I Quit Hacker News

Probably the worst part is the time-sink and the predictable nature of the comments. Most of the time I can tell from the title what all the comments are going to be like. Anybody that tries to swim against the stream, if only a little bit, can be mercilessly punished. In fact, it's somewhat of a game to see how even-handed I can make a thread -- human hacking. Which makes it even more of a time sink.

HN has changed for me from being a site where I can hang out with fellow hackers to being a site where people I like hang out and spend too much of their time. I'm trying very hard not to make the same mistake. Hopefully I won't be joining Matt. (Lunch is over. Back to work)

That Matt's blog post made the front page is a case in point.

The time sink factor is also obvious. However, I tend to swing back and forth between very productive and not very productive. When I am in a coding mood I rarely browse HN or comment and instead I hack like crazy for hours every day. When I am burned out or feeling like I need a break from chasing some bug I'll stop by here and read.

So the time sink aspect is doable for me at least. No one can work constantly, without any breaks, and maintain their sanity.

I disagree with HNers(mostly because I offered radical opinions) all the time. Sometime I get downvoted, sometime I got lot of points. There will alway be assholes who downvote people for simply disagreeing but they're outweighed by people who vote me up for adding to the conversation.

That's too bad, because you can.

Stop worrying about your karma.

I don't know. Do you monitor the 'new' page at all? The SNR there is certainly worse, but I do come across submissions I enjoy far more than practically anything on the front page these days. I realise that submission quality is subjective; I guess the community's average opinion on this has diverged far enough from mine that the front page isn't doing it for me anymore. Due to the low SNR (and rate of change) on the 'new' page, consuming HN via it is even more time consuming than normal.

I do catch myself idly looking through front page discussions and even commenting, but there is zero intellectual value in it most of the time. At least I don't upvote the stories.

/classic is slightly better on the surface. (currently 6 upvoted stories by me vs 3 on the frontpage) Unfortunately, submissions seem to hang around there for longer than on the frontpage, so it's like a distilled version of the front page's top 60 into 30, not a truly different set.

Naturally the reverse is also true and you can't help but not want either number to fall. In my case at least these feelings are involuntary, despite the fact that I know these are pretty much worthless numbers. (Except for the fact that karma average does effect the weight of your votes.)