[closeparen]

FWIW, Facebook and messaging have not hijacked my mind anywhere near as thoroughly as HN and Reddit have. It's always fascinating to see such moral outrage about addictive internet companies on these far more addictive platforms.

What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time. To its credit, HN at least provides noprocrast.

[losteric]

> What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time.

This is exactly what I do.

I wrote a system that reads from multiple RSS feeds and screen scrapes non-rss sources into RSS feeds. Every article goes through some basic tagging before being indexed in a personal Elasticsearch instance and archived on-disk (my "personal Google").

Every morning I get an email with content filtered based on tags, prioritized based on my interests and upvotes (where applicable), and coarsely aggregated by theme (mostly for politics). I limit myself to 30 minutes of reading for each update, forcing myself to conscientiously prioritize. I occasionally click to the HN comments, but avoid Reddit like the plague.

Actionable articles get added to OmniFocus, but only if I will take action. Informative articles get added to Evernote, but only if I will reference them in the future.

It's imperfect, but still scratches that cave-man itch to constantly check the environment for new signals - I trust my software to do so on my behalf. Funneling content into action-items and references keeps me otherwise focused on doing things instead of reading things.

(I also abandoned Facebook/Twitter/etc because their mix of news/entertainment/communication was addictive - all I need is communication)

[rayuela]

This sounds pretty great actually. Do you have this up on github or anywhere I might be able to grab this from you?

[losteric]

Not yet, but I'm actively working on it... my employer's FOSS policy is that all personal projects must receive corporate sign-off before they published.

[silentguy]

Care to post here once it is ready. Many people would benefit from this kind of setup. I was thinking of having this setup for myself too.

[losteric]

Absolutely. HN doesn't have direct messaging, so just keep an eye out I guess :)

[zamber]

Please notify me too if your "Show HN" doesn't pass 150 upvotes ;).

[vaughngh]

I am interested in this as well! Let us know if it's ever released publicly :)

[losteric]

I will! I wish HN had direct messages for this kind of thing..

[grwthckrmstr]

I would absolutely love to use such a system for myself as well! Upvote

[0x445442]

This sounds absolutely fantastic. I've been thinking about similar workflows for years but I've been thinking about it more from the UI end; distilling as much information I deal with on a daily bases into a common UI paradigm like a feed or just email.

[mercer]

I've actually been wondering if it might not be a good idea for HN to be time-delayed in some way.

I've noticed that with hot-topic issues (like the Google memo), there's usually a flurry of divisive, and in my opinion uninformed and low-quality discussion over multiple submission, followed by (somewhat) more informed and reasonable discussion when the initial outrage dies down.

I wouldn't know what the best way to implement this would be, though. A community guideline? A 'too hot, let it cool down' button for users with a certain amount of karma? Active moderation?

[incompatible]

I don't spend a lot of time on either site (HN or FB), and zero on Reddit. However, HN is apparently more engaging, since I make more comments.

My FB stream mostly consists of inane things that other people have clicked "like" on, and if FB thinks those are the things that interest me the most, they are failing big time.

[CamelCaseName]

I believe this reflects more on you than the platforms. The phrase "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" seems applicable to HN (ideas), Reddit (events), and Facebook (people).

That sounds a little arrogant, but is my general experience. I see this in the submissions and comments where HN demands thought out posts. Jokes or comments that do not contribute are rarely at the top and often removed, while the opposite is true of jokes on Reddit (in general)

[closeparen]

Having been an insider on at least two topics where the HN comments section consensus is confident and authoritative-sounding and detailed but way off the mark, I'm beginning to doubt this. (Not going to say which topics).

The "avoid gratuitous negativity" policy has helped, but we are still very much in a place of "most negative opinion wins" which pushes some discussions way off of reality. And those are just the ones I know about.

Turns out that sounding smart or righteously indignant (or usually, both) doesn't make something correct. Just a weird rabbit hole of darkly gratifying negativity. I guess I'm waking up to the fact that our flavor of "discussing ideas" might not actually be that more high-minded than Reddit or Facebook.

[incompatible]

I'm not sure exactly how to quantify it. I think you'd have to look only at public discussions of IT-related topics on other sites, since that's all that's in scope for Hacker News. Facebook suffers with a clunky forum system that doesn't do threading particularly well, so you end up with a "flat" discussion with a lot of duplicate comments. I don't have a lot of confidence in the "like" moderation system either. I hope that's not gratuitous negativity. Example: https://www.facebook.com/arstechnica/posts/10154966971473753

[ygaf]

Reduce HN's frontpage from 30 threads to 10 (then three interesting threads become one) and stop pages loading so fast; they need to become slower (I'm sure people have ideas how to achieve that).

[baq]

> What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time.

Holy Usenet Batman.

This is exactly what I did when I had to pay per minute of dial up. Still ended up spending hours in front of a computer.

[kaffeemitsahne]

The only adaptation I can really see working in the long term is being very conscious of our behaviour, and simply not doing it. The choice to do or do not open a new tab and type news.yc.. in the URL bar is always your own.

[closeparen]

Historically, this approach to addiction has performed poorly. You're not wrong, but this also isn't very useful.

I have found that putting some friction in front of the unconscious "tabbing to timewasting site" habit is really useful while trying to get something done.