As an honest question, how well does this apply to Hackernews? I know that BBC News is bad for my health and does nothing for my career. Holistically I'm not sure about hn.
To be brutally honest, a lot of the negativity on HN probably isn't the best influence on your mental health. It's a trade-off between that and career benefits.
The problem with hacker news and social media in general is that "real" news is targeting it for clicks and views. Bloomberg, nytimes, washingtonpost and almost everyone else have social media teams dedicated to spreading their articles on social media. If anyone else was doing it, we'd call it spam.
Even worse, hackernews gives these organizations favorable treatment and privileges where they can get away with it. Can you imagine what would happen if foxnews spammed HN everyday?
The only saving grace for HN is that HN is so small that it is an afterthought for these spammers. The real problem is in reddit, facebook, twitter or larger social media. That's why those platforms are so toxic. It's overrun with news media employees and spammed content.
>That's why those platforms are so toxic. It's overrun with news media employees and spammed content.
4Chan isn't exactly overrun with spammers and it's the same toxic cespool that Reddit is (granted Reddit has better manners and at least pretends to emulate civil conversation). I don't think the news sites spamming their articles is more than a minor contributing factor.
HN is so dour and moody at times, many positive articles' top comment is someone expressing cynicism or dragging creators down. Jokes and levity are mostly banned (though looking at reddit I can understand why). The insightful/thoughtful conversations you can have are good, but the atmosphere is not the best 9/10 times.
On HN, generally avoid reading the comments. Some very interesting things occasionally come up in the comments, true, but its just not worth the time sink and the effect on your psyche to dig through the dross and find them. Let this be the last HN comment you ever read...
