Stumbled upon the post — Optimizing My Hacker News Experience — and it put me into this toxic state of being overly smart and sarcastic.
Long time ago, very long time ago, I tweeted something like ‘my best todo app is meditating daily’ and that’s this type of a sudden thought I created this website for in this first place. I don’t believe anyone would ever even notice this piece of wisdom … but, well, I wrote it for myself, after all.
The idea is, I tried them all — all the possible todo apps, I could find by that point, Android, iOS, web, macOS, anything (expect fucking Windows, obviously) — my idea was, they solve the wrong problem. They appear to be solving the problem, but if they would, they would quickly become unnecessary.
The real solution to this overwhelmed with things to do situation is … surprise, being less busy.
That’s achieved by making priorities. When you have clear well-defined obvious priorities, you can decline some tasks right away. To be truly productive, there’s only one way of doing that, is to say no to most tasks.
I developed my own solution to this ‘overwhelmed with things to do’ problem, which works for me.
And I don’t care if there’s nobody else among the entire planet, who’d find it useful too. But my bet this system is going to work for huge number of people, once they got its basic idea.
I’d write about that some other time, but in a nutshell, I just write about things I’m going to do, privately for myself. And if I did something, I publish it for everyone.
Hey, look at this cool thing I did!
or
Hey, I did this, and it was bad idea, but here is my takeaways from this experience.
Works wonders.
Apart from that, if there’s something you want to do badly, you won’t forget.
- If something is very important, you won’t miss it.
- If it’s something minuscule, and you need it only once, but you need it badly — like some document to have while on a flight, or other similar things — a text file might work wonders.
A millionaire friend of mine uses some
asdfaddsaa.txton his Windows 😱 Desktop (meaning virtual desktop) folder, and it works super well for him.
All todo apps are a distraction. Even if you yourself wrote a todo app for yourself and yourself only.
Why HN FOMO?
Because I’m addicted to that shitty website too. In a negative way.
Ah, wait. You might not read the article I linked in the very beginning. Because if you read, you shouldn’t have. I forgot to mention that. But you do you.
The author invented some sophisticated solution to a non-problem. For me, there’s no issue I am not able to catch up with Hacker News. To me, it’s a pathetic website filled with pathetic folks helping some smart folks to nurture their cult-like status among some … well, how to place it, niche community.
YCominator, they’re just people with money, who’d like to make more money with the money they have already. There’s some idealistic vibe of ‘we’re changing the world’ [making it a better place], but whether you’re buying it or not is totally up to you. I’m buying it, but with a grain of salt. I believe we can change the world for the better, but we here are the hackers, not investors. The problem here is that those of us who are not investors (yet) may not understand the world (yet).
Hence, if you’re young and naive, are you really capable of changing the world, huh?
And once you’re young and naive no longer, would you have your motivation to commit to the change?
So, that was my partial answer to why the website is shitty.
I’m going to ignore how pathetic its technical realisation. They might be ashamed of it, but my guess they’re deliberately leaving it as it is, so other hackers would have their itch to make something better. (And fail. Because when you have money, you can do whatever mediocrity you can come up with, and people will use it.)
Despite being deliberately mediocre, the site works okay-ish on a mobile. Actually, it looks and works even worse on a laptop. So I cannot relate to author’s problem.
In case you didn’t read the article, which I hope, the author is having the issue with opening this website from their laptop, while making breaks at their work. Because they open a lot of links and never read them, and they accumulate … well, which is just another problem to deal with, but they do not realise it at this point.
And they solved this problem by making a Telegram bot, which will spam them with these links instead.
That’s sweet.
My solution to this problem — spending too much time with hacker news — is actually doing nothing. Except engaging with the community, because once I start, the community is quick to remind me I shouldn’t. I even got banned by this dang (that’s the name of the account, ironic, I know) censor for calling a Russian a Russian. Literally, he spewed ‘you cannot slur here’ on me. Fucking hypocrite.
I tried some fancy Android apps for reading through the website. And boy, they’re good! There are some masterpieces on F-Droid. I won’t write names only because I gave up on my Android once again, and simply don’t remember.
The thing is, if someone is mediocre, you don’t deal with them, if you not into mediocrity yourself. I’m not, and so issuing a different front-end didn’t help. The community is just shitty, and some jewels in the comments sometimes, they don’t justify it. Hence, there’s no point in making it prettier and user-friendlier.
It’s irrelevant to meditate upon the whys. I think the community became too big, and the sheer size with very poor and very biased moderation contributes a lot here.
To me it’s a fact, the community is shitty and worth no my attention.
Still, I’m wasting my time there, time and again. Why?
Oh why! That’s the correct why to ask! Eventually.
I’m wasting my time there because I need to fucking read something, especially when I’m stressed and/or exhausted. That the reaction to stress.
I’m having this addiction to at least some news. I’m living in the country at war, and not just that, I’m living in the country that was (and still very much is) attacked by its barbarian neighbour!
If you ask me ‘who’ right now, I swear! That the reaction to stress.
The fact I’m not doom scrolling my fucking iPhone all day long is actually a very much an achievement of its own!
I’m not reading news, and I’m not watching TV. I’m not distancing from the war either. I’m just trying to stay functional amidst all this stress, and I’m still aware of what’s happening. Mostly thanks to BBC World News in the mornings. (They shot it at evenings, but why watch it then?)
I’ve tried Twitter. It’s much better. (It was. It’s a piece of propaganda and misinformation shit since Elon Muscovite bought it.) These days Twitter means not X perversion from Elona, but rather BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, or whatever else you might prefer. Essentially they’re all the same. I love this public chat format, but there’s a price tag: it’ll suck up all your attention. That’s pretty expensive, trust me.
Facebook is just something I wasn’t ever addicted to, and Zuck looks like a zook indeed.
Oh, isn’t that a word? Weird.
I don’t follow any news sites, because, again, they take too much of my attention. I’d know all the main things regardless. They’re impossible to miss anyway. Unless you’re an infantile mommy’s little programmer.
I don’t read any of the popular resources. They’re attention whores. All of them. Even BBC with their so-called ‘standards’ they themselves do not follow.
Probably that’s the fate of any media. Or even any blogger. I know it first-hand. That’s why I created a huge number of resources, to not mass spam just one of them, and filter out the information better.
I don’t have many tabs opened. Most times it’s less than 10. Oftentimes, it’s just one to three. And since I deployed my links project, it’s getting even easier to throw away a link there. I’m not going back to 99% of those links. I did searched a link or two there. But all the others, yeah, let them just rot there.
So, there’s not much FOMO for me these days. My issue lies in a very different place: I need to develop some tactics, some skill or trick, towards this itch to read something somewhere. Hackers News fills this niche, partially. At the price of being irritated. But this irritation does not allow me to spend my time there.
I’m reading the shit mostly when I’m sitting and shitting, you know.
And by hackernewsing, I’m not doomscrolling some other resource. I’ve replaced them all with HN. All I need to do now, is to find some other community to replace this ycombinator’s imitation.
Most of the communities are at risk of consuming my attention much more than the one I have little respect for. So that’s a more complicated task, I’d say. Theoretically, multiple communities would solve this more gracefully. I’m yet to test it.
At this point in life, I like lobsters more.
By the way, did you know they call HN an orange site? I think it’s funny, considering they have this funny orange stupido at the White House.
I think I’m done here now. I just wish the original poster to realise one day that this attempt of theirs, while being clever and interesting, does not solve the bigger problem. The site visit itself.