

Most Popular How-To Guides of 2012 - patrickk
http://lifehacker.com/5964782/most-popular-how+to-guides-of-2012?popular=true

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nickpp
Is anybody still able to follow Lifehacker? Their feed seems to be updated
hourly with every single irrelevant tech news of the moment.

I don't even know what "life hacker" means to them anymore...

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roldie
Agreed. Lifehacker's usefulness has diminished significantly over the past
couple years. Besides the articles, what made Lifehacker so great in the past
was its community of smart people willing to share great tips. Many of these
people have left, largely due to the horrible design changes pushed by Gawker.

~~~
patrickk
OP here. Agree completely.

The average article quality used to be great there, especially for niche
apps/programs, the "hive five" feature, and detailed how-to guides. There's
still some great content on there - like you can see in an aggregate article
like this one.

However, the average article quality has declined significantly. Once Gina
Trapiani left, I noticed a drop in quality. The awful, Gawker-pushed redesign
hurt too, probably turning away some of the more valuable members who
contributed great stuff in the comments like you noted. If lifehacker was an
independent entity (or even an autonomous one like Reddit within Conde Nast)
it could be fantastic. Not possible while Gawker is pushing it's media
properties to a race to the bottom in search of traffic though. Gizmodo has
gotten significantly worse too unfortunately.

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w1ntermute
Are there any sites that have risen to take its place? I think there's a lot
of value in a site that does the sort of blogging Lifehacker does, but in a
more concise and useful manner (like they used to).

~~~
roldie
I've seen some of the past top commenters on How-To Geek and Ars Technica
forums. But there's nothing that really replicates the old Lifehacker.
Reddit's LifeProTips might be good eventually, but there is a significant
amount of noise since it isn't curated like a blog.

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astar
Didn't expect that "How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's Password with Reaver" would
be the top guide for lifehackers readers [http://lifehacker.com/5873407/how-
to-crack-a-wi+fi-networks-...](http://lifehacker.com/5873407/how-to-crack-a-
wi+fi-networks-wpa-password-with-reaver)

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raju
I agree with other HN'ers that LifeHacker has lost a lot of it's appeal - they
post waaay too much. I have found myself doing two things

1\. Only go to lifehacker once every few days and quickly browse to see if
anything catches my eye.

2\. Rather than going to lifehacker.com (the new design is absolutely
atrocious) I go to blog.lifehacker.com which presents the stories in a
chronological order, which makes more sense to me.

With that said, this is (IMO) a completely useless collection of how-to
guides.

Edit: Formatting

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jbigelow76
I think the title of the link should be changed to: "Lifehacker's list of
EVERY How-To Guild from 2012"

~~~
ocean12
I came back to HN to post the exact same thing.

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Nux
Wow, lifehacker's site is actually usable now without Javascript. Good job!

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aes256
TL;DR: Snake oil productivity tips and security/privacy hysteria get page
views

