Yeah, HN is such a double edged sword. Great technical discussions as well as time sucking passive aggressive discussions about "divisive social issues", which I cannot help but click.

Wrote this script today, that just stops me seeing submissions from sites I know won't have good technical discussions. Might be useful for others.

    const boringDomains = ["twitter.com", "newyorker.com", "nytimes.com"]

    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(".titleline > a"))
        .filter(elem => boringDomains.some(domain => elem.href.includes(domain)))
        .map(elem => elem.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement)
        .flatMap(elem => [
            elem,
            elem.nextElementSibling,
            elem.nextElementSibling.nextElementSibling]
        )
        .forEach(elem => elem.remove())

> I've ditched Reddit for HN because it contained a lot more worthwile content

I found that at least for myself, this was just a lie I kept telling myself. HN contains almost zero actionable content, and I've not been an epsilon better off for reading it. I come to see it as infotainment.

It varies... I'll often see mention of interesting/useful tools/sites/applications mentioned in more technical discussion. I don't always find these things immediately useful, but often even a year later if I can remember enough to search and find what I was looking for. Sometimes just knowing something exists in extremely useful.

For me the benefit is honestly just less content. There is only so much that makes it to the front page here and the lack of infinite scroll means I rarely see beyond it. It helps me waste a lot less time. But reddit was also a real problem for me. Way too many hours each day and I had to quit it.

Some HNers believe the site is superior to Reddit, if you compare it to the smaller and high quality subs, there isn't any difference.

there's been a few times where I read something that I was really glad I found out about through here, and probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. But yeah, easily >99% of it is just passing time

HN was my MBA back in 2010-2013, that’s where I learnt how to create a working startup. There were blogs like Kalzumeus or Joel On Software, people were still debating technical or business issues about startups.

Now it’s more a news aggregator. It’s my fault too, I don’t blog about the company I’ve created, and people can learn how to create proper startups in many places.

HN is great for discovery but 90%+ of the comments have declined to ChatGPT levels.

HN comments are less sarcastic, cynical, info-free than Reddit comments.

They can be, but not always. For example, any subject even tangentially related to Twitter or Musk summons a spate of low-brow, boilerplate comments.

I’ve discovered a bunch of neat libraries and projects through it.

> Probably "productive" distractions, since you can do them a lot more before feeling bad and going back to work. Especially if you can silently get into the "fun" territory.

I feel like this is the case for a lot of productivity tools; every once in a while I find myself browsing the status-quo of the next generation of todo apps that have had far too much design work spent on their website for what it does. 9 times out of 10 it's a grift to sell a $15 / month subscription for syncing across devices and its added value is tiny compared to just using a text editor, lol.

Have to admit, the change to Twitter in terms of personality the past few months has been as fun as Twitter around a decade ago... I mean, a lot more snark, memes and generally fun. Not perfect, but definitely more entertaining than when people were getting banned for parody accounts.

I made a resolution to just close my eyes instead of going on Reddit/HN. Went well for about 20 mins...

"oh I need to structurally modify these 20 lines, might as well craft a regex to do it"

30 minutes later... well got to keep my regex skills up to date else i'll lose them