Hacker Newsletter

Nice to see an approach to reduce doomscrolling (for myself, and most of my bubble, the biggest addiction, impacting productivity, mental health, and neck).

Yet, there is Hacker Newsletter (https://hackernewsletter.com/, which I like and use), there are others pointed by GPT5 that I don't Mailbrew and Digest. Kagi looks like the true former.

What I do want is personalization - not by picking interest, but actual personality, prompt, tastes, good enough that it puts something other, rather than only narrowing and narrowing my view. Yet high quality, rather than clickbaits and other "fluff". Otherwise, following a few Reddits would do the job (with some API to send emails).

What I would like even more is something that actually turns my social media into daily emails.

I was on a similar situation until last month or so. I read this book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr which references a lot of research that consuming lots of internet modifies your neural paths and makes you more distractable and harder to do deeper thinking (such as reading books, etc). I’ve since removed hn from my browser favorites and get a curated list of articles each friday from [1]. I just came here today to skim some articles as i’ve worked all day in a house project and my body hurts so I have no energy for other things.

This house project, some other mini-projects that i’ve done and the 2/3 books I read since last month is something i can now do because now I avoid HN (and the whole internet) by default..

[1] https://hackernewsletter.com/

I think a lot has changed since Tim wrote that book, but a low-information diet is always wise to minimize distractions.

I find it hard to stop reading HN or getting news from my twitter feed. You can try the Hacker Newsletter for the first case: https://hackernewsletter.com/

For Twitter since it's mostly fluff, I just delete the app and restrain myself from touching the web at high demand times. Probably people do the same when they close facebook.

You could also leave your favorite sites in a bookmarks folder, then consult them all just once a week for an hour or so, on weekends or any downtime. A set, scheduled, timeboxed one of course.

I am on HN mainly for the comments.

The way I usually learn about interesting threads (which I mostly like to read after a while so they have enough comments) is the HackerNewsletter[0].

Also (shameless plug), I built AskHN Digest[1], a weekly recap of the top threads of AskHN with their top comments, to make sure I don't miss any good content from the section. Many times the comments there have been insightful and made it worth visiting the thread after a while, when most people had the chance to comment on it.

[0] https://hackernewsletter.com

[1] https://askhndigest.com

Edit: formatting

Yes, I only visit reddit when I have only have something curious about, I don't actively scroll through it, maybe a few minutes when I'm on it. That's healthy boundary.

As for Hacker News, there is https://hackernewsletter.com/ that sends you mail of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from Hacker News. Join 60,000+ other subscribers and don't miss another week.

They also offer daily mails, but I'd say avoid it.

I'm using http://hackernewsletter.com
Got weekly nicely formatted email with:
.. best of week favorites
.. best #ask hn
.. best #show hn
.. best #code
.. best #design

It allows to read me HN on weekly basis, not on daily, and also got to the comments sections (email provides both links to articles, and to HN discussions) after few 'days of curation'.

Highly recommended.

I'm not affiliated nor the author of the tool. just happy user.