Definitely cheating and I’m not the GP, but I would argue HN is curated enough to filter out most guilty pleasure outrage news cycles. Still in the same realm though.
For example, the Twitter hack has made its rounds here but, say, Kanye having a political meltdown hasn’t necessarily (or at least I haven’t seen it) despite it being a prominent trend on Twitter.
I'm going to be blunt here and say that you're wrong. There is no difference. The news may be curated and may be for a specific audience but the odds that it's just as useless to you as mainstream news is still very high. I don't say this to criticize, mind you. I'm here as well.
Perfectly fine — I’m only arguing for the sake of discussion. When I have gone on no-information binges, I included HN in them. Over time, I realized HN upsets (upsets may not be the right word — maybe mentally clouds or distracts?) me a considerable amount less. The links I look at are informative and inspire creativity; the discussions push me towards explaining my thoughts carefully rather than resorting to status games, false sense of superiority, and mob rule. HN is news, and as such, it is addicting and sometimes does upset me depending on the subject matter and how many people take on views that oppose mine, but I still think it’s an order of magnitude less so than things like Twitter.
I have read HN every morning for the last ten years, and I think for the first 5 years of my HN life I felt a huge rush when _something_ new came out. That could be a new "groundbreaking" app, JS library, Mac distro etc.
About 5 years ago it just started to fade.. probably as I started to click less on the new JS libraries etc, and more on the obscure interesting learnings (but also could be due to the content that makes the front page.
Every once and a while I jump on, look at a few links, read a few articles, and feel a bit disappointed that I don't have my rush anymore... I think its healthier, less addictive, but what happened to my good ol' junkie-hit days? :)
I started with slashdot, it was ok until I realized I couldn’t comment and have anyone reply. I went to Reddit when it started but I never found a community. Maybe b/c HN became that community.. kind of. I actually have an earlier account I abandoned because I had been so addicted. But HN has similar slashdot issues and other issues too. I never took to digg.. did anyone? Twitter for me is a new thing but it has similar issues... no engagement. And anywhere I am expert or have a contribution I get downvoted. That’s weird. Kinda like how people feel if they’ve been profiled in the newspaper. Some of it is right but specific details and nuance are wrong. I can see why people feel it’s fake news in some sense. But that’s the nature of the fame.
I’m actually glad the engagement is minimal. It helps me disengage. It feels like a FPS game against all the youngsters.
The moral of the story is to never read the comments. So what does that really mean? It means, be the article, not a comment.
I find myself doing that as well. To my taste, the discussion is much more valuable than the article. In fact, for most cases, I see the article as simply a prompt for discussion with very little valuable insight found in the article itself.
HN has the word “news” in its name, but I think that’s where most of the similarities end.
Looking at the front page right now, I count maybe 4 items that are attempts at journalism. The rest are interesting subjects resurrected from 6+ years ago, tech guides, user-submitted questions/content, etc. The ones that seem like news items don’t really pertain to today’s hot news, they’re press releases from NASA etc.
HN is a discussion board, and the topics are almost always relevant to my career and interests. I mostly read the comments though. HN informs discussions I have with people at work and tech-related decisions in and out of work. I think it’s worthwhile.
For me, HN counts too. Yes, the quality is different compared to classical news pages, but I think it serves the same desire to find something new.
From my perspective, giving in to this desire is part of the problem. When I start my day consuming content, the whole day becomes a lot less productive (concentrating becomes very hard). But if I start the day engaging my brain in a concentrated mode, the first few hours become very productive.
So my solution for avoiding to constantly visit HN in the search for something new, is that I have a new tab page in my browser, that lists, the top 3 HN news from the best list, if I haven't read them already. That way I fight the fear of missing out.
Maybe I should add that it always shows an empty list for the first 12 hours of the day ;-)
I would say that an important distinction is that there are enough interesting articles posted in here which are not news related that make it worth while. But obviously I am biased here.
