There was a time that whenever I got in front of a computer and opened a web browser, my hands would start typing "slashdot.org" into the address bar and my eyes would watch for autocompletion so I could enter the address as soon as possible.

It was so automatic that when I was working on a new, not-at-all-internet-connected long-distance wireless IP network with the (quite apt) customer looking over my shoulder, well before the days of cheap or free phone hotspots and always-on pocket supercomputers, he laughed when he saw my hands start to type out slashdot and said: "Yeah, good luck with that."

After Slashdot, it was Reddit.

Now, it's mostly HN.

I've mostly avoided traps like MySpace, FB, and whatever LinkedIn has become. But it's all social media, and all of it always has been.

But HN is a little bit softer, I think. Whether it's design elements like the deliberately-quiet cooldown periods on serial comment replies, or the very apt and cordial moderation by dang and company, or some combination of that and everything else else: My compulsion to smash news.ycombinator.com into the address bar is not quite as intense as it was for Slashdot during its prime, or Reddit.

For me, HN is mostly just a place to learn about some new things that are going on in the world (with a focus on tech) and find healthy responses that help me to do better in my little version of that world. Sometimes, I get to teach some things, and I also occasionally vent about some things.

But sometimes, I get still find myself mired in responses from people who I feel are deliberately anti-helpful. This promotes involuntary responses in my brain chemistry that make me want to fight back as soon as I possibly can. I wish I could do better, and I wish that they would also do better.

But! So far, that's usually been pretty easy to shut down or redirect here on HN when it occurs, before it all gets Godwin'd all to hell and back.

(And before Slashdot, I used tin and an an ISP-provided news server. And before that, networked BBS systems; the whole of the 1990s were also rife with social media in my world. :) I even tried [and failed] once to implement an nntpcache box for a local ISP, to help them save on bandwidth and local storage.

Before all of that, it was the 1980s and I was a little kid.)