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