I considered shutting the site down for a couple hours a day. More people disliked that idea than liked it

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372593

but the vote was close enough that I might still try it.

To me, the alarmingly addictive thing about HN is that something interesting could happen at any time. Removing this real-time aspect, HN would still be interesting, but no more addictive than a good issue of the New Yorker or whatever.

The comments won't work as well if they aren't done in real time in the current format. One possible solution would be to add a separate section for active comment threads. This might serve as an acceptable way to slow them down, or keep them visible longer. However, the real time comments are a large part of what makes this site addictive, but it's also what provides a fair amount of the value.

I'm a strong advocate of hiding the karma counts entirely (for users, submissions, and comments). That greatly reduces the conditioning effect, not to mention karma-related drama and groupthink (as Surowiecki argues, crowd wisdom is best procured when evaluations are performed independently). Submissions and comments can still be ordered by net karma over time, as they are now.

Whatever you choose to do, I think there's a strong argument in favor of experimentalism. Especially since the site isn't a commercial undertaking and can deal with the occasional disruption.

1. Limit the number of votes users get a day/hour/time_period - This might make people more discerning (in general, but also perhaps where they put their time).

2. No karma for story votes. Still have voting, but just don't count it (either that or have it as a separate score) -- Possibly make people more focused on comments on a few more sticky topics rather than a constant stream of topics... Right now the karma system (perhaps) encourages more and more articles.

Or, to lift a more succinct phrase, "lead us not into temptation". ;)

But for all the people not on the fence, you're denying them responsibility for their own choices. I can't help but feel that your stated agreement with me that individuals should be responsible for themselves is empty if you support measures that take all choice away from them.

I feel guilty when I go more than a day w/o checking ycnews (I know, this is bad!). However, I think I've figured out why - I don't want to miss posts that will make me a better hacker. For example, last week there was a "Top 10 tips for linux admins" post where I actually learned something useful (I didn't know about the reset command, when you corrupt a shell by more-ing a binary file).

Is there a way, via some combination of features and/or "Ask HN" style tags, to mark posts as useful? I have nothing against posts that are not useful (but nonetheless interesting). However, if I could filter the posts by utility, it would make it easier to stay off the site for a while, and also make the time here more "justifiable".

There certainly could be downsides to such a system, that I haven't considered.

2)Show fewer stories per page. Or perhaps, show far more. The larger number of stories may seem daunting and remind the person of the sheer number of many interesting things out there, and consequently, the diluted interest of any one.

3) Make the time spent more explicit^. I understand that RescueTime and their ilk do this, but it would be far more salient if you had showed the net amount of time spent on HN on a day; to make in even more salient have the font increase in relation to time spent, with color coding to indicate dangerous levels of time spent.

^-Where HN is dangerous is that you often click your way here thinking you can get back to work after a minute's worth of a scan, but these breaks add up.

I sort of have this system already - I watch my karma and try and use that as a negative feedback loop (i.e. try and keep in the same general increase as other peers).

I've gotten into a routine of waking up and spending about half an hour on mail / news and then switching on Freedom.app for 2-3 hours to turn off my networking. I leave the local intranet connected so that if I really need to find some piece of info I can SSH to another box and use lynx. This helps me get into the groove most days.

http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/

Recall in the old days when people had a flash intro page and you had to continue to see the real content? You could start out with some page saying "You really should be working" but they could still click through. Maybe show this for 1 hour a day.

  open -a Opera http://news.ycombinator.com

  open -a Opera make.out

Though at first I thought you were opening Hacker News then going back to a relationship or something.

But you're still replacing one waste of time with another!

The stories are generally titled in such a way that I ignore stuff that I already know, don't need to know, don't care about, etc.

Conversely, I read the stories that seem interesting or relevant. There's a lot of cutting edge stuff discussed here and I like that. I haven't been here long enough for any one particular thing about HN to piss me off yet, either.

So, yeah.. it's a waste of time if you waste your time. And it's not a waste of time if there's a takeaway. So make a point to learn something each time you go on HN.

Second, some meta-advice about the "Trollish question? Although question might be trollish, it isn't because..." meme: Don't do it. If you have a question like that, then it really is trollish. If you think it isn't trollish, then you need to think about it some more, because you're missing something obvious. When you figure it out on your own, you're going to be so glad you didn't embarrass yourself by asking the smart people on HN such a--let's be frank about it--dumb question.

I normally don't respond to posts of this kind, but it has become a line-in-the-sand issue for me because this meme, and so many others like it, seem recently to be running rampant through an otherwise useful site. We get replies of the form, "I'm obviously unqualified to talk about X, but here's my opinion on X," the afore-mentioned "Trollish Q? Not so because I think it's interesting," and so on.

Think of it as being like farting loudly in an elevator. It doesn't matter if you have really bad gas, you wait until you're alone. Similarly, if you've got a vacuous question or opinion so unjustified that you have to qualify it by saying so, just don't air it in a public forum. You're wasting people's time.

It seems that you have come up with a sentencing formula which is bad in all circumstances. Maybe you should write a research report upon it, it certainly might be interesting. My academic training has taught me though that one should be weary of generalising.

I personally do not agree with your line of thinking that if you have an embarrassing question keep it to yourself. There might be many smart people here, but I do not usually refrain myself from asking a dumb question if I feel that it might shed some light regarding some issue.

Am I or this post wasting peoples time? I did think a bit about that before I posted it and concluded that if it was a waste of peoples time it would not attract comments or upvotes.

Thanks for your comment anyway, an interesting way of saying that the post was a waste of time without actually saying so, and further, an interesting way of wasting other peoples time while saying that my post was a waste of time. :P

Learning is generally worthwhile. Four hours each morning puts a lot of pressure on your schedule to be efficient in other activities, like running your start-up or caring for your family.

> The question though is whether interesting is good enough.

In my words:

"Is interesting stuff worth doing, and is using my own judgment OK, or should I stick to what tradition and authority and culture says is important?"

His best defense of reading Hacker News is not that he likes it. It is:

> I do not wish to come accross as someone who would rather be isolated

Being social is an approved activity.

Paul Graham says:

> [Hacker News is] certainly alarmingly addictive. Much more so than a newspaper. I've been wondering lately what to do about that.

He has the common attitude that problems should be solved by an authority Doing Something, and that his judgment should trump the individual judgment of each reader. And he has the attitude that if people spend a lot of time doing something, that is prima facie evidence that it's a bad thing. That is backwards.

All this is a direct result of parents who educate their kids with principles like:

- it doesn't matter if you like it, do something important (aka, approved by an authority like a text book manufacturer or a tradition)

- if you like it a lot, then it's probably bad. TV, video games, ice cream, playing in preference to doing homework, etc

- your judgment can't be trusted

- if you have a problem, don't do anything, tell an authority who will fix it. e.g., self defense is banned at school, only defense by teacher is allowed. even solving an "i need to use the bathroom" problem on one's own initiative is banned.

- you have to share and socialize or you're a bad person. Ayn Rand is the devil.

Reading the news is the kind of thing you do to fill in interstitial time that is not fungible with other activities, not something you do for its own sake, or should ever "make time" for, or that is ever inherently important. There may be important news, but the defining property of news is not importance, but newness.

I think that many here (and elsewhere) likely suffer from (to some degree) a kind of information-age malaise akin to scrupulosity (obsession over sinfulness). It's a condition where people feel anxiety over not being completely informed, or at least informed enough to have an opinion on every subject.

How often do you read an article (or bookmark it, or InstaPaper it, or tag it "toread", etc.) not because you want to read that article, but you feel like you should know more about that subject? How many unread items do you have in your RSS reader that you keep thinking you're actually going to read someday? That's what I mean.

It's an impossible task, but trying can very easily consume all of your time. You "just" have to learn to flip the switch from input to output without ever feeling "done".

2. Certain interests (e.g. awareness of a recession and industry news) may help you to prepare yourself in case war, famine or other problems that may appear to be global start to affect your neighborhood, job, family or friends. This point is based on the assumption that you, your family and/or friends you care about could be affected by these issues.

For me, interesting is good enough. I'd like to point out that my interests have been changing recently as I think more and more about scenarios involving a loss of income, and taking appropriate investment/skills actions.

Here there are a collection of pieces of information that possibly contain valuable trial and error results; filtered by what might be a very interesting group of people. Also, competitors ways of thinking. Not to mention the other side of that the community aspect, so you aren't alone in your adventures.

So naturally you are attracted to it as it is an attractor, simple due to the possible trial and error results you might also be looking for. Anything that can touch on that natural instinct of trial and error result feedback loop, competition, community or other embedded biologically binded behaviors will win. Video games for instance hits all these for instance, nearly recession proof in the sense that they will always be played, and attract people.

I mean, Henry David Thoreau spent his time wandering around the wilderness, an activity that most would call a waste of time, and yet the lessons he learned about simplicity and its impact on life are still being quoted nearly 150 years after his death.

Wisdom is everywhere the trick is to hang around places where you can find it while enjoying yourself. If HN provides that for you than it’s far from a waste of time.

+ with HN you get to read a lot of stuff that you yourself wouldn't have found otherwise.

I can't find how I came across the term -- I think it was via a link on HN, maybe even in turn from this thread. My apology to whomever I may be shortchanging from appropriate credit for the reference.

The term, and its definition here:

http://tools-for-thought.com/2009/01/05/curbing-info-porn-wi...

capture a lot of my concern.

Just using the term in my own head is helping me to re-evaluate my behavior in this regard.

So, yes, I use it to waste my time. I could be doing better things assuming you believe in objective measures of such things. The addictive low-cal-information-firehose nature of the internet is my one weakness, as Miss Lane never said with a twinkle in her eye.

HN on the contrary is populated by people (like myself, I hope) who wish to learn. They engage in discussion in order to improve themselves, not to win arguments.

4 hours is far too long BTW. I'm sure there must be better things you can do.

There are posts here that make our lives better. I come here while I'm compiling code or uploading code or waiting on something for a short time...

No one actually uses the above features??? It really helps me to reduce my visits to YC less than 3 times everyday. My maxvisit is 60 and minaway is 180. This means that I can only visit HN for a maximum of 60 mins for every 180 mins interval.