but political content (/r/whitepeopletwitter, /r/facepalm, /r/therewasanattempt) and Reddit seems to ignore me when I block subreddits. So, even though I WAS a reddit addict for 10 years, they changed the formula and now I'm just not hooked anymore. Thanks Reddit!
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  Reddit and the subs themselves may not be explicitly political, but the site leans incredibly heavily to one side and seemingly can not shut up about politics for even a moment. I honestly think it might be one of the most toxic, worst for your mental health social media sites that exists.
- ChrisRR 3y ago
  Not just politics, exclusively american politics.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  The one I got recommended once (despite not being subscribed) was AITA. Which is cheap (and I'm certain 99% fake) reality tv content. I clicked it once and now that's it, that's all I get.
  - ChrisRR 3y ago
    So much of reddit is such obvious ragebait that I'm surprised so many people fall for it Half of the posts are "My friend said I should murder this guy but I said no, AITA?"
  - kodt 3y ago
    Yeah, it is really terrible. Any sub with user submitted drama stories were terrible. Many are fake or ragebait, or at the least extremely one sided accounts meant to garner sympathy. You click on one and it starts feeding you more. The comment sections are really terrible in those subs as well, there is no reasoned discussion going on.
quaintdev 3y ago
I have added RSS feeds of limited channels to my miniflux instance and I browse youtube from there.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  That is the most sane way to consume YouTube content. I’m doing the same on reeder. I have all the channels I care about in a folder and that’s it. Only thing that bothers me is that the RSS feed has both videos and shorts mixed together and I really dislike shorts.
malfist 3y ago
I agree, in addition, it's recommendation engine has rapidly devolved into "suggest only the most popular books in this genre" type recommendations. Say, if I want to read grimdark fantasy novels, and I've already read all of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Larwence books and didn't like Glenn Cook, good luck getting anything else out of the algorithms. There's no discovery, just regurgitation of whatever has been blessed by the masses. And that's when things aren't manipulated. Take any popular category and it's all gamified. Someone is manipulating the most recent book to the top of the "best of all times" list, even recent self published crap gets into the top recommendations for popular categories. It's all manipulated garbage and Amazon doesn't seem to have any interest in changing it since it gets them sells or Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for that self publisher. I've fallen back on critics and awards to curate my read lists. It's not as specific, but looking back on what I've enjoyed reading most recently, almost all of them have been awarded a hugo award. So now I just go through the award winner lists and pick something that looks interesting. I recently discovered the Imperial Radch series this way and really enjoyed it.
voisin 3y ago
> HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Wonder how we could make it more effective. I’d love a keyword filter. Or an algorithm I can train myself to teach it what I like and don’t like. ChatGPT summaries of the comments to filter the wheat from the chaff would be helpful too.
- esperent 3y ago
  I've been thinking of this for a while - something like an advanced keyword filter that would work across most webpages, using a smaller LLM maybe? Personally I'd love to put in the names of some American cult of personality figures - Musk, Trump, the Kardashians etc. Ideally it would filter out all posts and comment trees on HN or reddit that are about these people and a handful of other topics. Even if it only worked on those two sites it would be a huge improvement to the internet for me.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  HN works well because the top stories are same the top stories for everyone. Having the #1 story be unique and algorithm-driven for every user would be detrimental to the site and the sense of community.
  - voisin 3y ago
    In what sense would it be detrimental? If the top news for the day is a new Google product, and I don’t care about Google, why would it be detrimental to anyone if I didn’t see that? I think you are conflating externally driven, top down algorithms, with users expressing their own preferences over what they see.
    - listenallyall 3y ago
      I disagree, HN is like a broadsheet newspaper, it encourages a sense of discovery and often learning that things you didn't initially have an interest in, can be interesting or perhaps a parallel to something with which you are engaged. Further, no personal preferences means the site isn't expected to be tailored to you specifically, this promotes a certain sense of deference where people are exposed to lots of ideas, concepts, industries, experiences and viewpoints -- nobody is an "expert" here and on any particular day, there may be multiple things for you to weigh in on, or none, and that's ok. Along with fair, objective moderation, the discussions here are mostly well-behaved, non-partisan and civil, which all the sites you can personally customize fail to achieve.
dspillett 3y ago
> edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless I don't much care for the upvotes (nor the occasional down) but the responses are not always worthless. In fact a count of responses (in total or since last visit) would be more useful to me in the top right of the page where the vote count currently sits. Someone might be correcting or refining what I've said in a way the I'll find useful, or someone could be asking for clarity on what I've said which, assuming I have time to respond back, might be useful to others too, or might highlight that I'm not as sure as I thought I was originally which again may help my understanding. This isn't true elsewhere of course, HN is one of the few places online, other than private groups, where responses have a reasonable chance of being useful.
vlunkr 3y ago
> Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it? Is it though? Don't you think maybe the billion of social media users around the world are getting some value out of it? It's a pretty shallow take.
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
  I do agree that "social media is uniformly bad" is too broad a stroke. That said, humans aren't exactly the best at discriminating something that feels good from being unhealthy or at least unproductive.
  - vlunkr 3y ago
    Yeah I agree. It's easy to list some negatives of social media (doomscrolling, bullying, building unrealistic expectations for your life), but the simple ability to connect many people all over the world is pretty hard to argue against. Social media companies push shallow, easy to digest content, but that doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of meaningful interactions happening every day.
- ChrisRR 3y ago
  "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that"
- brigadier132 3y ago
  Yeah, the same way people get value out of gambling.

throwaway71271 3y ago

I actually block all social media besides youtube on my pi-hole, and I unblock it manually for 5 minutes when I want to consume some hn/twitter.

Roark66 3y ago

I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram. Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section. Points aren't even shown next to the nickname so people are more or less equal in comments. Personally I don't have "friends/followers" on this site nor I seek them (which seems the main drive on sites like facebook/Instagram/twitter). Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)

dingnuts 3y ago
>I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me. >Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix. >I don't see many negatives of sites like HN Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back. I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.
satysin 3y ago
I don't include HN as 'social media' either mostly because it doesn't constantly ping me when I get a reply. I have to check manually. It also don't change much so checking it once or twice a day for ten minutes isn't a big deal. I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment. Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.
Kiro 3y ago
Nothing gives me more anxiety than HN so I personally think it's much worse.
nonameiguess 3y ago

masfuerte 3y ago

You don't have to visit the youtube website. People recommend videos here and I sometimes use a search engine to find them. To watch them I use youtube-dl or VLC. It's marginally less convenient but I avoid a world of nonsense.

FreshStart 3y ago
Addon: Whitelisted because found up voted on HN
- rfmc 3y ago
  can you link it? The only relevant searches are related to adblock whitelisting.

__loam 3y ago

HN is high value content surrounded by delusional and unempathetic tech bros.

sieabahlpark 3y ago

[dead]

marktangotango 3y ago

Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. There seems to be a pattern. Like I've been researching hardware designs for real time image processing lately. Over time the same search terms reveal more and more relevant links. Overall youtube search is completely useless. And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet). One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".

Roark66 3y ago
>Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.
- asaddhamani 3y ago
  You might like Kagi in that case. I've not really used them, but they have a lot of customisation options and they charge for their product.
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
  Kagi does not have regex but it does have some basic booleans, wildcard, and most important, exact word searching that actually has an effect: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html#search-operators-1 https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/search-operators.html#se... (Not affiliated with them except as a very happy customer.)
- jezzamon 3y ago
  I was surprised to hear that the minus was meaningless, but turns out that no, it does still work
  - 3y ago

throw1234651234 3y ago

Someone explained magazines to me a decade ago as discovering stuff you don't know you don't know about. That's the value of HN. I also find that keeping up with the news on the regular basis is a waste of time and it's mostly regurgitations of the same, but when I tried cutting it completely, I find that in a couple of months I am completely out of the loop and it takes quite some time to catch up. This is not a useful example, but it's a funny one. I was out of the country and away from tech for 3 months and when I opened my door on returning to the US, the delivery guy was a teenager, and says "Man, you have so many good Pokemon in your yard!". I had NO idea what he was talking about and said "Oh, cool". Found out Pokemon Go was a thing a few weeks later.

DwnVoteHoneyPot 3y ago
At least reading the headlines of news is important for chatting in social situations.
- bavell 3y ago
  Perhaps in the sense that now you're misinformed together, rather than being uninformed.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

re: Reddit A lot of the main subs you see on the homepage are not explicitly political subs, but they end up having almost nothing but political content (/r/whitepeopletwitter, /r/facepalm, /r/therewasanattempt) and Reddit seems to ignore me when I block subreddits. So, even though I WAS a reddit addict for 10 years, they changed the formula and now I'm just not hooked anymore. Thanks Reddit!

BizarreByte 3y ago
Reddit and the subs themselves may not be explicitly political, but the site leans incredibly heavily to one side and seemingly can not shut up about politics for even a moment. I honestly think it might be one of the most toxic, worst for your mental health social media sites that exists.
ChrisRR 3y ago
Not just politics, exclusively american politics.
brigadier132 3y ago
The one I got recommended once (despite not being subscribed) was AITA. Which is cheap (and I'm certain 99% fake) reality tv content. I clicked it once and now that's it, that's all I get.
- ChrisRR 3y ago
  So much of reddit is such obvious ragebait that I'm surprised so many people fall for it Half of the posts are "My friend said I should murder this guy but I said no, AITA?"
- kodt 3y ago
  Yeah, it is really terrible. Any sub with user submitted drama stories were terrible. Many are fake or ragebait, or at the least extremely one sided accounts meant to garner sympathy. You click on one and it starts feeding you more. The comment sections are really terrible in those subs as well, there is no reasoned discussion going on.

quaintdev 3y ago

I have added RSS feeds of limited channels to my miniflux instance and I browse youtube from there.

manuelmoreale 3y ago
That is the most sane way to consume YouTube content. I’m doing the same on reeder. I have all the channels I care about in a folder and that’s it. Only thing that bothers me is that the RSS feed has both videos and shorts mixed together and I really dislike shorts.

malfist 3y ago

I agree, in addition, it's recommendation engine has rapidly devolved into "suggest only the most popular books in this genre" type recommendations. Say, if I want to read grimdark fantasy novels, and I've already read all of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Larwence books and didn't like Glenn Cook, good luck getting anything else out of the algorithms. There's no discovery, just regurgitation of whatever has been blessed by the masses. And that's when things aren't manipulated. Take any popular category and it's all gamified. Someone is manipulating the most recent book to the top of the "best of all times" list, even recent self published crap gets into the top recommendations for popular categories. It's all manipulated garbage and Amazon doesn't seem to have any interest in changing it since it gets them sells or Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for that self publisher. I've fallen back on critics and awards to curate my read lists. It's not as specific, but looking back on what I've enjoyed reading most recently, almost all of them have been awarded a hugo award. So now I just go through the award winner lists and pick something that looks interesting. I recently discovered the Imperial Radch series this way and really enjoyed it.

voisin 3y ago

> HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Wonder how we could make it more effective. I’d love a keyword filter. Or an algorithm I can train myself to teach it what I like and don’t like. ChatGPT summaries of the comments to filter the wheat from the chaff would be helpful too.

esperent 3y ago
I've been thinking of this for a while - something like an advanced keyword filter that would work across most webpages, using a smaller LLM maybe? Personally I'd love to put in the names of some American cult of personality figures - Musk, Trump, the Kardashians etc. Ideally it would filter out all posts and comment trees on HN or reddit that are about these people and a handful of other topics. Even if it only worked on those two sites it would be a huge improvement to the internet for me.
listenallyall 3y ago
HN works well because the top stories are same the top stories for everyone. Having the #1 story be unique and algorithm-driven for every user would be detrimental to the site and the sense of community.
- voisin 3y ago
  In what sense would it be detrimental? If the top news for the day is a new Google product, and I don’t care about Google, why would it be detrimental to anyone if I didn’t see that? I think you are conflating externally driven, top down algorithms, with users expressing their own preferences over what they see.
  - listenallyall 3y ago
    I disagree, HN is like a broadsheet newspaper, it encourages a sense of discovery and often learning that things you didn't initially have an interest in, can be interesting or perhaps a parallel to something with which you are engaged. Further, no personal preferences means the site isn't expected to be tailored to you specifically, this promotes a certain sense of deference where people are exposed to lots of ideas, concepts, industries, experiences and viewpoints -- nobody is an "expert" here and on any particular day, there may be multiple things for you to weigh in on, or none, and that's ok. Along with fair, objective moderation, the discussions here are mostly well-behaved, non-partisan and civil, which all the sites you can personally customize fail to achieve.

dspillett 3y ago

> edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless I don't much care for the upvotes (nor the occasional down) but the responses are not always worthless. In fact a count of responses (in total or since last visit) would be more useful to me in the top right of the page where the vote count currently sits. Someone might be correcting or refining what I've said in a way the I'll find useful, or someone could be asking for clarity on what I've said which, assuming I have time to respond back, might be useful to others too, or might highlight that I'm not as sure as I thought I was originally which again may help my understanding. This isn't true elsewhere of course, HN is one of the few places online, other than private groups, where responses have a reasonable chance of being useful.

vlunkr 3y ago

> Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it? Is it though? Don't you think maybe the billion of social media users around the world are getting some value out of it? It's a pretty shallow take.

alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
I do agree that "social media is uniformly bad" is too broad a stroke. That said, humans aren't exactly the best at discriminating something that feels good from being unhealthy or at least unproductive.
- vlunkr 3y ago
  Yeah I agree. It's easy to list some negatives of social media (doomscrolling, bullying, building unrealistic expectations for your life), but the simple ability to connect many people all over the world is pretty hard to argue against. Social media companies push shallow, easy to digest content, but that doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of meaningful interactions happening every day.
ChrisRR 3y ago
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that"
brigadier132 3y ago
Yeah, the same way people get value out of gambling.