Lifehacker is sucking my will to live

August 13, 2008 3:19 PM

I'm looking for suggestions for sites that do a better (explained inside) job at "tips and tricks for streamlining your life with computers" than Lifehacker.

By "better" I mean: few or no sponsor pimping posts ("Love or Money"), few or no regurgitations of their own posts ("Flashback"), infrequent create my content for me posts ("Ask the Readers").

I understand that a site like LH (and BoingBoing and many others) depend on cribbing much of their content from other sites. Essentially I'm looking for sites that are like Lifehacker, that a better job at being a filter and without the crap above.

I've had LH in my feed list for a long time, but in the last year or so it posting frequency has accelerated dramatically and brought a corresponding plummet in quality, which I can only attribute to a "must make daily post minimum or I'll get fired" mentality.

I had tried to filter the feed using their own capabilities, which worked for a while but eventually "Love and Money" posts started showing up again. I would be open to more or better filtering of LH itself, but I really want to see if I can kick them to the curb and switch to someone else.

posted by turbodog to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Have a look over at http://www.hackaday.com/. They offer lots of tips and tricks, and usually feature their own work. It can be quite technical, and is more hardware oriented then lifehacker, but a fun read.
posted by ShootTheMoon at 3:37 PM on August 13, 2008

First, you could probably make a feed with Yahoo Pipes that excludes the phrase "Love and Money" or "our advertisers" or something. Also, the once-a-week ads don't bother me but have you tried their filters?

If not, then try Life Remix, which is a collection of blogs, although they're not as computer-focused.
posted by acidic at 4:04 PM on August 13, 2008

Well, one way to kick the habit would be to come to accept the notion that you don't really need productivity advice, anyway. It sounds like you are partway there already. Instead of supplanting LH with something, why not drop it altogether?

(Long) Bias to follow: To me, Lifehacker is part of the Productivity App Cult, this great faddy thing that purports to give you "solutions" and techniques for micro-managing the information in your life. I used to think those kinds of sites were the cat's pajamas, until I realized that most, if not all of it is micro-management for micro-management's sake.

Assess what are the bare minimum of tools/methods are that you need to get to your short- and long-term goals, and definitely incorporate anything that saves you from doing monotonous drudgery. This kind of time-saving is one thing that computers are good at.

E.g., with the ubiquity of simple and effective things like Gmail, which is the same wherever you go, unless you have very specific needs, a special POP client with complex filtering and folder taxonomy is not necessary. Nor is it a deal breaker if the public terminal you're using doesn't have your favorite browser -- you don't really need to have it ready on a USB flash drive with all of your custom settings.

Anything beyond the essentials is probably superfluous -- I know that it seems intriguing at first to find a way to customize your desktop wallpaper to display simultaneous RSS feeds from the world's major newspapers and prints them over your network printer through an "ingenious" hotkey, but trust me, it's not worth it! There's a lot of intermingling of high-falutin' aesthetic concepts in productivity software these days, but this misses the main point of just wanting to get from point A to point B.

Personally, despite being technically savvy, I hate using the computer for more than a few moments, so I try to just extract the information I need and get onto the next thing. I like to think of it as a cost of operation thing: if it's costing me more time to fine-tune and customize my umpteen little to-do-list programs and sticky note popups than it is to get something out of them, then I don't embark down that road.

If you like to use tech stuff for its own sake (and there are a lot of people of this mindset), then disregard my suggestion; I think that many people ultimately intend to use their computers to accomplish things in their lives outside of technology, but end up getting bogged down in the process.

Maybe a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Lifehacker had more genuinely useful content that simplified your life and helped you Get Things Done (gulp, I've invoked the name of the Beast). but a quick perusal of the front page suggests that those days are gone...

An app to remind you to blink? Seriously? If one needs that kind of "life hacking," they are a lost cause!
posted by softsantear at 4:29 PM on August 13, 2008 [10 favorites]

Honestly? Google.

Now before you think I'm snarking, hear me out. Lifehacker used to be good, as you say. But now it's full of a lot of junk (hi Gina, if you're reading!). It seems to me that the tips and tricks are a lot less useful, and a lot more attention grabbing or ultimately facile. So whilst some of what Lifehacker proposes may certainly be cool, and induce a moment of "I need this in my life", it's certainly a lot less than it used to be.

So, instead of pasively receiving new things via LH, instead only look for a solution when you have a problem.

Wait for a need to arise, then Google it.

Comedy 'hi Gina!' aside, what do I think is missing from LH nowadays? The more technical nature. It also seems that standards of what constitutes a cool hack have slipped, and that there's actually not a lot of necessity for a lot of the stuff posted. And, as mentioned, the perpetual "Last year in LH" and "Best of this week" posts. As well as the 'Most Popular Stories' bit at the top.

/rant

posted by djgh at 7:25 PM on August 13, 2008

ShootTheMoon: Hack a day is one of a few LH feeder sites that I already read. Freeware genius is another that pops up pretty regularly.

acidic: Thanks for the site suggestion. I had already tried their own filter but now it appears to be "broken".

softsantear: you point out the kinds of posts that irk me as well. I guess I'm more into the technology/web posts than GTD, etc. Lest anyone suggest Gizmodo or Engadget, they got the ban hammer from me a long time ago.

djgh: I see your point, but I see RSS feed reading as purposefully and intentionally passive.
posted by turbodog at 10:36 PM on August 13, 2008

By "better" I mean: few or no sponsor pimping posts ("Love or Money"), few or no regurgitations of their own posts ("Flashback"), infrequent create my content for me posts ("Ask the Readers").

The lifehacker rss itself is very configurable although it does lead to some messy urls.

My current one (which still needs some tweaking) is:
http://lifehacker.com/not:linux/not:mac-os-x/not:mac/not:iphone/not:health/not:reader-poll/not:%5Bthis-is-good%5D/not:Most-Popular-Stories/not:hive-mind/not:hive-five-call-for-contenders/not:ask-the-readers/not:how-to/not:diy/not:announcements/index.xml

As you can imagine, the "not:blarg" bits filter out stuff by tag. So if you open up a "Love or Money" or "Flashback" or "Ask the Readers" post and see what tags are unique to those types of post, you can filter them out.
posted by juv3nal at 9:59 AM on August 14, 2008

Oh my bad. Should have read that it seems the filtering isn't working for you. Are you sure it's broken? I've seen some slip through just because the poster hasn't been conscientious enough in their tagging. There are a lot of redundant and overlapping tags (e.g.: "mac," "mac os x," "mac os x leopard," "mac tip," and "mac os x tip") and if you filter out one, it may be that something gets by because the poster chose to use another one.
posted by juv3nal at 12:42 PM on August 14, 2008

The problem with the feed that filters out all the items tagged "mac" (or any of the variants), is that it also eliminates stuff that is both Mac and Windows. Or any other OS. So you also have to subscribe separately to the feed for the tag you do want.
posted by timepiece at 12:02 PM on August 17, 2008

Huh. Looks like you're right. That's annoying.
posted by juv3nal at 2:12 PM on August 19, 2008