[0dana]

My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it.

I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.

My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way.

[rlewkov]

I think doomscrolling is quite related to this - Obsessively reading social media posts about how utterly fucked we are.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrollin...

[Farow]

There was a post about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893690

[latexr]

Slot machines essentially reproduce that mice experiment on humans, as does pull-to-refresh.

[CrackpotGonzo]

It's the same mechanism that social and other addicting apps use, specifically a variable reward system.

The unknown of what's behind that notification drives our brains crazy and makes us need to check.

More from Nir Eyal here: https://www.nirandfar.com/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them...

[frereubu]

Although I think I get the underlying feeling you're trying to define, I'm not sure about the analogy of the experiment on mice. That feels more like it's about being in the presence of an unreliable food source, where it makes sense to stock up while food is available to get you through the lean times. There's obviously an overcompensation there, but evolutionarily-derived mechanisms aren't particularly precise. The food source in this experiment is "reliably unreliable", which probably doesn't mimic real-life food sources very well.

[magusdei]

You are of course free to model the underlying causality as you see fit, but the fact remains that this is one of the most robust and well-understood findings in all of psychology (see e.g. the Rescorla-Wagner model). The effect does not depend on the type of reward and exists in practically all intelligent animals, including humans. As noted, video game compulsion loops and gambling machines are carefully tuned to take maximal advantage of this "variable reward ratio".

I like to model this in terms of multi-armed bandits. Given a set of levers giving out unknown rewards, what is the optimal policy to maximize your rewards over time? A bad way would be to try all the levers until one gives you a reward, and then just keep pulling that one lever in hopes of more. This doesn't work because the other levers might have given you even better rewards.

Instead, you should try to learn to predict how much reward each lever is going to give you. A fast way to do this is to focus on pulling levers that "surprise" you, i.e. where your predictions of reward deviate from the actual reward you got. This works as long as the reward from the environment is at least in principle predictable, as it mostly is in nature. But with truly random rewards, you tend to end up with addictive behaviour. In nature this isn't a big problem, because truly random rewards are generally one-off events. So we're basically exploiting a bug in our own reward mechanisms, and evolution hasn't had time to adapt.

Incidentally, all of this can be viewed as a mathematically and psychologically precise way of saying that the reason you get addicted to news is because you are curious.

[frereubu]

I'm not arguing with the research, I'm just saying it doesn't feel like a satisfactory match to the psychological phenomenon that OP describes. (I spent six years studying psychology, including a masters in neuroscience, so it's not coming from a place of ignorance).

[MaximumYComb]

It's also the method they use to train military working dogs. Find dogs with a huge ball chasing instinct but only reward occasionally and randomly. The dog will work so damn hard to get that ball toss.

Poker machines are built the same, as are the recently banned loot boxes in video games.

[somishere]

Yes. I like this. Now, how to resolve it?

[smoe]

I stopped reading news, including tech news, in 2012, while working at a large news site. Seeing how the sausage is made, helped a lot realizing of just how little value reading news to a normal person is. (Note that that this is very different from saying journalism has no value or nobody should be reporting on current events)

I resolved, my news addiction, by redirecting the time I would have scanned ~12 different news sites multiple times a day, into reading more substantial content. Be that more long form (investigative) journalism, books written on a topic, studies, etc. Content, that let you actually understand the why of things, not just the what that is happening.

How to filter on which things to focus on, or tame the fear of missing out came naturally with the realization, that if something is important enough for me to care about (be that politcal or a new javascript framework), it will reach me eventually one way or another.

Also for big sudden events, like for example a terrorist attack, no matter how reputable and connected the news paper, in the beginning nobody has any solid information, which doesn't stop anyone from reporting and wildly speculating. It might be tough to just ignore that, especially since people will think you don't care, but beyond some basic facts, you won't be able to get any useful information for at least a couple of weeks.

[intended]

What part of seeing the sausage Being made turned You off from eating it?

[smoe]

Maybe sausage is the wrong analogy, since I love them and I find nothing wrong with the ingredients.

I'd say it is closer to a fast food meal. Yes they can be very tasty and satiating for a moment but the nutritional value is extremely low. If consumed too much it is pretty bad for you

Working in a office complex where about a dozen different news papers and sites were made, just made me realize that the "news" section is pretty much purely about relatively cheap traffic generation, nothing else. They license a bunch of wire agencies like Reuters, AP, etc. pick out and often blow up the stories that the target audience will likely click on. The site that is regularly the fastest in publishing something, will gain visitors.

So its not that there is per se something nefarious happening within any particular story, but the news feed is there to make you consume more and boost the numbers advertisement pricing is based on, not to inform you.

Related Article from The Guardian "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier" https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

[smileypete]

>Related Article from The Guardian "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier"

The author, Rolf Dobelli may be worth checking out, though I don't 100% agree with the article.

A good approach may be to do some independent analysis with the widest variety of sources, then use that going forward.

Eg anti Russian and China bias is coming more and more to the fore these days (not saying their leaders are good, far from it) but once its characteristics are recognised it's easier to ignore and not be influenced by it.

[saalweachter]

Hard, unwavering discipline. Resolve to stop reading it, either entirely or outside of rigid conditions (eg, no more than N minutes at X in the morning and Y at night). Then do so.

Some people have good luck modifying their network configs to enforce this when their willpower or habits are weak.

Fortunately there isn't a physical component to the addiction so it is safe to go cold turkey. Usually after a few days or weeks it gets easier but if you slip up it is very easy to fall back into old habits.

[majewsky]

> eg, no more than N minutes at X in the morning and Y at night

Since this community is all about using IT tools to achieve goals:

- There are some browser extensions that can do this, e.g. lock you out of Facebook, Reddit or $newswebsite after X minutes of usage.

- HN itself has the "noprocrast" setting in the user profile which I hear works similarly.

[chvid]

In the words of Morrissey: Stop reading the news.

[somishere]

In the words of Morrissey: there is a light that never goes out

[mouzogu]

Why would you quote him of all people. The guy is a racist at worst and a bigot at best.

[chvid]

I am just one of those people who can listen to Wagner without invading Poland ...

[lkvoid]

That's a straw man statement. Listening to something is not the same as sharing a quote from a horrible person.

[chvid]

The full quote is as follows:

  Stop watching the news
  Because the news contrives to frighten you
  To make you feel small and alone
  To make you feel that your mind isn't your own

And is from the song "Spent the Day in Bed".

It is relevant here as the mice in the experiment loose control over their "mind" and start behaving in a self defeating manner.

[wilsonrocks]

He is pretty horrible. An example of the Everyone Who Likes Music I Do Must Be A Good Person fallacy I held to when I was younger.

[indigochill]

I still seek this hit, but I do it in abstract knowledge like learning more about audio engineering (discovering the harmonic series for the first time or building an intuition for how FFT works is pretty neat). Then I get the hit, I learn neat stuff that may or may not be immediately useful, and I shut out the day-to-day noise.

Ditto, really, for how I engage with the industry. I'm looking at long-term principles like the fundamentals of distributed systems and not getting hung up on chasing certifications for Bob's New Cloud Platform. The details change slightly over time, but the principles remain the same.

[raldi]

Fear of something great showing up and then falling off the front page before you get a chance to see it

[rorykoehler]

You've articulated why I come here perfectly. I've learned so much coming here and on twitter etc but I had to wade through reams of shit to find it.

[blueterminal]

This is a super interesting take. Are there studies / clinical definitions of this or something similar?

[majewsky]

For a basic introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

[melenaos]

Sounds like the gambler's fallacy