HACKER Q&A
📣 BeFlatXIII

How to force yourself to spend less time on HN?


This past month or so, my work has shifted to have long periods of being on standby during WFH. However, I can’t get into reading a book, working on personal programming, or applying to other jobs during the downtime because there is too much likelihood that I’ll be summoned to fill the gaps with activities that require sustained concentration.

Enter HN. Somehow my phone remembered that I created an account a few years back and then never used. HN became a way to fill time because there was no value lost if I had to step away to do work for a while and totally lost my place. Unlike Reddit, the discussions here are readable and (occasionally) informative. The problem arrives when I’ve read the font page for the day and then keep coming back to refresh the page or browse the new queue.

I’ve tried deleting the HN icon from Safari’s top sites list (I’m a strict iPhone-only poster here). That worked for a few days until I started to type in “news.y…” in the address bar manually (and then another HN page ended up in my frequently-visited list).

What got me off Reddit was boredom or exhaustion from the repetitive discussions. The addictive points about HN right now for me are the novelty (I’m still finding interesting discussions and not yet mentally autofilling the expected comments on every post I read) and the civility culture (which means that the arguments aren’t Twitter-tier name-calling, so long as there isn’t someone to show up to rant about the evils of socialism on a tangentially-related thread).

If I had better Wi-Fi in my office, I could just blackhole HN from my PiHole. However, my phone reverts to cellular data most of the workday.

Fortunately, this should have a natural conclusion in a couple weeks when my team starts a new project and I can expect to be busy with real work all day instead of staying on standby.

  👤 WheelsAtLarge Accepted Answer ✓
I've found that HN's way of prioritizing news has the same affect on the brain as a slot machine. For a news junkie that's always looking for the next news article it incentivizes you to comeback over and over again. And since the order is always different then you spend the time scanning the titles looking for the next one to read. It's a very simple yet powerful way to keep you on the site.

Whether it was designed or accidental the affect is the same you get stuck coming back for more. It's addictive.

There's really no way to slow down since there will always be something new to read or at the very least you'll want to check for more. If it's a problem then the best way to deal with it is to delete the url and stay away. There are other news sites that are less addictive and you should start using those.

My other suggestion is to change you host file to point to a different url when you type the HN's url. Point it to something boring. On windows it's at "c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts" but linux and OSX both have their own version.

👤 version_five
I was thinking about this some more - (a) I think there could be a market for a weekly HN digest, with a curated list of interesting stories and their discussions, ideally adapted to what the reader wants to see, e.g. with all political articles stripped out.

(b) even if I had (a), I think I would end up still wondering about whatever gossip is happening in real time. There is lots of stuff that wouldn't rank a weekly digest but still ends up pulling me in, like the replit thing. I don't know how to get away from that.

👤 auraham
Use this extension [1]. It is based on WebRequests [2], so you can intercept HTTP requests and block content, like HN.

[1] https://ops.tips/blog/extension-to-block-websites/

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

👤 version_five
I have the same problem. You can turn on noprocrast of course, but usually I just turn it back off. If I'm going to read a book or something, I try and leave my phone somewhere distant from me so I can't check it.