Your Daily Scroller
Your daily scroller is the website you read when you're on the toilet or getting ready for bed.
It's that go-to URL your fingers type without thinking, the place you visit during those in-between moments of life. And here's the thing - I'd argue it's actually one of the most important websites you'll ever visit. Why? Because you're there every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, absorbing content whether you realize it or not. That daily scroller shapes how you think, what you learn, and honestly, who you become.
My own daily scroller journey has been a wild ride. Started with Facebook back when photo uploading was the hot new feature and relationship statuses actually mattered (middle school drama, anyone?). But I got tired of the constant social comparison game - obsessing over what friends were doing, who was dating who. So at 14, I made a weird choice: I switched to Hacker News. Yeah, while my classmates were on Instagram, I was reading about startups and computer science concepts on the toilet. Looking back, it might've been the best decision I ever made. Instead of consuming mindless content, I was learning something new every day - electrical engineering concepts, the early days of Bitcoin, AI before it was cool. That daily habit of learning shaped my entire career trajectory.
After college, I moved to Silicon Valley and got sucked into Twitter - it was where all the VCs hung out, where you learned about the hype culture of tech investing. For a while, it was great. But lately? Twitter's become this toxic mix of:
Rage bait designed to piss you off
Right-wing TikTok wannabe content
Thirst traps (because apparently that's allowed now?)
The app being broken half the time
So I'm back to Hacker News, and honestly, it feels like coming home. Yeah, it went through a toxic phase where everyone was cynical about everything, but it's mellowed out. Now it's back to being this tiny corner of the internet - probably less than 100,000 daily users - but they're the right 100,000. These are the people building the future, debating ideas that matter, sharing genuinely interesting stuff. Yesterday I read about a paraglider video that went viral but turned out to be AI-generated. The day before, a deep dive into some obscure computer science concept. This is the content diet I want.
I'm experimenting with adding Substack to the mix, but it's not quite there yet. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't as good - it almost needs Reddit-style voting to surface the best stuff. But here's my point: your daily scroller matters. Those 30 minutes a day add up to 182 hours a year. That's over a week of your life annually. You can spend that time doom-scrolling through rage bait and thirst traps, or you can spend it learning, growing, and engaging with ideas that actually matter. Choose wisely - your future self will thank you.