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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

That has a lot of resonance for me. In this modern age, we are all kings, and there are vast industries to save us from ever being alone from our thoughts.

For December, I quit sugar, social media, and video games. It's been really interesting to notice what state I'm in when I go to reach for those things. Sometimes it's just habit, but often it's because I'm uncomfortable or in distress and want to avoid those feelings. But indulging in those things often just kicks the problem down the road.

Indeed, breaking my social media habits reminds me of Oscar Wilde talking about cigarettes: "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?" The same for me is definitely true with Twitter and Facebook. An infinite feed of shiny, entertaining, funny, and outraging things, but almost nothing that's ever satisfying.

View on HN

If you are commenting here, you haven't really quit "social media".

While I agree, I personally give HN a pass due to the fact that conversation is typically better here and the fact that it's technically focused.

It’s still a random search for new information, distraction, entertainment.

Yes, but random search for information is not always a bad thing. There's a time for exploration.

I agree. HN is net positive for me over the many years I’ve been around. But if you want to cut social media, you probably should include HN ;)

At some point I decided that abandoning social media as a whole would be a tremendous task because of years of being 'trained' by tech... Now I separate useful and useless social media. Shaping my perspective this way helps regulate my Internet use a lot.

Isn't reading a book the same, by this definition? You could say that when picking up a book you do control the topic (while in social media it is others), but this is an illusion if you do not read that book for the second time.

I think if you're disciplined in your HN use - like, check the front page twice a day, not a few times an hour - then it's basically a community-curated newspaper. And while newspapers may not be particularly healthy, they're probably better than most social media.

HN content tends to be longer-form which I feel is quite different from the typical infinite scrolling for quick dopamine hits on sites like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.

HN is also in a strange category for me.

The articles and the conversations are better quality than on any other social media with the added bonus that what I read is relevant for my daily job and career.

At the same time, it's still distracting, I almost never finish an article and go straight to the comments, thinking "entertain me, comment section". I feel productive, but in reality, it's superficial knowledge, and spending time here is time I don't spend on actually working on my goals.

In the end, it's all about balancing the pros and cons. For Facebook, Instagram, it's easy, I don't use them. For Twitter, I focus exclusively on tech so that I don't end up in a pointless yet vicious fight. For HN, it's spending 10 minutes on the top articles, keeping up with important industry news every second day.

I feel the same way.

I've spent countless hours in the last ~5 years on reading seemingly useful articles, and comment sections.

I cannot pinpoint even one instance where anything helped me IRL.

Something might've helped indirectly, but the connection is not clear.

Does it need to be a "direct" benefit? I think sometimes the things we do out of our own volition shape ourselves not only directly but also indirectly.

As a personal example, I have noticed how my way of discussing heated topics has changed based on discourse I have seen here.

And this would not have happened if I didn't invest time similar to yourself.

Yes in your case you identified a specific way to improve your communication skills by immersing yourself in the HN environment.

This is a hit or miss though, because you either identify specific ways to improve or not, and you may or may not actually improve those identified skills by reading trough the comments (and not taking action).

If improvement is the goal, then there are more efficient ways to eg. learn better ways to discuss heated topics (like reading a specific book on the topic, or attending a "Nonviolent Communication" workshop).

The more I think about this the more HN only seems like a place to get a specific flavour of entertainment (which I personally like), but nothing more.

HN has no user/private profile bubble which is the distinctive feature of social networks in my opinion.

HN has never sent me a notification.

Neither has Facebook, reddit or any other social media I use. That doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction.

Their whole model is built around getting people's attention by making them addicted to notifications.

If you disable the notifications, that's good for you. But you're a small exceptional minority.

HN afaik has no such feature at all.

How did you know that XorNot replied to your previous comment?

Notifications, addictive design and gamification are really bad practices that we should try to avoid - but the underlying drug of social media is that someone noticed and reacted to your content, and HN provides that just like Facebook or Twitter.

Most people on here and Reddit are lurkers. They still keep coming back even though the see no tasty upvotes.

I think all three of you are actually hitting the nail on the head. Large headed nail I suppose ;) Take ne as an example. I could've had a really low user number on Slashdot if I had registered right away. I never actually did but I read Slashdot for many many many years.

I turn off notifications on my phone for almost any app. It's just way too annoying. I'll get to it when I get to it! I guess I'm part of that minority mentioned above but as you say I do keep coming back too. It's not black and white but we can stay on the healthy side.

If I try to find an analogy, it's the difference between sitting by the fire in the evening and chatting with other people vs. spending the entire day running around listening to and actively spreading rumors.

You check the Threads link in the HN header.

But you can get the same addiction to likes (upvote count) as you'd get on a "real" social platform.

Less so now but the whole site used to be a filter bubble of people in tech/science or with tech/science interests. It was actually a fairly positive filter though since it resulted in some very interesting content being surfaced. It still stands head and shoulders above the rest but there has certainly been some decline in recent years. In its early days, Reddit was much the same but suffered a massive decline after becoming the "front page of the internet". All "free as in beer" communities seem to follow a similar progression, those with stronger gatekeeping tend to last longer but no site can survive an overwhelming influx of new users without a proportionate increase in the ability to educate those users in the norms of the group they are joining.

HN to me at least is an place I actively go towards when I have the time and I want to. I don't believe in dogmatism, if you want to reduce the impact social media has on you, just reduce your usage. You don't have to become a recluse and you won't become a heretic for going to social media once in a while, if you make it a conscious choice.

Just like that if you want to eat less meat because of the environment, just eat less meat. If you eat selected meat once in a while on selected occasions this won't make you a heretic, because you are still reaching your goal of reducing your impact on the environment etc.

The people who say "if you want to reduce X you are a heretic if you don't abstain 100% from using X" are projecting their own lack of dicipline onto others — they feel they wouldn't have the discipline to do it, but also realise it would be good for them to have it. So they have to invent an excuse why this is a goal that cannot be reached, not worth reaching etc.

Being a free thinking and acting person fundamentally means also to notice when you are manipulating yourself by making your thinking fit the image you already have of the world. I for example often fall into the trap of "if I can't do it perfectly it might not be worth doing at all", and because I know that, I try to work against it.

So what your comment does here is undermining another people's effort to be in control of their social media environment. Why you deem such an act necessary should be something you should know yourself.

How helpful to have a person who knows nothing about my situation police my behaviors because of a vague congruence and an apparent desire to score internet points.

No, for the purposes of what I'm doing, HN was not included in that. From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way. No personalized, UAM-optimized algorithmic feed, no infinite river of small content bites, no rich mechanisms for interaction. And, very importantly, it has the noprocrast feature, which I long ago set to low usage levels.

And as others point out, it's not like I took some sort of vow of internet chastity to a god who will now smite me because I looked at HN. The point was to partially undo some bad habits that had built up during the election cycle. I'll often make some 1-month change at the beginning of the month. For me it's valuable mainly as self-experiment and a way of getting back to some baseline.

"From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way."

I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. Every time I see my total Upvote count go up, I get excited and I rush to see who has agreed with me again. If it goes down I immediately get angry and defensive that someone is downvoting what I said. And surely, you participate in the same process, even if you don't feel as strongly about it - otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?

It might not have been designed this way but it's exactly what it is. And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason.

> clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason

It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.

The same effect would be achieved without showing the numbers though. That's where the addiction comes in.

There's still value in knowing the scores though. When it works, it encourages better conversation, and this effect might be weakened if you couldn't see your comments' scores.

Slashdot's approach is to have different kinds of upvote (Insightful, Funny, etc) and different kinds of downvote (Off-topic, Flamebait, etc), and scores are clamped, iirc the lowest value is -1 and the highest is +5.

https://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml

I don't see the numbers on HN? Which is why it is less addictive to me than Reddit. I also lurked for nearly 2 years, as I was concerned about diluting conversations with low quality, unnecessary posts, which are far less frequent on HN than Reddit.

edit: Now I see the numbers. The quality of posts is still far better than Reddit and the interactions less addictive, at least in my experience.

> It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.

Mostly. There is an unconscious hive mind on HN too, and it downvotes when you disagree with it. It just happens that most commenters belong to it, at least most of the time.

> otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?

The act of writing out your thoughts gives them added clarity. This holds for long(er)-form comment-based sites such as HN and Reddit, not so much for FB and Twitter.

I gave you 1 internet point for this.

Feels familiar, but I'm still in control. Much like with alcohol.

>And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason.

This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with.

You can actually observe this in this very thread so far: while people express opposite viewpoints at this moment none of the comment are in the negative. I'm sure that on Reddit the hivemind would've decided what the Right Opinion(tm) would be and people disagreeing would be sitting at -200 comment score.

Maybe the system could be pushed further and hide the scores even for your own comments though, removing all gamification. I don't know if it would improve things but I'd be curious to see how it would impact the quality of the discourse.

>otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?

I mean even on forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/BBSs/imageboards without scoring system (or even publicly identifiable accounts) people would do the same thing, so I think that you overestimate the influence of the scoring system. I guess the closest equivalent on these other forums in general is getting "replies", i.e. engagement with your content, which I suppose is what we really crave in the end. We want people to listen to us.

Beyond that HN does have a few huge quality advantages over other social media. A big one is that the focus is still on textual content, not images and videos which means that you have to take some time to digest every story instead of mindlessly scrolling through the main page one gif at a time.

Newsgroups had scoring.

> Newsgroups had scoring.

News readers had scoring. Neither the NNTP protocol, nor NNTP servers, had a scoring mechanism, and certainly not one that was distributed over the world-wide Usenet infrastructure.

If you think otherwise, can you point to (e.g.) an RFC where it is documented?

I didn’t use newsgroups a huge amount, but certainly some, and none of the clients I used ever had scoring. So to me, newsgroups were completely devoid of ranking.

As mentioned earlier, engagement seemed to be the goal. And the newsgroups I frequented were usually about getting help with a tech problem, or helping someone else out, which has largely been replaced by Stack Overflow.

> This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with.

A lot of people seemed to have liked (do like?) the system that Slashdot came up with: choose a random group of people every day and give them moderator posts to police the discussions. However, if you post in that day you lose your moderator points.

They seem to have gone with a wisdom-of-the-subset-of-the-crowds instead of a wisdom-of-the-entire-crowd/mob.

>This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with. //

Disagree, a lot.

I've railed against it, but pg (the site owner) noted that voting as a proxy for like/dislike was not improper use on HN, much to my chagrin. In the early days (of my use, back on my first HN account) voting seemed mostly to be done to move a comment to it's "proper place".

Nowadays very good comments get greyed to non-readability. I find myself so often vouching for things I disagree with because comments that add well structured, logical, or interesting thoughts get voted out of view because they go against the group norms.

HN is for me in a sense the "front page" of the internet. I'll call it the thinking persons social media. Social? Check. We are here interacting. Media? Check. It's HN's raison d'être. Additive? Check. I check my up-vote score several times a day.

I also left every social media stuff behind. But I consider being on HN and reading some comments here and there as practicing basic human behavior. Its the same in real life, I cant just leave all human interaction behind. I must be able to deal with people. I think I can practice this a little.

I realized the aforementioned, checking my points and who responded what to my thoughts. I actually made an adblock rule to block out my points. So I dont get that rush, because I realized that too, that everytime I arrive at HN, I just checked my points, and if it were more than before, I felt the rush. And I just knew it was bad, and that is not indeed what I come for to this site.

Sure. I agree it has addiction potential, which is why I have the noprocrast feature turned on, and have for years. And clearly a lot of people get there "someone is wrong in the internet" fix here. But it wasn't a problem for me in the months of the election, so I didn't have the same need to quit it. Ergo I didn't.

As to the design question, I think the biggest things it's missing for me versus modern social networks in terms of addiction potential: 1) river-of-content setup; 2) algorithmic feed with personalized engagement; 3) images; 4) video; 5) wide topic variety; 6) follow graph; 7) real-world social connections in the platform; 8) on-platform notifications; 9) on-phone notifications.

> why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet

For me this platform is as close as I have to discussing things with my profession. So both with my professional Twitter account and this account, I see it as an opportunity to influence my field a bit and support younger colleagues where I can. Were it not for that, I'd just consume it in a read-only way, as over the years I've come to see on-line argumentation as unhealthy for me.

HN is addictive for me, similar to Instagram and TikTok for others.

business only policy, during 9-5. no news/socialmedia, cannot discuss irrelevant issues with my cofounder. Otherwise, I can go into rabbit holes for hours to research certain topic if my brain thinks that it is interesting.

When you first open hacker news, where are your eyes? Are they in the upper right, checking your comment score?

> And surely, you participate in the same process, even if you don't feel as strongly about it - otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?

Why not? Do you not value discussion, hearing new ideas, learning new concepts, having a soundboard for your thoughts? I also like sharing knowledge and participation in the process of humanity developing its collective memeplex (or at least fooling myself that I'm doing that). The fact that I'm not going to meet the people I discuss with has no bearing at all.

While what you describe in your comment is a factor, I cannot agree the rush is the dominant factor for commenting for me.

>>Why not? Do you not value discussion, hearing new ideas, learning new concepts, having a soundboard for your thoughts

I do, but ultimately, I post because I want someone else to read what I said and comment on it(good or bad). It triggers the same release of oxitocin in my brain that seeing likes on a post does.

Kudos for your self-awareness. Have a squirt of dopamine^W^W^W upvote. ;)

I have noticed the same reactions myself, and dislike them. I am slowly and gradually learning to be able to deflect that angry defensive reply impulse. Simple awareness seems to be the first step. I don't know yet what to do about the upvote thrill.

Didn't know HN could lead to this type of addiction.

I use it only as a news delivery system, and in there there's already pathological signs - for instance I rarely skip reading anything that pushbullet displays. And if by accident I "brush it aside" (literally), then I open the app and recover the link.

> an apparent desire to score Internet points.

Like in a social media you mean?.. :)

I’m not sure there are « good » and « bad » platforms. It’s not about the platform, it’s about our usage.

So let me get this straight, you 1. Come in bragging about how self-disciplined you are for not using social media on a social media platform and then 2. Get very defensive when someone points it out to you and 3. Assume the only possible reason anyone could disagree with you is that they’re trying to get internet points?

I think you may need to add a few more months to this social media cleanse...

This otherwise insightful response would have been more persuasive and effective without the first paragraph.

I'm not trying to be judgmental, but I believe it might be worth it for you to re-evaluate some activities to assess what they really are at their core if you're pursuing mindfulness in time spending. Not acknowledging things for what they are can hold you back.

Just because HN doesn't have formal attributes of addictive social media like tailored feeds, shiny pictures, endless scrolling, etc., it doesn't mean that it's very different. I'm saying that, because I managed to get rid of almost all addictive sites, but HN sticks, and I still spend far more time here than I'd like to admit. If you look at it closer: this is an _endless_ list of _news_ with _a lot_ of _comments_ from your _peers_ that you _engage_ with. If you take words in italic it's obvious that this is exactly what makes other social media addictive. "News" and "peers" are the most important words here of course.

In a way, I believe sites like HN are even worse than others because they are somewhat disguised. I shrug FB, twitter and instagram easily (never actually even got into them), Reddit was harder but their stupid redesign made it much easier, HN sill stands for me.

Who made you the judge?

I don’t consider HN to be social media anymore than a discussion forum on gardening is social media.

HN is not a SV startup selling ads spying on you manipulating your behaviour to sell crap or breaking democracy or depressing teenagers into suicide, it’s just not comparable and these false equivalences are just so tiring. Stop trying to bring other people down.

People have tried to define what social media is. Rather than responding immediately I tried to think about what makes places like Facebook and Twitter so toxic.

For some context I don't consider things like forums to be social media. As an early internet denizen I had lots of thoughtful discourse with folks that reminds me of what I experience at HN. I continue to use IRC, which I also don't consider to be social media.

So what makes them different? I think it's the underlying technology. The graph, our ability to search it and correlate immediate (mostly irrelevant) commonality is what makes things dangerous.

Humans are full of dumb or awful thoughts. They'll combat these ideas or thoughts with alternatives regularly which end up referring to as cognitive dissonance. The result is that these lesser ideas widdle away or drop off completely. On social media, the graph doesn't forget and continues to tie you to people, ideas, and thoughts that are increasingly useless. While this sells ads and generates interest in new products it doesn't align well to the way humans have discourse, socialize, or just relate in general.

That to say, HN isn't social media to me.

You are a dunce if you think anonymous comments on a page is social media in the same way Facebook or Twitter are.

> In this modern age, we are all kings, and there are vast industries to save us from ever being alone from our thoughts.

Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit religious order, set up a daily ritual to help keep himself (and those in the order) centred:

> To help me remember the five steps, I like to use a 5-Rs mnemonic:

> Relish the moments that went well and all of the gifts I have today.

> Request the Spirit to lead me through my review of the day.

> Review the day.

> Repent of any mistakes or failures.

> Resolve, in concrete ways, to live tomorrow well.

* https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/ignatian-spir...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_Exercises_of_Ignatiu...

If you go online you can probably find a Jesuit retreat centre not too far from you where you can spend (say) eight days in total silence and seclusion; you can optionally (though recommended) talk with a spiritual director once a day to help you sort through anything that bubbles up during your stay.

The BBC had a short doc where a bunch of random men and women went through the exercise (episodes are available online if you search):

* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2117584/

Perhaps worthwhile, even if that is not your particular worldview.

(This is separate than what monks do, which is seclusion from the world.)

Most faiths in the world have spiritual traditions where silence and reflection are done. Probably possible to find similar retreat centres following their traditions. It seems that it is only the modern secular worldview that hasn't adopted something (yet?). I think this is something most modern philosophical worldviews (especially in the materialist bend) overlook: human 'spiritually' (for lack of a better word).

Fun to see the spiritual exercises on hn. I did a 4-day version at one point. It was wonderful.

Thank you. I have had friends, none Buddhist, attend Vipassana retreats that are similar. No phone, computer, media, or conversation for a week or a weekend, just a focus on silent meditation. And an absence of religious trappings, so suitable for both devout Christians and atheists. They all told me it is very challenging and a good look at themselves and their cravings for interaction. I don't doubt it.

> That has a lot of resonance for me. In this modern age, we are all kings, and there are vast industries to save us from ever being alone from our thoughts.

very valuable quote

> The same for me is definitely true with Twitter and Facebook. An infinite feed of shiny, entertaining, funny, and outraging things, but almost nothing that's ever satisfying.

Facebook has been making it pretty easy for me to quit - it's mostly been an unending stream of boring advertisements with maybe one or two meaningful posts from friends.

Have you noticed any changes?

Definitely, but they're commingled with the other change I made: minimum 10k steps per day. My mood and energy levels have been much better. I also find myself getting more done, because instead of turning to some disposable distraction, I'll get usefully bored. E.g., things around me are cleaner, I've read more long-form stuff, and I've called more friends on the phone than I otherwise have lately.

Those are the "empty(/bad) calories for the mind".

It's akin to eating processed snacks when you're hungry, instead of nutrient whole foods

I want to pay $20/month for something like highscalability.com It hits 80% of the stories I cared about during the week and I get them in 30-40 minutes on a Friday. I don't think this type of service exists because it would have to intentionally limit the growth of the company. When someone asked for a daily update / hourly update / or news feed you would have to say no. And a competitor may emerge that makes more money and eventually tries to buy you.

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