> 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)