Ask HN: Proposal for Managing the Addictiveness of This Site | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Proposal for Managing the Addictiveness of This Site

11 pointsgruseom24 comments

My partner and I were just talking about this business of how addictive HN is and how even certain industrious founders are struggling to balance it with other stuff. Turning the site off for a few hours a day seems a bit... heavy-handed. How about leveraging the power of shame instead? Here's our proposal:

    Public Humiliation

1. You can go to the Profile page and promise to be off the site for X hours.

2. During the X hours, your username is colored differently to show how virtuous you are.

3. If you break your promise, your username gets colored RED to publicly shame you and reveal your weakness to the world.

You could do it without #2, but I like that step. I think it would feel more like a game to see who else was playing. Also, seeing lots of people keeping their promises would nudge me in the same direction.

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It'll pass. It did for me, anyway. For about two or three months, I was here all the time. I was clicking "override" on the procrastination page five or ten times a day. But, it came from being unfocused about my work--I didn't have a clear, and exciting, vision of where I was going or how to get there, so I was putting off doing anything.

I did two things:

1. Started working on music again (which always excites me, but I had to give myself permission to take time off for something fun--I was wasting that time dicking around on the Internet, anyway, so I might as well have something to show for that time).

2. Sat down one day and figured out the overarching vision for my company and my development for the next week, month, and three months (don't think too far ahead--it causes paralysis because the job looks too big). This triggered several great ideas for big visible improvements in the product that don't cost me much time or effort or money (outsourcing brain-dead tasks to cheap labor, for example--for our website builder, for example, I just got 50 new Open Source templates added for $149...this would have taken two or three full days of my time, on a task that would make me nauseous with its tediousness, but for the guy who did it, it was easily a couple of weeks normal wages). Some of these ideas expanded my productivity dramatically, because it takes the work off of my plate almost entirely, but it still gets done.

What I'm saying is that if spending your time here is satisfying your accomplishment receptors better than your own work, then you're probably doing your own work wrong. You're treating the symptom rather than the disease.

Oh, and leave yourself something unfinished at the end of each day (this is old hat for GTD people, but I never really paid attention to any of that stuff). It actually works if you have something to do each day instead of going to HN first, you'll probably find you just keep doing things rather than reading random crap on the Internet.

I've found my engagement with the site has waxed and waned a lot over the nearly 2 years I've been here. I was on here constantly while I still had my day job, because I had a good amount of free time while blocked on other people yet couldn't work on my starttup at work. Then I dropped off to posting maybe 2-3 times a week once my startup started ramping up and I had a clear picture what I wanted to do with it. Then I started visiting more frequently again when my startup folded. Now I'm here a lot on weekends, but I check only once a day, while eating breakfast, on weekdays. There's enough going on at the Googleplex that I really have no urge to visit Hacker News or Reddit while I'm at work.

Procrastination levels really do have more to do with what you're avoiding than what you're procrastinating with. Figure out how to make your work more exciting rather than how to make your procrastination less exciting.

You'll have to take my word for it, but we definitely have a clear and exciting vision of where we're going and how to get there... of course we could still be going about it wrong. But the main point of the post is just that since a lot of people seem to have the same problem, maybe we could use psychology to finesse it. Even if everybody just goes and browses some other site, it would still be an interesting experiment.

How small are your tasks? I've found that once I've broken things down into the "Okay, I can get that done in the next hour" level, I'd almost rather just do it instead of saying I'll do it later. But if my tasks are "Okay, we'll get this done in the next month", I'll be like "Eh, a month's a long time, I can do it later."

It's my fault for not being clearer, but you guys missed the point of the post. I'm not asking for advice about procrastination issues (I have some, but they're not that bad) and the general subject has been done to death already.

The point is that given that a lot of people have this problem (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446924), here's a suggestion of something new to try.

Of the comments that do address the specific proposal (of shame-based noprocrast), there have been two objections. (1) Some people say they're not influenced by anybody else's opinion, or shouldn't be. I call that self-deception. (2) Others say it would be better to just stop procrastinating. Of course it would. That's like prescribing "sleep" for insomnia.

I still think it's a cool idea that would make for a fun experiment.

Edit: by the way, while I've facetiously emphasized the shame aspect, I don't think that's all there is to it. Lots of people have noticed that if you make a public commitment to do something, you're more likely to follow through. There's a lot of experimental data on that too.

"noprocast" in the settings has been wonderful for me. The only thing I'd change is add -1 karma when you click override :)

"noprocast" in the settings has been wonderful for me. The only thing I'd change is add -1 karma when you click override

How about it, PG? Will you give that "antifeature" a test?

That would be awesome. Then I could make a new account and get to -100 karma without having to post any comments, to see if anything neat happens.

Like i care what people on the internet think. I am a pretty shameless person, so this is a bad idea IN MY CASE. Maybe it will help other people, i don't know.

The problem is more fundamental than that, procrastination seems to be a big problem with a lot of people here on HN, including me. I've been searching for answers and ways of countering it, i have thought a lot about the causes and effects.

My conclusion is that it is not HN that is the problem, procrastination is deeper that that, HN doesn't have anything unique that makes it addictive, there are many activities that are addictive in the same way, and a lot of them are offline, so its not an internet problem. Its a human problem. I have found that i am more productive without internet though, but not that much, it just takes me longer to find distractions.

The problem for me is that stories are so time-sensitive. For example, there are a lot of good stories that never get to the front page, and if I want to see them, I have to continually refresh the "new" page. I hate that, but it's something I find myself doing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Does that tell you how many upvotes and comments each story has received? Certainly I could use that to continually poll the site and tell me.

Doesn't look like it does. That would be a good feature

I just edited my /etc/hosts to point this and most other procrastination sites at localhost. The work day is for working. Now I have only two options at my desk, either stare blankly or figure out the next task and do it. I unblock it once a week or so to keep current.

You ever find yourself staring blankly? I've done that myself sometimes - it's kinda depressing, that even with all distractions removed, I still can't bring myself to do what I'm supposed to be doing.

On the other hand, I sometimes get a big moment of super-productive flow after mostly staring blankly and doing nothing for like 20 minutes or more (or even several episodes like this in the day). But those 20 minutes are indeed really depressing so what usually happens is that I'll stare blankly a few minutes, then get overrun by depression and just give up and land on HN or something else unproductive, to "get my moral back up".

But I feel I could get really productive regularly if I just faced up that fear more readily. I wonder if maybe the big depression that accompanies this staring blankly and doing nothing is just my brain working in the background and realizing the intricate details of my complex task, and I interrupt the process when I'm just beginning to get real productive in the background.

Just a thought.

this is silly. to quote richard feynman, what do you care what other people think?

You think humans aren't affected by this kind of thing? Are you aware of the myriads of data showing that we are? Even the people who think they aren't. Probably especially the people who think they aren't. Which is basically everybody.

I accept that most people (including most people who deny it) care deeply what other people think (in many but not all areas). Many people care so much about it that they will sooner hurt their children than do something in public that they think their neighbors disapprove of. A few bright lights such as Feynman care what other people think only in a more limited fashion.

But so what? People can and should try to better themselves. Consider a person who is pursuing the honorable goal of caring less about what other people. I think he would not want to participate in your public humiliation plan; it would harm his progress.

PS I also don't like to see people humiliated. I think being sensitive to suffering, and not embracing plans to cause it, is a good trait too.

your public humiliation plan

don't like to see people humiliated

I hope your namesake had more of a sense of humor than this, or I'm going to have to lower my opinion of the pre-Socratics.

Your plan relies on the fact that people would find the "public humiliation" unpleasant. Whatever you want to call it (I just repeated your words), being unpleasant is an integral part of it.

How about a top losers list... users who are using the site the most every day.

I'd rest most of the blame with the people, not the site (no offense) -- if you become "addicted" to this site, you'll probably become "addicted" to other sites too.

fwiw, I built a facebook app on this exact premise (shame): http://apps.facebook.com/friendlybets

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