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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently.

As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all at once? It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.

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I couldn't agree more.

Don't social news sites sort of depend on them being "up" in the background "working out" what is interesting? Won't bringing it down for 3 peak hours just reduce the churn of good material?

I tend to check hacker news/reddit/etc. at very specific times (like first thing in the AM, right before and after lunch, etc.). If it's down during those times, or if the content is stale (because it's spent the past 3 hours being down), I'm not going to get more work done. I'm going to just stop coming.

> and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently.

Thus returning the site to it's original, smaller, more committed more elite character and hopefully raising the level of discourse, improving the signal to noise ratio, etc.

I'm not sure what pg is thinking but I could see the factors you describe as being a good argument FOR restricting access to the site.

I find the site itself and pg's experiments with attention management to be a fascinating exercise in cognitive science. Taking one of the most addictive forms of news display (look up variable reward schedules and operant conditioning if you want to see why it's so compelling) and attempting to manage it so that you get the benefits (better informed people, faster diffusion of ideas, a 'hotter' intellectual environment) while limiting the time and productivity sink.

//and by the way, thank you Paul Graham for making this possible.

Don't you think if people came to the site at certain hours and there was a page saying "get back to work, we'll reopen in 1 hour and 14 minutes" it might interrupt their procrastination in a useful way, and make them think, "Ok, I'll work for a couple hours, then read the news?"

I find when I've been procrastinating and there's some kind of reward coming in an hour or two (e.g. dinner) that often makes me buckle down and start working.

If people saw that hypothetical page once, I think they might respond to it the way you describe.

But once people subconsciously know what that page looks like, I doubt they'll actually read the text -- they'll just come here, see "oh, news.yc is broken right now" and bounce off somewhere else.

I'm pretty sure this would just subconsciously train me to procrastinate elsewhere. At least when procrastinating on HN there's a chance I'll learn something about programming or business.

I find this idea and noprocrast a tad bizarre. HN has a simple goal (sharing info of interest to hackers), which thanks to focused design it does pretty well. Fixing my brain is feature creep, and should be well outside it's scope.

Fixing your brain is feature creep, but keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio is well within the design goal of HN. If intermittently turning off the site can help accomplish that (not saying it will, just that it might), it seems worth trying.

I think this is an interesting experiment worth trying if nothing else. You'll probably see the polls weigh against trying the change, but that's generally because people don't like change.

The way I look at it, no one loses anything by trying it... and it's not hard to put things back to normal if it doesn't work out.

Two words: Rescue. Time.

do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all at once? It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.

Maybe there are other means to limit it - for example, only let users submit a max of (say) 2 links a day.

Not sure limiting comments would have a desirable effect - But you could limit the number of story/comment votes users get a day.

Might make people more frugal with their time - but still keep a high standard of contribution.

So, true.

In addition, one needs to fix the problem at the source; the thing that works for me is to turn on "Freedom" and dis-connect myself from the Internet for a few hours.

Yep. And want to take bets on how long before someone grabs the source from arclanguage.org and sets up a 24/7 variant?

It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.

You're right, we should make the down hours fluctuate a little bit randomly. Like within the peak visit zone, make one or two of the hours a blackout period, and let that change every day (randomize it).

The page that replaces YC News during that time could be anything. What if YC did some advertising? That way, the silly folks who sit there refreshing (probably me) will at least be doing something productive (generating pageviews)?

Whups, guess I suggested a bad idea. Figures, considering "responsibility" is winning now, ha-ha.

Yeah, on second thought, it's probably a bad idea to make a service like this spurious. Imagine if Google decided to do that to keep me from checking my email.

Hm... if there were time limits on posting rather then viewing, would there be less politics crap?

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