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Comment by gabriel | Hacker News Reader

Stop making yourself feel like you have a duty to spend time on any site. In the end, none of it will give you a meaningful experience.

I loathe apps and sites that make you feel like everything is in your face. Email is like this, so is RSS, same with pretty much all news sites. The list goes on and on.

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I think you actually just nailed the three biggies. The reason is that each of the three works in the same way: it gives you a list of "things to get done," and in two of the three cases that list goes on for a long ways. (Email does too, I suppose, if you really use it extensively.) The only other thing I think fits into this case would be social networking.

It's why I was interested in that new Times application for the Mac, the one that turned RSS reading into a sort of newspaper. When you have that format, then you're expecting to look at something only to have it come to an end. It's a different mindset. At the same time, though, it doesn't solve the problem entirely, problem being: the Internet moves constantly, not only at set intervals.

I wonder: is there a way of limiting that without alienating people? Of setting a precise limit to how much can be done during any given time, then ending things up? It would make it a lot easier to avoid sites. At the same time, though, it would slow things down to a crawl compared to the speed at which things move now.

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