Ask HN: Do you mostly browse to catch up or just for entertainment?

4 points by darengb 13 years ago | 3 comments

I have about 6-8 sites that I always need to be fully caught up on. I'll check them a few times a day, and while I don't need to read every article, I need to at least look at the headline of every article up to the last one where I left off so I know I'm caught up. I'm working on a solution to this problem (skim.me, but I don't want it to distract from the question), but we're not sure how many other people browse this way. Are you concerned with catching up on specific sources, or would you'd rather just have content recommended to you and don't care if you missed any updates from any one specific source, so long as you see stuff that's interesting? Do you browse to catch up, or for entertainment?

antidoh 13 years ago |

Hacker News recommends content to me. It's the only site that I look at every day. I don't worry if I haven't seen every HN headline, the site just isn't good for keeping up and the only way to win that game is to not play.

Once in awhile I'll look at a more news oriented site, like news.google or rarely my region's newspaper's site.

So yeah, I like having things recommended to me, and I like the way HN does that for me.

mburst 13 years ago |

I like to skim the titles as well up to a certain point. It's always nice to know what's going and on and to try and learn new things. Makes for a good conversation starter if anything. If I miss a few days it's no big deal though. I won't try to go back and read all the content. I like content recommended to me to an extent. The upvoting and downvoting kind of takes care of that but I'm sure I miss some good articles.

darengb 13 years ago |

Thanks guys. I wonder how many people look at stuff mainly for conversation reasons, as mburst was saying. Like, would you rather have stuff recommended based on popularity so you know what to talk about with people, or based on personalization tailored specifically to you?