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Comment by suketk | Hacker News Reader

The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.)

Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.

[0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful

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> The problem is absolutely scrolling (I call them feeds[0], but pedants don't love that.)

> Feeds encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice.

Isn't the problem more one of open-ended feeds rather than feeds generally?

I can live fine with my RSS feed for example: nothing gets in there if I don't actually put it there.

My Facebook and Twitter feeds however are full of this person liked this, reshared that and commented there. So full that I cannot finish it ever.

Of course my addiction is HN, I frequently forget to visit Facebook for weeks (booooring maybe especially after people stopped posting what they did and started just posting motivational posters and memes) and I only visit Twitter as some kind of duty (it is one of the dumbest ideas that ever got traction IMO so I don't exactly enjoy it).

I would argue that there is something about the physical interaction that is scrolling. you can scroll at the same time you are reading--this makes the text more of a moving target, and then your "reading" becomes mere scanning. it's hard to shift out of that shallow level of engagement once your there because it's by definition a distracted state, you're trying to just get the gist of this and move onto the next thing you just know is out there which you will actually want to read.

thank you for the link! I'm happy to see other people making this point--raises my hopes some future UX designers will bring it to the platforms someday.

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