Doomscrolling at work wastes time, but the real cost is what happens after | Hacker News Reader

Doomscrolling at work wastes time, but the real cost is what happens after

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I must say, I've been engaged in a doomscrolling cycle for quite a while now. And have had periods where I've done it almost religiously. It is addictive. And the effects linger a lot longer than the period of scrolling.

There is a thing I generally believe about neural pathways. That the road we most travel is the one we'll keep going back too. And doom scrolling makes me walk down those paths. To the point that it impairs and guides my thinking even after I stop.

And I have stopped. I have had periods where I have blocked Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. I will find myself walking those paths regardless. And then, after a time, I start seeking out the doom again because it's comforting in it's discomfort.

It's probably the worst moment in recent history for this. The constant barrage of information whether it comes from AI, climate disasters, politics or any of the other myriad things that are occurring right now. It feels impossible to break from that cycle. I'm trying.

I want to be present and live in the moment. But it's hard to feel powerless. And Doomscrolling, while it absolutely doesn't bring power, brings a comforting illusion of it. I am aware of it, so I am at least a little in control.

To counter myself: I've also had periods where I'm doing two things that really help.

I've been reading a lot (a lot.) of fiction recently. That kind of escapism is fantastic. I love being able to form the images in my head of the books I am reading.

I've been learning another language, and have become proficient enough to read fiction in that other language. I'm nowhere near at a fantastic level, but being able to read in another language, and have those images form is amazing. So far the biggest books I've read in Dutch are Dunger Crawler Carl (which I am now reading the sequels in English.) and Project Hail Mary, which felt cool due to the themes of translating other languages.

I recommend both as a way to try to escape the loop.

> I have had periods where I have blocked Reddit

This alone has helped me immensely. Avoiding the latest ragebait that spills over into other subs from r/mildlyinfuriating alone has reduced my stress level.

”The effects of consuming negative news during the workday can linger in employees' minds long after they stop scrolling.”

Doomscroll doesn’t necessarily have to be about negative news. I don’t have any social medias but I’ve seen my friends feed, they are pure brainrot.

"Doomscroll doesn’t necessarily have to be about negative news. "

Taking the name literal, it does. But sure, endlessly scrolling positive news while being in a zombi state in reality, is doom as well.

Insofar as we can actually definite Internet terms, (like enshittification, which has a specific meaning, but Cory Doctorow himself told me not to word police other people about their usage of it.), doom scrolling refers to the fact that attention is sacred, and technology has hacked our attention spans, like a sophisticated laser pointer dot and a cat, so the doom is in losing unplanned hours to content, whatever that content is.

The tone of this is pretty funny.. People worried that the planet is dying, civilisation is doomed, it'll all soon end in fire and war. But worst of all their work productivity is down!! Those lazy peasants!

I've seen an increase, despite the aggressive and partially effective moderation by users (including me), of political content on Hacker News. This content is almost never positive.

If you're someone who likes to do submit these things, please stop. We love HN as our little geek corner and refraining from political content would reduce the negative effects pointed out by the article.

Stuff that ends up on the home page was not just submitted: it was also upvoted, otherwise you would never see it outside of the news feed (which is full of noise and bad crap anyway. Seriously, go have a look and you’ll see that filtering is actually quite good).

This means that enough of readers here think it is interesting. Those people are neither better or worse qualified than you to decide what should be on the front page.

Also, these stories are very easy to avoid. Just don’t click.

Your point proves mine. Doom scrolling is self reinforcing. People upvoting these articles spread the fear: "this is really concerning! Others must see this right away!"

I understand your point of view, but where do you draw the line of what is political and what isn't? For a purely programming/technical article, its political dimension is probably tiny to non-existent. For an article about, say, SpaceX's stock valuation? That is intrinsically political, particularly since the CEO is someone who was closely associated with the current US administration. For an article on US-EU tariffs[1]? Even more political.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708708

Considering how the tech industry's foundation is made in no small part with government money, support, and approval, I don't know that you can really separate tech from politics. Arpanet, Facebook's funding through In-Q-Tel, SpaceX's entire business, and the ongoing public outrage surrounding Flock cameras and hyperscalers are all stories that lie at the intersection of politics and tech.

Hacker News summarized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdhwTXwhA4c

"Doomscrolling", as an addictive technology, was invented by the Hacker News commentariat.

I understand you don't enjoy being told that your "little geek corner" is making the world worse, but you don't really have the moral high ground here.

This really feels like something out of Orwell with some millennial era lingo tossed in.

I'm currently going through the difficult process of weaning myself off Reddit. That's my doom scroll drug of choice, and it's terrible for me.

So I'm building my own news aggregator. The value of this process has been surprising for me. I've had to interrogate what keeps me hooked. It wasn't actually the news. It turns out that's the easy itch to scratch, and it wasn't very itchy.

After some iterations and soul searching, I'm embarrassed to admit that part of what kept me doom scrolling was the rage. Arguing with strangers on the internet. Explaining to them why they're wrong. Laughing at silly comments by wrong people. In order of addictiveness, these are the things which keep me doom scrolling:

1. Rage. Editorials which oppose my value system. Articles which describe people who oppose my value system. Comments by people who oppose my value system. False/incorrect/bad comments.

2. Interesting discussion which extends beyond articles. This could be a list of interesting movies in a Reddit submission. New perspectives. Etc.

3. News. Especially around my niche hobbies. Often this news comes from niche sources which can be difficult to aggregate.

The third priority is technically easy to solve (well, mostly. I'm still working on it, but there is a clear path to success). I would like to completely eliminate the rage loop, so I'm omitting that entirely from the design. The challenge is therefore the second priority: discussion. How do I engage in productive discussion without the rage? They so effortlessly flow into each other in modern media - by design. It's so clear to see now.

I think back 15 years and I could have great discussions and debate with people on Reddit even when we vehemently disagreed with one another. Things remained respectful. Now it's more toxic than 4chan or Bluesky. So the quality of the community matters, but I think that is shaped by the algorithm and policies of the site. Reddit wants it to be a rage machine.

So how do I a) have interesting discussion, b) on niche subject news, c) without the rage? My current hypothesis to test is that I could use an LLM to intentionally hide all Reddit comments which could trigger rage. I might start with a browser extension. The major issue with this is that I form my own little echo chamber. All the comments and submissions conform to what makes me happy and comfortable. I'm not sure how healthy that is, either.

Further, Reddit is not designed around second-order algorithms. It's going to fight any attempts to subvert its rage algorithms. So building this on top of Reddit is like trying to drink sewage water by first sanitising it. I can do it, but should I do it? This raises more problems. We live in a world of monolithic platforms. The old internet is dead. I tried to spin up a Lemmy community and the only people who joined were actual communists who sent me death threats because I didn't agree with what Russia was doing to Ukraine.

I'm toying with the idea of creating an LLM-first/native distributed protocol which enables the communication of agents and their human users. The value proposition is aggregation: moving the discussion from closed ecosystems into whatever app/domain/interface the user feels like using. Communities appear and die and change as freely as users desire. Of course we already have a million social media protocols and the fundamental challenge is critical mass: if you don't have users, no one wants to use your platform/protocol.

Anyway, I've done enough rambling. This is a serious problem for me now so I'm going to keep chipping away at it. Thoughts and suggestions welcome.

I have a similar, albeit slightly different relationship with Reddit. It's not the arguing, it's the upvotes. Feeling like people agree with me. The faux-community building aspects of it all.

I don't think the LLM idea is a great one, to be honest. For a while, I tried forums. ArsTechnica had a decent forum. Fewer people, better moderation. Even that had it's faults for me.

I'm still on the journey, but part of it was just... stopping with one of the communities that I was the worst on. Cold turkey. Habit Tracker app, don't comment there, did that for 90 days and then just stopped entirely.

I tried to block reddit recently. It's impossible. I wanted to find some nice headphones, everything leads back to Reddit recommendations. I still think I should delete my account, but I've had it for nearly 15 years.

But I can't see any good in replacing human interaction with LLMs. It sounds like a recipe for psychosis, in all honesty.

I'd be interested to read more about it, as I believe that I have the same problem and I am also trying to remove reddit from my life.

I think that a carefully designed solution using LLMs could be the way, if it could correctly filter what I'd still want to read. I'm not sure that a browser extension is the way since it could too easily pull me back to the website. But I haven't really tried any solution like that for now, except for the simple keyword filters in RES.

For now, I'm using Cold Turkey to block some news subreddits, and News Feed Eradicator to remove all feeds. I can still visit specific subreddits and read threads. I don't think that's the right solution, but it helps me notice my patterns.

In any case, if you're interested in collaborating on this, let me know. It could be an interesting little project to work on.

I don't think it will work. Old internet worked because people knew how to behave. I implied that folks using internet in the past were only "educated" ones (correct me if I made a wrong conclusion).

Forums worked because people gently expressed their ideas/opinions. They collectively knew when to stop.

Now a kid can post something on the internet and hurt your feeling for days. Or a person who knows nothing about the subject can leave a remark about an event or famous people that they know nothing about.

My proposal is that your protocol should bring the concept of "social class". People only need to interact with people in their own class. It seems harsh. But that how society works.

You can't talk to the prime minister of your country. Even a big leader of a corporation in your daily life.

Old internet worked without any of this because it took effort to join a forum/thread/post in early days. Only people who are deliberate passionate about it join these kinds of "digital community".

Dead internet is real. But we still need to use technology to socialize. Make fences and don't waste time on public places where "uneducated" people can ruin your day.

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