It’s been three months, I didn’t use Hacker News daily and in this post, you will find my reasoning and also my experience during that process. I need to warn that this experimentation is not about getting rid of one of the influential social media/news outlet for a tech person.

I am not fan of the social media concept that is from 2010, mainly because 2010 was the time period of all these platforms started to evolve into something else, and therefore, affected the quality of the content in each platform. I want to give you a heads up that you will find this post as more like my personal experience and nothing more than that.

The community in Hacker News and Lobte.rs is definitely interesting and diverse that I can see different opinions in the comment section. I am ignoring comments that are politically supported or have strong opinions, but many of these people share their ideas, and I love to read them.

Not long time ago I started to look each link without thinking about the content. I want you to think this as you are scrolling in your social media feed without any further thinking involved. We might have a debate on this about how to consume social media feed, but it doesn’t match with my own knowledge consumption idealogy. That is the moment that I decided to reduce the usage amount of these sources.

As you can see, this is more like a habit issue rather than what HN community is made of. So, since the first day of the year, I limited the amount of HN take.

You might ask how I am doing or what are the alternative methods I have as replacement. I have been collecting RSS links for the past 8 years and I have enough that I had to built an RSS instance 4 years ago. Currently, I manage text content with Miniflux and podcasts with Antenapod.

I need to add that amount of content on my Miniflux is not enough and therefore I have podcast software on my phone, but I found that I actually don’t have time to listen a podcast in 1.75 speed. This is the reason why I am also using Hacker News’s Best list.

This list is a pretty good summary of the last 3 to 4 days and if I really want to go to further, I will see another 3-4 days. With this method I am still seeing interesting bloggers that I want to follow in the future, and thus, I add them to my Miniflux instance.

To sum up this experiment, the amount of tech news I am getting from these platforms and resources getting closer to 45 minutes daily Hacker News consumption; moreover, I hear these news/posts from the source. I need to notify you that I couldn’t find any alternatives to the HN discussion for the RSS feed.