Forum Overview :: Rants :: The Sad Tale of Lifehacker

[quote name="skip"]Lifehacker is one of the few Gawker blogs that most people don't mind that much. Even if you hate Deadspin, Gizmodo, and Kotaku (as you should), Lifehacker gets left out most of the time. Most people have gone there and most of those people have found something useful at least once. And yet, without sucking as hard, it's become this beast of a website that undermines the things it's supposed to help you with. It's almost impossible to be a regular reader and still have enough time in the day to actually be productive. I'm not going to post links. A visit to their homepage at any given day will show all of these. 1. Overengineering productivity - I use Evernote, an RSS reader, Pocket and have used more Lifehacker favorites than I care to admit. For every site or app I found through them, there's 3 that were clearly completely worthless For every site I signed up for because I thought it might be a good idea, I've regretted about half. I now don't bother unless there's something that isn't clearly superior to what I'm already using. They're always pushing new todo managers or new ways to colorcode your tasks or some shit. It becomes procrastination in the name of efficiency. I fuck around with my workflow now and then, but Lifehacker seems to recommend weekly changes. It says volumes that when they interview people with actual jobs, none of them use more than one or two productivity apps to get their shit done. 2. Constant app updates - I use Android so couldn't care less about iOS updates. Too bad! That alarm clock app they like? You'll hear about every minor upgrade. 3. Dealhacker is usually not that great - Either the deals are crappy or they're for products that I'm not interested in. 4. Deal digest - Let's hear all about the iOS app updates and new programs (sleep tracker #485839) that you weren't interested in the first place AGAIN! 5. Waffling on privacy - Every now and then they'll talk about how Facebook is stealing all your data. Then they'll make 13 more posts within the next 48 hours about how to "hack" Facebook for a better experience. 6. Most of the hacks have become boring social media shit - I don't use Twitter enough to care about how to get the most out of hashtags. 7. Self-help posts - How do you get over anxiety or learn to be mindful? If you need those sort of posts, their advice won't help you anyway. Most of the site's issues center around Denton's philosophy of just constantly posting, regardless it it's worth posting. With a site like Lifehacker, it becomes borderline unusable. Even heavily weeded RSS feeds from there are just monsters to go through after not reading them for a few days. The best way to use it is to wait for one of their big summary posts, like the ones that tend to come out out at the end of the year, and skim them to see if there's anything worth looking into. [/quote]