Hacker News Reader

Solid advice. I'll add to this:

- Do not follow newspapers RSS feeds. They bombard you with news that are not relevant at all. Their newsletters are better. I get all my news from daily or weekly newsletters. I would like to get weekly digests only, but I havent found a good one from a newspaper I like.

- Actually quit Facebook. It's pure evil. I was so shocked to hear how it showed you your old, forgotten photos/memories from past just to engage you. If you can't engage with people through messaging (including whatsapp) or phone calls, they are not that close friends.

- On reddit, avoid controversial subreddits, especially on things relevant to you. As a Turkish citizen I avoid /r/Turkey because it's idiots idioting on things that directly affect me, and the urge to rant and answer is hard to suppress. Nowadays I usually only comment on /r/emacs and HN, and avoid all the controversy everywhere. Also, I push all the funny, interesting etc. stuff on reddit into multis, and subscribe only to some low traffic subs where I do not thing my participation would be a loss of time (which is basically /r/emacs, /r/istanbul, and a couple others).

- If you use HN often, subscribe to the front page RSS and to the digest [1]. This way you won't ever miss the important stuff but have less need to actually check the frontpage.

- Disable email notifications. Don't let the sender dictate you when you'll interact with them, decide it yourself. The last time I had an email notification was quite some years ago.

- Declutter your email inbox. Try to make sure that most of what's in there is what you'd just immediately read. Try to redirect the rest in relevant mailboxes. Your email setup should allow you to dispatch incoming messages on headers and body content. Especially useful are List-ID, Subject and From headers.

[1]: https://hndigest.com/

it's funny, your comment makes me think.. the world has too many moving parts to follow them all, so a carefully curated summary of events would be interesting. annnnd that's the press (which got injured by the stream fad.. irony)

I dream about an AI service that can curate me a newsletter given some sources (RSS, Twitter feeds, youtube feeds, whatnot) and send it to me regularly on a given interval. It would avoid duplicates and essentially identical stuff [1], weigh and choose the most interesting ones, and present them to me in a nice, readable format. Ironically I would not use such service if it existed because it would be very anti-privacy.

[1] Twitter is weird. I only follow ~15 accounts for events and (want to) use twitter only for that, but the way people usually post updates about events is to repeatedly post what is essentially the same tweet, and even with that many accounts followed it becomes a mess. I end up never checking it because it's basically a puzzle.

> "Ironically I would not use such service if it existed because it would be very anti-privacy."

Does such a service necessarily have to be anti-privacy? It could be created with open-source tools and run on a cheap low power server in your home, scouring the web for stuff that it thinks interests you based on data you feed it. You will still be in charge of your data then.

can't say if it's just fatigue or a valuable idea but at that point I want no more tech, I want to see people working together, even if it means lo-tech

I like your suggestions, but I have to tell you my anecdote. As someone relatively new to Turkey, I followed r/Turkey to find more information and understand things better. But I quickly found that your description of it is pretty accurate. But as someone still struggling to learn the language and wants information on Turkey, where are better forums to look?

I've done something similar with my Android phone, and it's worked out decently. One problem I encountered though - I spent a lot of time on Reddit, and would check it subconsciously, so I deleted it. Now I find that I'm using Google Now, the left swipe off the home screen. In effect I took the attention from Reddit and gave it to Google. I'm not convinced that was a worthwhile trade. Given I can't delete Google Now, maybe having Reddit on my phone was serving a purpose I didn't realize. Maybe there's an app that will minimize the subconscious attention blast radius. Something that I'll still check but will minimize the time I spend there.

FWIW, you can disable Google Now on your phone. On the more recent versions of Android, you long-press an empty spot on your home screen, select "Settings", and then locate and disable the "Your feed" item.

Amazing. Disabled. Didn't know that, thank you!

This doesn't seem to work any more :( I'm trying to keep notifications of my calendar and flights but disable all the distractions like "Stories to read", and apparently Google has removed the ability to disable it... (https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/140288/how-do-i-...)

It would certainly be nice to disable just that one section. I took the GGP's comment to be about disabling the entire Google Now/Feed app.

If only that actually did anything on my phone.

Moto G5, Android 7.0, the long press on home screen -> settings has no other settings but one. But I did locate the settings by going through Google Now's settings. Thanks for pointing this out!

Hi I accessed it using the following method on my Galaxy S7.

Applications Drawer\Google -> Hamburger Menu\Settings -> Your Feed

> 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.

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.

Install a different launcher. I suggest Nova Launcher, or Trebuchet (open source launcher, get it from https://labs.xda-developers.com/store/app/com.lineageport.tr...)

One thing that has helped me: beeminder (I don't work for them). I have a goal that tracks reddit(etc)-free days, of which I need to do several each week or they take some of my money. This has been pretty effective, in that I've been doing more than strictly required and coming back here to write this feels weird.

I follow a similar protocol & find it very helpful. The missing link for me was the events function of Facebook, which I find endlessly useful. Luckily FB now has a standalone app specifically for this, Facebook Local. Its no-nonsense, no ads, just relevant events. Plus, the feed it gives you actually ends!

Oh wow, dod not know about facebook local. Does it let you manage events you’ve been invited to, amd host events? I could avoid facebook entirely with that. Friend’s birthdays would be tye only thing i’d miss.

I believe there is a way to link your FB friend's birthdays to your google calendar.

True. Though then my calendar becomes terribly cluttered. (I care about maybe 20% of the birthdays on my list)

I think the birthdays only counted as "costless" when I was already checking and filtering through Facebook notifications, but that was an illusion.

When internet connections were pay per minute, I'd think about what I wanted to look up before I connected. Then I'd go online and used Opera to follow many links to different tabs. I'd have a flurry, then disconnect and read. This worked surprisingly well.

I find I can't really read/comprehend from an LED screen well at all these days. I got into the habit of sending items of interest to my e-reader. Any long form article goes there.

Sadly I sat on my e-reader, and my system went to pot. I've just stacked up my reading list. I have no idea what is there. Going back to scrappy reading, feels like a real time and brain drain.

> Uninstall twitter, facebook and other social apps from your phone

A middle ground is turning off badges and other notifications. Switching to a paper newspaper also helps.

I used to run my browsers with an addon that disabled user comments. I whitelisted a few sites where the Internet idiots didn't visit. It worked absolutely beautifully and forced me to avoid the worst of Internet very effectively, even during my weak moments. It cut down so much of the frustration I had about consuming content on the Internet.

I had to uninstall it, because the addon developer stopped maintaining it and the performance bugs made browsing bigger sites much too slow.

> Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something... use private/incognito mode... use 2FA... it's an extra hurdle so you won't default to "quickly check"

Absolutely. Latest Firefox helps here. There's an option to use private by default for all windows. This means when you close it (another habit to develop perhaps) you don't stay logged in to these social media sites.

> ignore content that you know is junk but that tends to drag you in. I suspect this is slightly different for anyone, mine is: anything cute...

I've actually started deliberately looking at the cute stuff. It's a welcome antidote to the outrage apparent in other threads/sites. I have enough natural spleen already without needing to top it up.

> Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something

Even without going as far as "incognito mode for everything", this can dovetail well with a privacy-conscious cookie or browser-profile policy.

Love the 2FA idea.

Do you know of an app/browser extension that lets you bookmark arbitrary HTML pages, and keeps track of how far down you've scrolled; maybe let you write notes? Or maybe one that converts an arbitrary page to PDF, and stores it locally for you?

The combination of OneNote and Edge's Web Notes gets you most of those features. There's also relatively "ancient" apps like Pocket (which Firefox presents out of the box these days) and Instapaper.

This list is EXACTLY what I do and I'm pretty happy with it.

Excellent advice!