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.
