Hacker News Reader

This presentation is from 2013. It's a historical artifact that helped kick off the movement to fight distraction in its early days, not the state of the art thinking of the current day.

Obviously, a lot of the concerns it expresses are still very relevant.

View on HN

What is the state of thinking currently? What's changed? The presentation was created eight years ago and leaked three years ago, but it has never appeared on HN before. What progress has been made?

Digital Wellbeing on Android was one major example of something that seemed to have come from this. I believe iOS also built something similar.

Oh, a notification that tells me a distracting device has been distracting me for too long, and that I should take a break. That's effectively nothing: it hasn't challenged the attention model itself. It's like if a casino had scantily-clad women wandering the floor offering men at the slot machines a free drink. They aren't doing that to help the gentlemen, they are just adjusting the incentives.

That's rather uncharitable - Digital Wellbeing has more features than just the notification, which is an entrypoint not the entire product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com