Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

It's certainly alarmingly addictive. Much more so than a newspaper. I've been wondering lately what to do about that. Any ideas?

I considered shutting the site down for a couple hours a day. More people disliked that idea than liked it

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372593

but the vote was close enough that I might still try it.

An alternative to fully shutting down the site would be to "freeze" it. The site is available, but nothing changes. (This could even happen 24 hours per day: updates only happen every 6 hours or something.)

To me, the alarmingly addictive thing about HN is that something interesting could happen at any time. Removing this real-time aspect, HN would still be interesting, but no more addictive than a good issue of the New Yorker or whatever.

I agree with that. Normally with newspapers there is nothing of interest to read after a certain amount of time spent reading. But on social news sites, an interesting article can appear anytime. It's basic operant conditioning. After a variable amount of time, you get the reinforcement of reading an interesting article. And the VR(variable reinforcement) schedule happens to be the most addictive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rein... And the Fixed Interval (FI) schedule, which sounds like what you are suggesting is also the least rewarding. So I think it's a great idea.

But what about all those in different time zones? Freezing the site for periods may make it tricky for people in some places to contribute at all.

I was thinking that anyone can access the site and do anything that they would do now. The only difference is that what you do doesn't affect other people until the freeze interval is over.

Freezing the content of the main page to update at a fixed rate makes sense.

The comments won't work as well if they aren't done in real time in the current format. One possible solution would be to add a separate section for active comment threads. This might serve as an acceptable way to slow them down, or keep them visible longer. However, the real time comments are a large part of what makes this site addictive, but it's also what provides a fair amount of the value.

I tend to find myself influenced by the karma count more than anything else. I have to log myself out after commenting to increase the cost of checking the change to my net karma.

I'm a strong advocate of hiding the karma counts entirely (for users, submissions, and comments). That greatly reduces the conditioning effect, not to mention karma-related drama and groupthink (as Surowiecki argues, crowd wisdom is best procured when evaluations are performed independently). Submissions and comments can still be ordered by net karma over time, as they are now.

Whatever you choose to do, I think there's a strong argument in favor of experimentalism. Especially since the site isn't a commercial undertaking and can deal with the occasional disruption.

I had a couple of thoughts, but hard to imagine how effective they might be:

1. Limit the number of votes users get a day/hour/time_period - This might make people more discerning (in general, but also perhaps where they put their time).

2. No karma for story votes. Still have voting, but just don't count it (either that or have it as a separate score) -- Possibly make people more focused on comments on a few more sticky topics rather than a constant stream of topics... Right now the karma system (perhaps) encourages more and more articles.

Serious question: don't you think people should be expected to be responsible for themselves?

I'd agree that they should. However, if someone's on the fence, pushing them in a productive direction might be something that serves our (well, pg's) goals, in which case it's not really about responsibility, but about pg's effect on others, something he will likely want to take responsibility for, at least to some extent.

Or, to lift a more succinct phrase, "lead us not into temptation". ;)

"Pushing them in a productive direction" could be something like "You've been spending a lot of time here. Don't you think you should do something else?"

But for all the people not on the fence, you're denying them responsibility for their own choices. I can't help but feel that your stated agreement with me that individuals should be responsible for themselves is empty if you support measures that take all choice away from them.

I don't really support measures that take away choices (I'm against having the site closed for X hours per day, for example), but I do support arranging choices and defaults such that the goals of the arranger are furthered.

Fair enough.

This is as good a place as any to toss out my lingering idea:

I feel guilty when I go more than a day w/o checking ycnews (I know, this is bad!). However, I think I've figured out why - I don't want to miss posts that will make me a better hacker. For example, last week there was a "Top 10 tips for linux admins" post where I actually learned something useful (I didn't know about the reset command, when you corrupt a shell by more-ing a binary file).

Is there a way, via some combination of features and/or "Ask HN" style tags, to mark posts as useful? I have nothing against posts that are not useful (but nonetheless interesting). However, if I could filter the posts by utility, it would make it easier to stay off the site for a while, and also make the time here more "justifiable".

There certainly could be downsides to such a system, that I haven't considered.

1) Limit the number of submission (posts and/or comments) people can make in say an hour. This might limit the number of new things people can see.

2)Show fewer stories per page. Or perhaps, show far more. The larger number of stories may seem daunting and remind the person of the sheer number of many interesting things out there, and consequently, the diluted interest of any one.

3) Make the time spent more explicit^. I understand that RescueTime and their ilk do this, but it would be far more salient if you had showed the net amount of time spent on HN on a day; to make in even more salient have the font increase in relation to time spent, with color coding to indicate dangerous levels of time spent.

^-Where HN is dangerous is that you often click your way here thinking you can get back to work after a minute's worth of a scan, but these breaks add up.

#3 is a good idea - Although time might be difficult to calculate reliably. Page views might be a better metric.

I sort of have this system already - I watch my karma and try and use that as a negative feedback loop (i.e. try and keep in the same general increase as other peers).

How about a slow feed that I could check once a week and only get the week's 30 best stories?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/HNWatrCoolr

Looks like the current front page, not the best stories of the week..

Nope, it is the stories that make it to #1.

Hey PG, what about enforcing procrastination filters? EG just removing the override link?

Encouraging and enforcing are very different: one increases usefulness, and the other decreases it.

Looks like my suggestion got implemented. Thanks PG!

Shutting the site down for which hours of the day? With timezones it's not exactly a trivial question.

I was planning to shut down during the traffic peak. That seems the obvious choice if you want to save the most people's time.

I think that it might depend on when the most traffic peak is. I know that I am most productive around the afternoon, so if it was shut down then, it might make a difference in my productivity. If it was shut down around 9:30-11:00 p.m., it probably wouldn't do much for my productivity because I'm not usually doing much work anyway at that time. This would of course depend on traffic peak and where most of the users were located.

And annoy a whole bunch of others.

Really it's just one of the many distractions available on the web. If it's not available, people will flock to others. Actually, the worst for me is ... my mail client (especially since it has my RSS feeds in there).

I've gotten into a routine of waking up and spending about half an hour on mail / news and then switching on Freedom.app for 2-3 hours to turn off my networking. I leave the local intranet connected so that if I really need to find some piece of info I can SSH to another box and use lynx. This helps me get into the groove most days.

http://www.ibiblio.org/fred/freedom/

In the early days when ebay would go down, people actually started up alternative sites to talk on until it came back up.

Recall in the old days when people had a flash intro page and you had to continue to see the real content? You could start out with some page saying "You really should be working" but they could still click through. Maybe show this for 1 hour a day.

It's a question of will. If you don't have enough will to prevent you from polling the site every five minutes, you probably have other problems related to will in your life. Only a conscious work on will can give results.

I'd be interested in seeing anonymized stats of views per day per user. I know my number is pretty high. And yet I find something good almost every time I come back.

I tend to use LeechBlock for Firefox so I can be reminded to get back to work when I get pulled back in. (I used to use 8aweek until it disappeared...)

Limit the number of submissions per day per user in order to encourage high quality submissions.

If you do that I'll emigrate to North Korea

It doesn't necessarily start out as a waste of time but it can become one if you spend too much time on it. I try to restrict myself to reading YC when recompiling stuff on my powerbook. At the beginning of the build I use

  open -a Opera http://news.ycombinator.com

and at the end I have

  open -a Opera make.out

That way the browser automatically takes me to the build output when it's time to get back to coding.

Awesome.

Though at first I thought you were opening Hacker News then going back to a relationship or something.

That is brilliant.

But you're still replacing one waste of time with another!

Is it really a waste of time if it entertains you and stimulates your thoughts, when used judiciously?

I don't know. You could post the question to HN :)

I'm going to admit that I barely read any of your post. I'm just going to answer: Your question is like asking "Is the Internet a Waste of Time?" It really depends.

The stories are generally titled in such a way that I ignore stuff that I already know, don't need to know, don't care about, etc.

Conversely, I read the stories that seem interesting or relevant. There's a lot of cutting edge stuff discussed here and I like that. I haven't been here long enough for any one particular thing about HN to piss me off yet, either.

So, yeah.. it's a waste of time if you waste your time. And it's not a waste of time if there's a takeaway. So make a point to learn something each time you go on HN.

HN is a /timesink/. It is easy to dump a v. large amount of time there, without a great deal of energy expended. Much like heatsinks, this comes with advantages (less free-unthinking time) and disadvantages (can suck time away).

4 hours reading The Guardian every day -- holy lord...are you independently wealthy? Try just reading The Economist on the weekends. Maybe you'll feel less guilty about all the time you also spend on HN.

First, only your post is a waste of time. (Zing!) But seriously, that all depends on what your goals are when you come here, how you use the site, and whether or not the site meets your goals.

Second, some meta-advice about the "Trollish question? Although question might be trollish, it isn't because..." meme: Don't do it. If you have a question like that, then it really is trollish. If you think it isn't trollish, then you need to think about it some more, because you're missing something obvious. When you figure it out on your own, you're going to be so glad you didn't embarrass yourself by asking the smart people on HN such a--let's be frank about it--dumb question.

I normally don't respond to posts of this kind, but it has become a line-in-the-sand issue for me because this meme, and so many others like it, seem recently to be running rampant through an otherwise useful site. We get replies of the form, "I'm obviously unqualified to talk about X, but here's my opinion on X," the afore-mentioned "Trollish Q? Not so because I think it's interesting," and so on.

Think of it as being like farting loudly in an elevator. It doesn't matter if you have really bad gas, you wait until you're alone. Similarly, if you've got a vacuous question or opinion so unjustified that you have to qualify it by saying so, just don't air it in a public forum. You're wasting people's time.

I see your point. I started with although this might be a controversial question.......because the question is Is HN a waste of time, from that question you might get the idea that I am speaking of HN only.

It seems that you have come up with a sentencing formula which is bad in all circumstances. Maybe you should write a research report upon it, it certainly might be interesting. My academic training has taught me though that one should be weary of generalising.

I personally do not agree with your line of thinking that if you have an embarrassing question keep it to yourself. There might be many smart people here, but I do not usually refrain myself from asking a dumb question if I feel that it might shed some light regarding some issue.

Am I or this post wasting peoples time? I did think a bit about that before I posted it and concluded that if it was a waste of peoples time it would not attract comments or upvotes.

Thanks for your comment anyway, an interesting way of saying that the post was a waste of time without actually saying so, and further, an interesting way of wasting other peoples time while saying that my post was a waste of time. :P

The question is whether those 4 hour or so in the morning reading the guardian newspaper and then the articles on hackers news are worth it.

Learning is generally worthwhile. Four hours each morning puts a lot of pressure on your schedule to be efficient in other activities, like running your start-up or caring for your family.

HN is the closest thing to communicating with like-minded people since leaving university. As long as it retains its diligent, unpretentious and insightful membership, it is a good use of time, so long as you don't overdo it.

> Ask HN: Is Hacker News a Waste of Time?

> The question though is whether interesting is good enough.

In my words:

"Is interesting stuff worth doing, and is using my own judgment OK, or should I stick to what tradition and authority and culture says is important?"

His best defense of reading Hacker News is not that he likes it. It is:

> I do not wish to come accross as someone who would rather be isolated

Being social is an approved activity.

Paul Graham says:

> [Hacker News is] certainly alarmingly addictive. Much more so than a newspaper. I've been wondering lately what to do about that.

He has the common attitude that problems should be solved by an authority Doing Something, and that his judgment should trump the individual judgment of each reader. And he has the attitude that if people spend a lot of time doing something, that is prima facie evidence that it's a bad thing. That is backwards.

All this is a direct result of parents who educate their kids with principles like:

- it doesn't matter if you like it, do something important (aka, approved by an authority like a text book manufacturer or a tradition)

- if you like it a lot, then it's probably bad. TV, video games, ice cream, playing in preference to doing homework, etc

- your judgment can't be trusted

- if you have a problem, don't do anything, tell an authority who will fix it. e.g., self defense is banned at school, only defense by teacher is allowed. even solving an "i need to use the bathroom" problem on one's own initiative is banned.

- you have to share and socialize or you're a bad person. Ayn Rand is the devil.

If you have to ask, you've passed the point where it is.

Reading the news is the kind of thing you do to fill in interstitial time that is not fungible with other activities, not something you do for its own sake, or should ever "make time" for, or that is ever inherently important. There may be important news, but the defining property of news is not importance, but newness.

I think that many here (and elsewhere) likely suffer from (to some degree) a kind of information-age malaise akin to scrupulosity (obsession over sinfulness). It's a condition where people feel anxiety over not being completely informed, or at least informed enough to have an opinion on every subject.

How often do you read an article (or bookmark it, or InstaPaper it, or tag it "toread", etc.) not because you want to read that article, but you feel like you should know more about that subject? How many unread items do you have in your RSS reader that you keep thinking you're actually going to read someday? That's what I mean.

It's an impossible task, but trying can very easily consume all of your time. You "just" have to learn to flip the switch from input to output without ever feeling "done".

Yes, but so is working for a living.

A few points: 1. 4 hours in the morning reading anything is quite a long time. Perhaps if you were to reduce the number of hours, this would force you to reduce your intake and be more productive. This is based on the assumption that you have a vague feeling after morning reading periods that you have 'wasted' your time, possibly due to the numerous other things you could have accomplished in half that time.

2. Certain interests (e.g. awareness of a recession and industry news) may help you to prepare yourself in case war, famine or other problems that may appear to be global start to affect your neighborhood, job, family or friends. This point is based on the assumption that you, your family and/or friends you care about could be affected by these issues.

For me, interesting is good enough. I'd like to point out that my interests have been changing recently as I think more and more about scenarios involving a loss of income, and taking appropriate investment/skills actions.

It goes at the core of human development. Trial and error and results feedback loop, competition and community.

Here there are a collection of pieces of information that possibly contain valuable trial and error results; filtered by what might be a very interesting group of people. Also, competitors ways of thinking. Not to mention the other side of that the community aspect, so you aren't alone in your adventures.

So naturally you are attracted to it as it is an attractor, simple due to the possible trial and error results you might also be looking for. Anything that can touch on that natural instinct of trial and error result feedback loop, competition, community or other embedded biologically binded behaviors will win. Video games for instance hits all these for instance, nearly recession proof in the sense that they will always be played, and attract people.

Information is as useful as you make it. It’s really a questions of "are you just reading to entertain yourself?" vs "are you reading to learn and allowing your worldview to be shaped based on what you are reading?" Almost every piece of information is useful if you pick it apart and actively seek out the lessons to be learned from it.

I mean, Henry David Thoreau spent his time wandering around the wilderness, an activity that most would call a waste of time, and yet the lessons he learned about simplicity and its impact on life are still being quoted nearly 150 years after his death.

Wisdom is everywhere the trick is to hang around places where you can find it while enjoying yourself. If HN provides that for you than it’s far from a waste of time.

Everything is good in moderation. If you spend 24/7 on HN then yes its a bad idea. But if you spend 1-2 hours per day its really not that bad.

+ with HN you get to read a lot of stuff that you yourself wouldn't have found otherwise.

"Info porn"

I can't find how I came across the term -- I think it was via a link on HN, maybe even in turn from this thread. My apology to whomever I may be shortchanging from appropriate credit for the reference.

The term, and its definition here:

http://tools-for-thought.com/2009/01/05/curbing-info-porn-wi...

capture a lot of my concern.

Just using the term in my own head is helping me to re-evaluate my behavior in this regard.

I hang around a lot of websites (passing the time), and websites like HN are full of entertainment ... but if I was honestly seeking self-improvement I would open some study material and study it.

So, yes, I use it to waste my time. I could be doing better things assuming you believe in objective measures of such things. The addictive low-cal-information-firehose nature of the internet is my one weakness, as Miss Lane never said with a twinkle in her eye.

I very quickly gave up reading the comments on the guardian web site. Many, even a majority, are insulting and regurgitated opinions by people unopen to changing their mind, they simply want to shout their (often unappetising) opinion at you.

HN on the contrary is populated by people (like myself, I hope) who wish to learn. They engage in discussion in order to improve themselves, not to win arguments.

4 hours is far too long BTW. I'm sure there must be better things you can do.

I think its a waste of time only in the trivial sense of time spent at HN doesnt' translate into work done. On the other hand, hard work requires making the brain work well, and the brain works best when its you cycle between doing different activities. So I think in fact having a source of novelty of consistent quality as HN, is ultimately not a waste of time at all if you are infact working on something intellectually nontrivial.

I don't know about everyone, but I have a limited number of hours that I can focus on any single task before I need to take a break. If I didn't have this, then I would find something else to distract me. It is a lot easier for me to pull away from HN than to stop playing chess games online.

Be informed. Don't rely on YN only. And use it only if you can't get the same content through easier ways.

Great question. I don't have an answer although I do know that reading hacker news != hacking. I too think I spend far too much time reading all the interesting topics posted to this site and that I should probably be doing something more active and less passive. You're not alone.

HN is entertainment, but it's productive entertainment. Better than playing solitaire or freecell or something like that.

There are posts here that make our lives better. I come here while I'm compiling code or uploading code or waiting on something for a short time...

I avoid the "check HN every n minutes" addiction by using Google Reader to give me a static view of what's come to the front page. This way I'm never re-parsing the entire front page every visit.

noprocrast: maxvisit: minaway:

No one actually uses the above features??? It really helps me to reduce my visits to YC less than 3 times everyday. My maxvisit is 60 and minaway is 180. This means that I can only visit HN for a maximum of 60 mins for every 180 mins interval.

Reading that thread opener was a waste of time. Get to the point.

It isn't. I've come up with a few great ideas in these threads.

Yes, but its awesome so your point is moot.

TLDR

I overcame /. addiction by subscribing to its Headlines which arrive every morning in my mailbox.