
HN is my new Facebook - herve76
I find myself not checking my Facebook feed as often as before. Instead I check the HN feed more and more everyday. Am I alone? Between VR, AI, Cryptos, etc, I love the technologies of today&#x27;s world. Very exciting time ahead. Thanks HN.
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pssst
This is my first post so here it goes:

I'm a 30 yo self-taught programmer from Romania and I've found this page a
couple of months ago... since then this is my point of entry to the WWW, this
is really adictive! :D

Great job maintining this!

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amorroxic
Been a HN user for 6+ years and after all these years HN is still pretty much
the only feed I check on a daily basis. (not on Facebook so my example may not
be very relevant)

The thing I love about the experience can be summed up as: \- no click bait
headlines \- no endless "engagement", notifications, round navigation and
noise (incredible quality of content curation) \- amazing community (comments
are often more insightful than the source)

Basically there comes a moment when you're up to date - reading done - and can
carry on with life afterwards.

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lproven
Beware of echo-chambers.

[http://n-gate.com/](http://n-gate.com/)

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Mz
_Hackernews takes this claim seriously, and has opinions about it._

Delicious irony. Someone "hates" HN enough to spend all their time here and
then write a send up of it every freakin week. It does not even appear to be
monetized.

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notadoc
I stopped using Facebook years ago and the quality of my life improved
notably, I would highly recommend it based on my own experience. I personally
found it to be a huge waste of time, and also full of useless information that
amounts to brain pollution. Do you really care what an excoworker from an old
job ate for breakfast? Do you really want to know a grade school classmates
political opinions? Do you really want to see vacation photos of someone you
sort of once knew? How much time, energy, brain power, do you devote to any of
this? Does it give you any value in your life? Does it make you feel good? etc
etc etc

You might think "oh but I like it to stay in touch with people!" but eh...
pick up the phone and call someone, or send them a text message. Actually
communicate with the people you want to keep in touch with. Casually observing
what someone is doing via internet voyeurism is not staying in touch.

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marsRoverDev
This only works until it gets too popular. Reddit was pretty awesome back in
the day too, specifically because it had an HN-like crowd.

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kk_cz
reddit can be OK, you just have to invest time into finding subreddits
relevant for you and unsubscribe from the defaults.

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nicky0
Defaults no longer exist. (Hooray!)

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kk_cz
Do you just mean the changes to the front page, or do you actually get an
empty list of subscribed subreddits when you create new account? (too lazy to
create a throwaway :))

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nicky0
New accounts now start with zero subscribed reddits.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6eh6ga/reddi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6eh6ga/reddits_new_signup_experience/)

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arximboldi
It is also like Facebook for me. Indeed, these are two first lines of my
/etc/hosts and only comment them from time to time:

    
    
        127.0.0.1	news.ycombinator.com
        127.0.0.1	www.facebook.com

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matthberg
I find that it's a near perfect niche for news. It's slim and dead-simple:
there's one feed (two if you count new, then the subdivisions show and ask),
no following or friends, direct messaging is even excluded. It was built into
a niche, and it expanded to fill it perfectly.

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rahimnathwani
"no following or friends"

If you still use an RSS reader, you can follow a specific user's comments:

[https://hn.algolia.com/userfeed/rahimnathwani](https://hn.algolia.com/userfeed/rahimnathwani)

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COil
Same here. Facebook will just make you loose your time and fill your brain
with useless data.

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nicky0
I could say the same about HN...

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gorkonsine
I couldn't. There's plenty of actually interesting and useful articles cited
here, and then discussed (esp. if you're a programmer, but there's lots of
non-programming topics discussed as well).

I can't say the same for Facebook. At best, you'll see cat photos and videos,
which are OK, but not exactly intellectual, and I can get that stuff on
Reddit's /r/aww anyway. More likely, you'll see a bunch of insane alt-right-
wing "news" and memes and conspiracy theories passed around by your dumb
relatives.

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nicky0
There's a lot of potential for timewasting on procrastination on both HN and
Facebook.

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chippy
I'm thinking that both Facebook and Twitter has lost that early adopter,
frontier mindset that initially drew us to it. Reddit had it for a few years
but has lost it now and HS has some of it in a niche way.

I think that there's a huge space, a huge potential for a new social network
which we, early adopters, will jump in and love.

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slang800
Yeah, same here. Just don't start posting cat photos or what you ate today.

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TurboHaskal
edit: tried pasting grumpy cat ascii art. Didn't work.

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thatwebdude
It would be a lot better without karma.

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luord
Apples and oranges for me.

I use Facebook to keep up with friends and family. I use HN, among others, to
keep up with technology.

I see no reason for dropping one or the other, they don't even intersect for
me.

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parski
Pipe yourself to /dev/null.

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zabana
HN sounds very similar to the FFF forum in Gibson's pattern recognition novel.
And I mean it in a good way. Also, if it's not on Hacker News, then it's not
news.

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chippy
The FFF forum, to me, was similar to the Unfiction Forums - which was very
active at the time the book was released, and both dealt with mysteries and
puzzles of online phenomena - with found footage (for FFF) & Alternate Reality
Games (Unfiction).

ARG players knew they were playing a game, but there is also a game and
excitement about finding out whether an online mystery is actually a game or
not.

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manoj_venkat92
I think wherever there's sizable amount of devs, engineers & creators are in a
group. Things get pretty meta and discussions run deep in subject and quality.
Good to be on HN. May people post really good tech and exciting world
happenings and create a multicultural world-view among the users.

Like they say in Canada : "Peace Ooooot"

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dirtylowprofile
I just hope HN will have an official app in the near future.

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Inconel
Out of curiosity, what do you find lacking in the third party HN apps? I use
Materialistic on Android and find it to be pretty great.

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passivepinetree
Agreed. When I switched to iOS, I bought MiniHack (paid, but well worth it)
and I've been very satisfied.

In addition, it fits the HN ethos to only provide a dead simple website and an
API and let the community do the rest.

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companyhen
I've been getting into Crypto a lot lately.

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tnone
Strange, I'm absolutely jaded on the technologies of today's world. The web
and mobile phones have locked us into a shitty content consuming culture.
Almost nobody is writing real novel software, they're just gluing together
premade parts and managing the plumbing. I don't even blame them, the amount
of effort required to just get people to look at something that doesn't open
with 1 click is immense.

But shunting data in and out of sql databases and making REST APIs is not
novel tech work, it's just a very fragile way of describing and maintaining
policy. The tech sites of old had more interesting and novel implementations
in a handful of articles than passes through HN in a week, and it wasn't stuck
behind a SaaS wall either.

As for VR or AI, one is stuck in a rut of uninspired arcade shovelware and the
other is being used for terrifying totalitarian purposes. Welcome to cyberpunk
dystopia, population you.

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increment_i
My own feeling is that we're now smack dab in the middle of two tech hype
cycles, and yeah - it does seem kind of boring right now to be honest.

We've probably hit and passed peak web/app/social but the horizon technologies
seem still very immature, with relatively high barriers to experimentation.

I've found this is reflected in my own experience perusing HN. In the past I
found something on the first page almost every single day that blew my hair
back. Now I'm mostly like "Oh, some ancient civilization used scorpion venom
to make birthday cakes..." or "Oh, this React library hit version
8.5.2...guess I'll go...make a CRUD app now?"

I don't think my experience says anything about HN though - this community is
as good as ever. I'm probably just getting old. One thing I know for sure is
that there's a ton of opportunity out there for those with a prepared mind and
enthusiasm for technology.

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danielharrison
I find medium is my new FB.

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chinmayv
I use Block site plugin for chrome which redirects facebook to HN :D

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mrnutella
I don't have Facebook. All the cool people are on HN.

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fadolf
same here, opens automatically.

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allenleein
Same here.

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angersock
You...do realize that all the news articles are basically product and startup
propaganda, right?

Go read some n-gate to put things in perspective.

