It's not that I don't read a great deal from a wide variety of sources, but that I reserve the small amount of free time I have per day for back-and-forth discussions (like this one) with groups of people I am fairly sure are not sock puppets. The amount of oversight that dang exercises on HN to ensure that frequent and verbose commenters are authentic people should not go without notice.

I have a theory that a good part of the filtering for authentic humans has already been done here, which gives me a higher level of confidence that I'm not metaphorically shouting into the void by conversing with somebody's LLM or social media influence apparatus.

I have moved back to my small hometown, from a large city.

My mental health improved significantly. I actually feel valuable at work. I feel pride in contributing to my local community. And the paycheck isn't actually worse.

Sounds just like gambling, honestly.

Which might be a winning strategy, but also might not be.