Ask HN: Does reading HN make you happy?

The most shocking thing about HN is how polite and and reasonable the people on here are compared to the other places I visit on the web.

Reasonable good faith debates are not normal on the internet!

I guess we have the moderators to thank for this.

No, but unfortunately I'm addicted to dopamine hits and HN is the most "organic" one, compared to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, you get the idea. HN is the one makes me the least depressed.

Overall HN is the best community I have found so far People over here are generally very helpful and always up for offering their own perspectives/advice and that's one of the reason I love HN

Hi, yakattak. Like you, I also created my HN account in 2010.

Browsing HN stopped making me happy years ago.

Searching HN for individual comments that include jargon that is indicative of knowledge relating to my interests does make me happy. I search HN multiple times per day using a search shortcut that uses the following URL:

https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&sort=byDate&query=%s

Overall, HN is good.

Nowhere else really can you get that concentrated & large a place to weigh in on something and get (fairly) intelligent, (fairly) rapid, (fairly) reasonable, (fairly) fast feedback -- even if you don't agree with all of it.

Or, if you're not weighing in and getting responses, just to read the temperature on any discussion (of interest) and see reasonable views raised and discussed.

PG always said something like, if you want to see how silly some people are just read the bottom-ranked comments on HN.

Well maybe HN doesn't upvote the best. But hype gonna hype. It's the best we have AFAIK.

Partly agree. Most of the stuff posted here is either politics, or as you said, Pro/Anti AI.

Times change, indeed.

One thing a high school teacher told me and that I carry with me more and more nowadays is that you need to classify what you’re reading before you read it. Not everything is news. There’s always a mix of real information, FUD, and gossip. If you treat all of it the same, burnout is inevitable.

You need to train yourself to scan and decide which discussions are worth going into and which aren’t.

This applies to any kind of forum or group chat.

If I’m happy? I see HN less as a place for joy and more as a place to know what’s going on. It’s still useful. There’s a lot of BS mixed in, and that’s just part of the deal. It’s not a defining part of my happiness or my life, almost like a newspaper.

I just ignore the sloppy posts, be it AI or non-AI related.

hn: you can close the tab but you can never leave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BciS5krYL80&t=260s

I assumed your post was more generic and not specific about LLMs or AI.

Generally speaking, while the disucssions are 'better', they are not good. The comments themselves seldom add real value, discussions are not held with sources and if you start to have a discussion, the other person stops responding to your arguments.

Its 'fun' because i think i like to discuss but i have often than not the feeling i have to explain things

While you mentioned LLMs: I do think that simplifing what LLMs are to a statistical parrot, shows how little people on hn know about LLMs, at least the ones commenting on it and repeating this every time.

With the crypto garbage, i had plenty of people not responding to proper arguments from my side and it feels empty.

HN is seldom stress.

Make "show HN" your landing page get back the hacker spirit, maybe?

The majority of HN participants are now, not founders themselves. Founders have to focus on signal over noise. People who are not founders focus on... whatever.

I'm finding it frustrating. I want to block hackernews but a lot of good discussion in searches for tech end up here. So i'm not sure how to square that. I should probably just block it and then use an LLM to ask 'what would HN say?'

HN goes through hype cycles, I suppose. Remember when it was all about crypto and every conversation ended with "we could use blockchain" and we were all fed up? Remember when everyone was an Elon Musk fanboy and Tesla was going to save the world? I'm sure there are more, but that's just off the top of my head.

There's always going to be a prevailing zeitgeist, and that's always going to dominate people's focus.

But by and large, HN is the most intelligent, thoughtful community I've encountered, with people going out of their way to be kind and thorough in their replies, discussing things maturely, disincentivizing unhelpful and low-effort behavior. Not to mention the dizzying wealth of knowledge and experience the people here have.

Obviously it's not 100%. There are plenty of harsh people and attitudes. But there's a lot of good discussion happening here, and that's what I try to focus on. I can only hope one day to be as interesting/inspiring a member of the community as some of the people I've seen on here.

Yes, it genuinely does make me happy, every week I find several things that make me smarter.

Is the the only social network that is not enshittified or dominated by inane algorithmic slop.

The LLM arguments are boring but exist literally everywhere online discussing technology

No.

yes

I used to see posts that I disagreed with that I still upvoted because they made me think new things. That happened often - say, multiple times a week.

It's been a long time since I saw something like that. There's far more yelling, far more people who seem to be here not to think, not to discuss, but only to argue and push an agenda. Far more people that simply Will. Not. Listen. no matter how thoughtful a point is being made in reply.

HN lost something - something that was really sweet while it was here.

No. I don’t even know why I come here anymore. Mostly flagging and downvoting idiotic comments out of spite.

The real hackers have left long ago.

HN is full of pseudointellectuals who like to mask their bigotry under the strange guise of being "rational". So no, reading HN does not make me happy.

no - this is why we've decided to become a hive mind

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