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by eastbound 1311 days ago
Serious question and not snarky (despite appearances): How come you comment on HN? It looks like it falls in addictive experiences, albeit maybe necessary to keep on top of IT news. If the theory of “quitting” was right, we wouldn’t see anyone commenting about quitting while still online. I’m asking because I wonder how to keep on top of things / what part should news-reading take in my less-dopamine life.
2 comments
DerekBickerton 1311 days ago
> How come you comment on HN?

Just for the record, karma is a useless metric to me. It gives visibility into how one of my submissions performs, but that's it. I don't chase karma.

> It looks like it falls in addictive experiences

Addiction is when a thing controls you, and you don't control it. I am in charge of my experience here on HN, and as I said, I don't chase upvotes & karma.

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eastbound 1311 days ago
Equivalent to what a Youtube or Instagram user would say. So, if I understand, you see any other app as bad, but you don’t see HN as bad because you are in charge of your own experience?

I personally think I don’t want to masquerade my participation as something else than an excitement to be part of an interesting online community, an interest in being up to date with trends, but nonetheless, an addiction, since it takes time and doesn’t create that much value in my life, and if I had to quit it, I would be doomed by being unoccupied.

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factsarelolz 1311 days ago
> I am in charge of my experience here on HN

As an alcoholic I too feel in control of my alcohol intake.

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profstasiak 1311 days ago
It's very hard to quit Internet 100%. Way harder than alcohol. Most of the people try to limit. When you limit, I guess most of the people would still come to HN, for interesting world news and industry news as you mentioned.

When you limit, articles like this pique your interests (my thinking: "New smoking? I would say it's internet/smartphone addiction, I wonder if I'm right"). So I believe it's not unusual that you find a lot of quitters/limiters in threads like this. Is it still addiction?

Also it's very hard to talk about experiences of quitting Internet. 99% of my friends don't want to quit, don't see anything wrong with Internet. I am alone and can talk about that only through Internet. Ironic I know, but what gives? Internet is not 100% toxic like alcohol, limiting totally would be not only very hard but also probably too strict.

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