
Ask HN: Why do you still use HN? - kirillzubovsky
Personally, I&#x27;ve deleted Instagram, curbed my Tweets, don&#x27;t use Facebook anymore, and trying my best not to be social on social, but Hacker News is one of the resources I can&#x27;t stop coming back to. I know I am not alone. Anecdotally, I&#x27;ve met many people who do the same.<p>I don&#x27;t know why though. What makes HN special? Is it the constant curation, the old-school design, the constantly updated front-page? I can&#x27;t figure it out.
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AnimalMuppet
You can have actual intelligent conversations with people who think. You can
read ideas that differ from your own, from people who can tell you why they
hold those ideas. The knowledge available here is remarkable. (I was doing
some research on some number-theory-type stuff. I asked a question here. A
Cambridge PhD gave me some pointers. Gave them to me, a random nobody on the
internet with a BS, no affiliation, and no academic work for the last 35
years.)

It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you get ideological wars. Sometimes
you get people who Just. Won't. Listen. - who are, on that topic anyway, just
going to argue their position to the end of the earth with scorched-earth
tactics. Sometimes people come here to do ideological battle rather than to
have an actual conversation. That happens here more often than I'd like. But
it's still better than anywhere else that I've found.

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xupybd
Yeah the mods here kill flame wars pretty quickly. At first I was put off by
it but HN has a really good community because of it.

You can have nuances in discussion here. I don't know of any other places
online where that is possible. It's also possible to have a civil
disagreement. It's a credit to the mods and community rules.

~~~
ed
Props to Dang, who is so active that I sometimes wonder if he’s an AI

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toomuchtodo
The quote goes, "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the
wrong room". HN is an enormous room where I'm confident I'll never be the
smartest person, ever, and that is invaluable for someone's curiosity. Every
day I get to converse with and learn from intelligent people (many of whom are
also as curious as I) I would've never had the privilege of interacting with
in person or another online forum.

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Antonov45
I'm an ordinary person from France. I don't work in IT but HN has helped me to
get a hard as steel general culture (sorry , I'm french, not a good english
speaker !).

1\. Top quality articles and research paper every day, in every domain of
science 2\. The real news, I mean, the news that matter 3\. Very informed
opinions in the comments.

HN is the top of the top of the web !

~~~
kirillzubovsky
Interesting, does it mean France doesn't have. its own version of HN-type
community, or it's just that HN covers the world, which makes it more
interesting?

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fudgefr
Both actually!

There is no HN type community in France (that I know of). And the openness and
international aspects of HN are incomparable

~~~
samcgraw
Interestingly enough, I just saw this the other day posted on HN:
[https://www.journalduhacker.net/](https://www.journalduhacker.net/)

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CM30
I use HN because it's the one place I can find a variety of intelligent
discussions on different topics that don't devolve in name calling, flame
wars, doxing, etc. The latter is why I only use Reddit for pop culture related
topics, since the political and cultural ones there devolve into absolute
hell. Same with their equivalents on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

At least on HN, you know that everything from a discussion on web design best
practices to a talk on the changing role of journalism in the modern world
will have some form of civility to it. And that the people involved will be at
least trying to have an intelligent conversation rather than fighting over red
team vs blue team tribal politics.

I also find it one of the few places online where I can find, how best to say
this, obscure/personal sites, articles and content written by people
knowledgeable or passionate about a topic. Links on Reddit are about 40%
mainstream media outlets, 50% YouTube/Twitch and 10% stuff from other sources.
The links on Hacker News are far more varied, and far more supportive towards
independent creators.

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ivan1783
The discussions on here are what keep me coming back. I often dont even read
the article, just jump into the discussion. Provides a lot of interesting
perspectives from people who clearly think and can articulate those thoughts.
As an aside: I am not IT but I do work in tech.

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photonios
I come here exclusively to read the comments and sometimes participate in
them. I often only end up clicking a link because I need more context to read
the comments.

The comments are often insightful and intelligent. Its interesting
conversation, from people with different backgrounds, different opinions etc.
As opposed to most other forums, HN is heavily moderated and the crowd it
draws helps. Sometimes I see a comment that looks out of place and an hour
later it is either down voted into oblivion or removed already.

I also use HN to pick technology. I search HN for threads relevant to the
technology I am thinking of using and read the comments to see what people
think. This helps me get a whole bunch of different opinions and thoughts that
I otherwise wouldn't have access to.

I also love the minimalist look of HN. If they'd change it, I'd be incredibly
upset. It's one of the last places on the internet that always loads in an
instant and doesn't distract me from the only thing that's important: the
content.

~~~
mkaic
I also rarely click through the links. Often the discussion of the headline
draws enough people asking interesting questions and giving interesting,
qualified answers that I learn far more from the discussions in the comments
than from the actual linked page!

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non-entity
Incredibly detailed and well written technical articles. I still have a very
well detailed description of the UEFI boot process saved on here that I need
to get through.

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gitgud
Surround yourself with people smarter than you. I'm not that smart though...
so it might not be a compliment...

It's simply discussion around links, and isn't dominated by competitive people
trying to get top comment like Reddit/Imgur is.

There's much more emphasis on innovation and technology, rather than cat
pictures. I think this rather serious and neutral nature of Hacker News is why
I keep returning

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rhoque
For the discussions under each article. It helps me see a lot of interesting
perspectives.

~~~
kirillzubovsky
Oh yeah, that's something I've started to spend a lot more time on now.
Sometimes the threads are hard to read/follow, but once in a while there are
such gems in the comments, it's definitely worth it.

~~~
jeremy_k
Sometimes the sheer number of comments is daunting too. Seeing some
discussions reach three, four, five, even six hundred comments is almost a
deterrent. I'll usually look at the first few top level threads to see if
anything interests me if not, I'll move on.

I also wonder how it's possible that big of a discussion is happening in the
middle of the day. I usually take a break from coding for 5 or 10 minutes, pop
over to HN, refresh and see if anything sparks my interest. Then I notice some
article has gone from 1XX to 3XX comments and am just like 'huh...'

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Fej
Perhaps due to its connections to business, some influential people hang
around HN. For example, once I got a response from the CEO of Namecheap (my
web host) in a thread related to their services. It was very informative and I
can't imagine getting that kind of interaction anywhere else.

You don't get that on places like reddit because the standard of discourse is
generally lower and it's not worth their time.

Also: the moderators are consistent, clear, professional, and easy to talk to.

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austincheney
> I don't know why though. What makes HN special?

Cry baby echo chamber is not the preferred normal behavior here. This is
exactly why I deleted my Reddit account (r/programming).

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uvw
I never got addicted to social media. I have Facebook, twitter, Instagram,
reddit, HN, digg etc etc, but I rarely if ever use it. Although I do read
reddit and HN regularly, I never felt a desire to delete it in order to curb
the usage. Haven't posted anything on Facebook in two years, on Instagram in
almost a year, on Twitter in 4 years.

~~~
kirillzubovsky
I use Twitter a fair bit to DM with people that I find interesting, on
Twitter, but lately it's become too much of a firehose of opinions, rarely
backed up by data or even sound logic. Now I try to use it only once a day, or
even a few days. So far, so good.

Instagram on the other hand, that got out of control quickly. I found myself
browsing through the feed and liking a lot of content, only to eventually
realize that what I really wanted to do was to BE in places that I was liking;
spending time on Instagram certainly wasn't going to get me there faster. That
was the point where I deleted it.

Suspending the account, deleting the app... none of that has worked for me
with Insta, there was always some pull to get back into it. Once I deleted the
account, some number of months ago, I haven't had the need to even think of
it.

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danielscrubs
It's the one forum where people seem to attack ideas not each other. :)

A lot of people that people can look up to are here too. Lots of famous
engineers, computer scientists professors, data scientists, you name it.

I wish there was something similar for business/economics.

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dmarlow
Because when I see an article about some obscure topic I'm interested in, but
know very little about, there's a high chance someone knows so much about that
topic and will make some outstanding post to add to the conversation.

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krgraver
I keep my social media accounts only as utilities with reddit the only
exception. I've found Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, and now HN to be awesome
communities of people smarter than me and actually building stuff. The world
needs more people building stuff.

