Hacker News Reader

Comment by DerekBickerton | Hacker News Reader

If you like this article, I would suggest reading these too:

I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/11/04/i-dont-want-to-be-an...

The Internet is Made of Demons: https://www.damagemag.com/2022/04/21/the-internet-is-made-of...

When traveling, I carry a dumb phone, specifically a Nokia feature phone that doesn't even connect to The Internet. The only distraction on it is the Tetris app which kills time waiting for the bus, or waiting to be seen by a doctor, etc

I dedicate a small window of time (1 hour at most) to social media, and trained all my feeds to be high signal, so I come out of scrolling educated and informed.

I don't engage in phubbing[0] which is a portmanteau of 'phone snubbing'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phubbing

View on HN

How is killing time on Tetris on Nokia any different than Candy crush or browsing hackernews on iPhone?

At least with iPhone I can load up hundreds of ebooks to read and choose how I spend my time.

Hm, you could argue that the Tetris app is not designed with casino-like blinking/vibrant colors/success sounds to induce endorphine rushes. Also Tetris is relatively fair and does not have pay-to-win schemes (notice how that unbeatable Candy Crush roadblock level suddenly becomes easy after you have swiped your card again).

Serious question and not snarky (despite appearances): How come you comment on HN? It looks like it falls in addictive experiences, albeit maybe necessary to keep on top of IT news. If the theory of “quitting” was right, we wouldn’t see anyone commenting about quitting while still online. I’m asking because I wonder how to keep on top of things / what part should news-reading take in my less-dopamine life.

> How come you comment on HN?

Just for the record, karma is a useless metric to me. It gives visibility into how one of my submissions performs, but that's it. I don't chase karma.

> It looks like it falls in addictive experiences

Addiction is when a thing controls you, and you don't control it. I am in charge of my experience here on HN, and as I said, I don't chase upvotes & karma.

Equivalent to what a Youtube or Instagram user would say. So, if I understand, you see any other app as bad, but you don’t see HN as bad because you are in charge of your own experience?

I personally think I don’t want to masquerade my participation as something else than an excitement to be part of an interesting online community, an interest in being up to date with trends, but nonetheless, an addiction, since it takes time and doesn’t create that much value in my life, and if I had to quit it, I would be doomed by being unoccupied.

> I am in charge of my experience here on HN

As an alcoholic I too feel in control of my alcohol intake.

It's very hard to quit Internet 100%. Way harder than alcohol. Most of the people try to limit. When you limit, I guess most of the people would still come to HN, for interesting world news and industry news as you mentioned.

When you limit, articles like this pique your interests (my thinking: "New smoking? I would say it's internet/smartphone addiction, I wonder if I'm right"). So I believe it's not unusual that you find a lot of quitters/limiters in threads like this. Is it still addiction?

Also it's very hard to talk about experiences of quitting Internet. 99% of my friends don't want to quit, don't see anything wrong with Internet. I am alone and can talk about that only through Internet. Ironic I know, but what gives? Internet is not 100% toxic like alcohol, limiting totally would be not only very hard but also probably too strict.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com