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Comment by ahub | Hacker News Reader

I think the author wants to prevent his/her compulsive clicking of links. I can relate to that, as I tend to open a lot of content without second-guessing.

I accidentaly discover a different method to the same effect. To circumvent censorship in my country, I began regularly using a tor proxy. (Not the tor browser, just my regular browser setup). Of course everything became slow, reminding me of the good old 56k days. At first I was annoyed, it's not only slow, it's also full of CAPTCHAs. Most websites using cloudflare ask me to "prove I'm human". Annoying as it might seem, it's my ultimate "anti-compulsive-click" tool.

If I don't bother filling a captcha and/or waiting a few (~10-20) seconds to read something online, is it worth it ?

Most likelly not.

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My version of this has been saving news to a reader. I read very few articles in the moment, it's all pushed onto the reader stack.

The stack gets a little out of control, but it also makes it easier to make reading news a discrete time chunk of acceptable duration. It also makes clickbait a waste of effort.

Maybe it's like the news version of sleeping on a purchasing decision. See if you still care about it tomorrow.

I do pretty much the same. If it takes longer than like 10-20 seconds to get through, it goes straight into Pocket.

I then pick up my Kobo reader (built in Pocket support) which is usually on my living room desk when I feel like reading a thing or two. Usually during morning coffees or over the weekend.

Two problems I have: I can't highlight stuff on Kobo, so I have to awkwardly highlight them on my phone when I find something interesting, and I have used this method for many, many years to the point where it'd take me months of non-stop reading to go through all of them. And I remove like 70% of the saved articles within the first week.

We’re all getting used to insta-load but around half of us will leave a site if it takes more than ~3 seconds to load about half of the people give up and the majority won’t come back [1]. It’s that dramatic, and I’ve seen myself doing it - or well, I just fallback to Google cache/web archive.

[1] https://www.hostingmanual.net/3-seconds-how-website-speed-im...

Another accidental method I found was leaving Javascript off by default. It's a bit more granular since websites experience different levels of breakage (if any) without JS. But it makes me similarly thoughtful. I can't count the amount of times I've clicked back on personal blogs (via HN) that don't load because of JS. And IEEE. It seems to be a good filter so far.

People need to fill out captchas to read web pages now? What happened to the internet?

Cloudflare happened. Deanonymizing users since 2009 with their captchas.

TOR in practice became pretty much unusable in censored countries because of it.

I've done this as well, and it's often made me happier and saved me time.

It made me realize most links that I open I don't care to read, and often just the headline or a few sentences about a topic is the best signal/noise ratio and use of my time. This is especially the case for most news/politics/event articles (although in that case I'd not even bother with most headlines either).

> To circumvent censorship in my country, I began regularly using a tor proxy.

Depending on your ISP's firewall implementation, you may not need to use a Tor proxy or a VPN. https://getintra.org (and its forks) should be more than enough [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24612486

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