How do you deal with FOMO? I don't particularly care about Facebook/Instagram updates but RSS/HN/Twitter have been vital in my learning process. I learn something new every time I'm on these platforms. Personally, I think it's better to moderate your usage of these platforms than completely quitting them.
FOMO was probably the hardest thing to overcome before quitting twitter, after fear of losing my meagre number of followers. There are a few ways to look at this. First, consider the things you are happy to have not missed out on. Can you name them? Can you articulate what you got out of seeing them when they were brand new? Would seeing them a year or more later have changed what you got out of them?
One thing which helped a lot was realizing just how slow things really move. People post very interesting technical things every day, but those are usually the products of maybe a year of intensive offline effort. You don't fall behind by skipping reading those. You do fall behind by endlessly reading those and doing nothing with your own time. Four hours sitting with a textbook in your area of interest is worth more than a month's worth of twitter posts. As a corrolary, you needn't worry about falling behind in general - because of how slow things move, you'll always be able to catch up. It takes probably two orders of magnitude less effort to understand a concept than to research & come up with it in the first place.
As you develop an area of interest and talk with other practitioners, you'll naturally hear about interesting things eventually. The rest is just brain candy you wouldn't have cared about anyway.
You should question whether you really are getting valuable learning from these sources. For example, most product launches / company launches / open source project launches / arxiv research paper announcements / developer conference presentations / AI or ML demos / etc that end up on the frontpage of Hacker News are just noise / junk that gets a flare up of attention and never goes anywhere and doesn’t persist even 6 months later as a newsworthy topic or something someone needs to know to stay current.
The only thing I find unique to Hacker News is much higher quality analytical comments about politics, economics and tech industry labor issues. Almost everything else is in one ear out the other.
This is a good observation. I feel like I tell myself HN is a source of information... but it really is not. You might learn "the news" from HN, but you are not learning per-se. I would point back to another comment that reading will give you more learning. I think a fair number of us may have (temporarily) lost the ability to sit and read un-distracted. I know after about a mere 10 mins with a book in a quiet room, I get antsy.
I learned this very thoroughly one day when I came across an interesting article outside of HN. I immediately went to post it on HN only discover that not only had it already been posted, I had already upvoted it!
