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Comment by pantalaimon | Hacker News Reader

> I spent a lot of time on Reddit, and would check it subconsciously, so I deleted it.

How can you delete a website?

No seriously, how do you keep the browser from hooking you?

I don't have any apps installed and I often fall into a reddit-hn-local_news1-local_news2-it_news1-it_news2 cycle that I start all over when I'm done with it just to check if something new happened in the meantime! Especially on Weekend mornings or when I come home from work, I can sink hours into that cycle and feel increasingly miserable about it, but the sweet endorphin rush of new bits of information can push that away momentarily.

I have tried editing /etc/hosts in the past, but this tends to only shift my cycle to other websites.

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Set this to your homepage: https://codepen.io/Yakudoo/full/YXxmYR/

And set your browser to open new tabs with your homepage.

Seriously. The gentle smile of playing with this silly little low-res lion can break you out of that loop sometimes.

Does not work if you tend to just keep on reusing the same tab of course.

> No seriously, how do you keep the browser from hooking you?

This was a really big issue with me too. What I did in the past was to signup for low bandwidth internet connection (not by speed, but with yearly limit of 18 GiB), which made me limit the frequent visits.

These days when I do some serious work, I decides to disconnect internet for the next 45 minutes (or so). I have locally installed manpages, devhelp and devdocs.io documentations. Even if I'm tempted to visit some website (eg: stackoverflow), I delay until the time reaches.

I've solved this problem by simply being aware of it. When I catch myself opening a website that I just had open, I minimize my browser and do something else. It can wait, and I'll enjoy the run later anyway when the world's had some time to bake, and there's more news stories to read.

Block the host at your firewall or in /etc/hosts (or system equivalent).

dnsmasq is rather good for this.

I use Cold Turkey on my computer and the Freedom app on iOS. It works pretty well (Freedom can be buggy). I make the list of websites pretty exhaustive. Using those + meditation has helped quite a bit.

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