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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I think of so many human problems as the "sugary food" class of problems now. Internet addiction†, pornography, gossip, sensationalist headlines. All sugary food. Our brains are wired to seek out that hit of glucose or dopamine in resource scarce environments and it's maladaptive in the long-term for resource rich ones.

† which is why I'm here on HN, if I'm honest

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"Internet addiction" seems like a different thing than the rest of those to me.

Being addicted to discovering new information and sharing with others sounds pretty healthy to me. I think the difference with HN vs FB is that at some level, you are driving your HN interaction, while FB is driving your FB interaction.

I think it only becomes "internet addiction" when you're not the one in control.

I was "addicted" to discovering new information before the internet existed. I biked 20 kilometers to the city to spend hours in the library and dig around in the shelves. When I got got access to the internet in the early 90s I spent hours to search in Usenet news and gopher sources (www hadn't been invented yet). I would not call that always a healthy behavior. It can be pretty inefficient and lacking any direction. Yeah, I sometimes wonder how narrow knowledge my fellow programmers or my early colleague from university who is a professor of computer science today can have.

My interaction on HN could be more focussed to learn something new and not comment something old...

I agree. I think "cheap dopamine" is a good way to describe this.

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