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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

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Robotbeat·

> I recently stopped using all of my social media...

Same here. And yet here we find ourselves on HN... :)

(In our defense, the signal to noise ratio is much better here.)

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Haha yup, my excuse is that HN directs me to a lot of long-form content with tangible value instead of throwing shit at me that'd only serve the purpose of keeping me coming back.

But in a way that's worse, because the engaging content and discussion on HN makes it that much harder to put the phone down and get back to work.

At least with Facebook I know there's almost nothing of value and with the news it's almost always bad, so I'm otherwise not missing much.

That's fair, although I consider HN a value-add when I use it (once in the morning). You're right though; if it ends up being a habit to check randomly, it causes a lot of the same problems social media does.

I'm personally trying to fix the habit of constant checking of HN so that I don't miss out on the good stuff with a weekly email that I can review once a week. [1] Admittedly, breaking the habit of checking HN throughout the day is a bit harder to break than subscribing to the newsletter, but in theory it would be an excellent solution. :)

1. http://www.hackernewsletter.com

It's worth noting that Hacker News has an anti-procrastination feature: set the "noprocrast" option in your profile to "yes", and then it will time-limit your visits to "maxvisit" in minutes, and block you for the "minaway" period.

I don't know of any other site that does this. It's a very cool thing for Y Combinator to have done.

Fully agreed. Let's give credit where it's due--not only to the community but also to the moderators, who do a great job keeping conversations civil and on track!

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