Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwamon | Hacker News Reader

And yet here I am, on one of the most "anti-design" sites I know (which even has a "noprocrast" feature), frantically pressing F5 every other minute looking for articles like this. Sigh.

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In online, 'multiplayer' environments, there is always something going on and if you're not there every single waking moment, you'll miss out. You can fiddle with all of the design elements all you want, but if the underlying interactions are built on FOMO, there's not much you can do about it.

I had this realization as a senior in college, and it's the reason I never went into game design. I knew too many dropouts for whom gaming was part of the equation.

I know this probably doesn't mean anything, but thank you for following your conscience.

I tend to lean pretty hard on internal motivation but it's nice to hear.

I really hoped that Jane McGonigal was onto something big when she started trying to put these dark patterns to positive use, but it seems to have fizzled. Sometimes it takes a couple of hype cycles for a good idea to stick. Fingers crossed.

Tangentially related, this article was very recently published by a newsletter I follow. It talks about strategies to make your real life more interesting, and that by playing video games for hours you have proven that you have certain skills that are useful (like focus, achieving goals, learning new things, etc).

I found it really interesting as someone that struggled with video games previously. I don't currently struggle with them (though if I had the right desk setup I probably would have a hard time staying away from them still), but certainly there are always other things that take their place. I was kind of floored to realize that I can actually focus really intently on a video game, and thus I do possess the ability to focus despite my difficulties to do so on boring work tasks.

Maybe you'll find something interesting, inspiring, or thought-provoking within it: https://www.deprocrastination.co/blog/play-the-ultimate-game...

A bit unrelated and I'm sure you had your reasons, but it's worth noting that while this is rampant in multiplayer games, it's not really common in single player games which are still fairly popular. I see and play plenty of such games and I think it wouldn't be too difficult to find game design work making interesting single player experiences instead of the typical multiplayer treadmill.

> underlying interactions are built on FOMO

My experience is that addiction to sites like HN is built more on fearof facing up to some other part of your life.

I think it alternates between the two. At various points one can be the scapegoat for the other.

This is an astute observation. I guess you could limit this effect somewhat by making your product operate on a digest model. Batch comments and release them on a schedule. In addition to making your product less addictive it could give the operators a chance to pre-moderate and curate the content stream.

For some part of the population, me included, taking the action of reloading feels better than being pushed from one piece of content to another - it helps me tell myself I'm in control, unlike with, say, video sites that automatically queue up the next video.

A killer anti-design feature for a place like Hacker News would be to limit how many links and comments get posted every hour or day. Which would have me reloading less often, which would - accomplish the goal of me spending less time here, I guess?

But seriously, the thing most likely to keep me from infinite scrolling or reloading is to have a roommate or live-in significant other.

I don't feel in control at all. In fact I realized I tend to engage in this mindless refreshing when I'm exceptionally stressed out, which I know is pretty much the opposite of helpful.

And I wish it was as easy as just having fewer links on HN. I'd just go to Reddit instead.

rss solves this nicely + train your willpower

The imoortant stories tend to resurface and lurk on reddit too.

"have a roommate or live-in significant other" - life's killer app.

The #1 thing I need is a feature that makes me feel confident that if I spend a few hours carefully and deliberately looking at Hacker News this weekend that I will not "miss" the stuff I would have seen throughout the week. The various sites which try to show you the highlights never seem to actually show me the stuff I would have found in the moment looking at the site :/. It sucks too because it isn't like anything af all about this site is "real time" in the sense that it goes away later... except figuring out how to show people the historical rankings is missing. (I am considering trying to build a mechanism to do this for me, as I often feel like my solution to things I am addicted to is to automate their recording and then realize I never bothered to look at the recordings.)

I assume you’re not happy with stuff like HackerNewsletter [1], though my experience is that missing out on the latest stuff on Hacker News has never had a material negative effect on my life. I see it as entertainment, not a need per se.

[1] https://hackernewsletter.com/

Well, congratulations on not having the problem being discussed ;P. One may as well tell an alcoholic that not drinking during an outing has never been a big deal, and that you see it merely as an interesting flavor ;P.

Huh? I’m not saying it’s not addicting, I’m saying it’s an illusion of importance - you mentioned you worry about negative consequences of missing out, I was just pointing out that in my experience I can’t think of a time where missing out actually had a negative effect (regardless of how important I perceived information on HN, and I’ve compulsively viewed HN plenty). Sorry if that came out wrong.

Please do! My Issue is that I rarely want to actually read the articles, the discussions are usually much more interesting. Most hn aggregator sites have a ui that is focused on the articles not the comments. If i had a way to check a week in review hn one a weekend (or some other time) that would be amazing for my productivity;-)

HN is designed for addiction because it shows me a score. Stop displaying the score on individual comment, posts, and profile and much of the addiction would go away IMO

You can download an css injection extension for this in minutes.

I love this simplicity about hackernews. Try that on google, twitter, reddit, instagram and you'll see html elements with classes like "_9AhH0" that change daily, and I'm not exaggerating.

I use the HN frontpage link which only updates stories about once a day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front

It's tough. HN is the last of my social accounts. I'm really trying to limit it to once a day - you really don't miss anything, and it intrudes far less into your day.

What is this noprocrast feature? I don't see it in the interface and can't find it on Google

You can turn it on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FearlessNebula

click on your username on the top right corner. There is a dropdown labeled "noprocrast", and I think the text-fields under it saying "maxvisit" and "minaway" put, respectively, a maximum amount of time that it will let you use the site contiguously (in minutes) (or, possibly, maximum number of distinct times it lets you use the site per day? not sure) and a minimum amount of time between visits.

I haven't used the feature, so I'm not sure quite what it does.

That isn't what design means.

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