The Hook with sites like Reddit, HN, etc is that they ARE addictive. Actually addictive in the sense of gambling. In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning". Now if they never ever won the addiction wouldn't form. If they ALWAYS won the addiction also wouldn't form.
The old thing was email that people were addicted to checking because you MIGHT get an interesting email. It's the same way with training a dog. You don't always give them a treat for behavior. If you only randomly give them a treat they are more likely to perform the behavior because they don't want to miss the reward. If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior.
That's how social media and more specifically sites like reddit and HN are addictive.
I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is.
But we are compelled to continually check because of the fear of missing out on some piece of beneficial information. If we were always presented with good information then we could more easily delay checking the sites.
> In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning".
I disagree. I remember my DotA addiction, I wasn't addicted to losing or "almost winning", if anything I was addicted to "almost losing". Stomping the enemy wasn't fun, getting stomped wasn't fun, almost winning but losing in the end was VERY not fun, almost losing but winning in the end was a huge high, and that's why I'd play. To get that feeling again.
That's why I try not playing competitive video games anymore.
Matchmaking is set up so that you have a 50/50 win/loss rate. When you take into consideration all the outcomes you mentioned, maybe 1/20 games was fulfilling.
Not to mention the "can't quit on a loss, can't quit on a winning streak" mentality.
I also gave up on competitive games right about the time everything switched to matchmaking. For all its faults, the old way of just joining servers manually led to a lot of community servers where you could actually get to know the other regulars. When you know the people you're playing with winning and losing aren't nearly as important to your enjoyment. You end up going to the server not because you're chasing a high, but because you just kinda like hanging out with people. Regulars talk to each other about their life, movies they just saw, Harry Potter lore, whatever. It's like a virtual pub.
This is why I play things like factorio (or used to mindcraft) I think they hit a nice medium. Slightly addictive but very enjoyable, easy to pick back up, and easy to freeze and come back to later without "losing anything"
It's not about fun, it's about what kind of activities cause addiction.
You were addicted because when you played there was a chance of getting a high, but it wasn't certain. A certain high would not be as addictive, if at all.
No, it is about both. If you don't have anything you want to do then everything with any fun elements at all become "addictive". Removing those "addictive" activities from such a person wont help them at all, it just makes their life more boring and they will take it up as soon as you give it back since they have nothing else to do.
Some people have problems with addictive activities. But lots of people just do it since they lack alternatives. If you try to fix the second as if they were addicted then it will all feel frustrating and hopeless since you aren't addressing a real problem.
I don’t think your experience contradicts what the parent comment said. If you won literally every DotA match you played and were very sure you’d win future ones, my guess is you’d probably grow tired of the game pretty quickly. It was the real possibility of losing that made winning rewarding.
HN is addictive but I don't think it's deliberately designed to be that way. The posts and comments here really are interesting.
Modern games are designed from the ground up to form habits. Steady random chance rewards, timers, daily tasks... Basically Skinner's box simulators designed to impose a schedule on players via psychological conditioning. Then it's a simple matter to hook up the reward button to the player's credit card.
I think HN is very different from Reddit, in the sense that I don’t think is addictive at all (for me).
HN doesn’t have infinite scroll, doesn’t have infinite pages with different posts. And that’s what I think would make something addictive. You keep finding new content, without leaving the site, as long as you want, until you get some reward.
On HN I have to reload the page to see something new. And I would have to keep reloading the page for several minutes until I happen to see one new post in the front page.
I want to keep up with everything that gets to the front page all I have to do is come back every hour. With a good chance of keeping up with everything checking just every 6 hours or so.
There is no way to mindless get new content in front of you.
Even keeping up with new comments is hard.
HN is no where near Reddit and other social media sites in addictiveness.
Ehh, HN is just like any social media site in that the pleasure of using it is similar to that of IRL social interactions both good and bad. To be incredibly reductive, it's that you have a chance of having a really engaging conversation, or hearing some really awful takes (can you believe what he said earlier?!). HN isn't as bad as reddit for the reasons you stated, but it is addictive for the same core reason.
That’s the point, it is un-optimized to the point where it’s addictiveness is an order of magnitude lower.
Optimization is what generates addictive behavior in social media. Optimize to feed you with infinite new posts with minimal fraction. HN simply doesn’t feed you with infinite posts in a day and adds friction to find new posts (UX focus on a front page with 30 posts and pagination).
Also, moderation plays a role. Social media addiction thrives in controversial topics while HN bans flame wars. The heated the discussion the heavier the moderation.
HN is not in the same league of Reddit, IG and others regarding addictiveness.
I disagree. The subreddit system breaks up content on that site into classifications. Yes, major subreddits have an unending stream of content just like the site as a whole does. But if one is interested in only niche subjects, the flow is rather low. HN, being unorganized with no sort of category or tag system, forces one to reckon with the stream in realtime.
There's often good nuggets that are buried under new, that don't make it to the front page. Sometimes one only serendipitously finds that content when being dumped into new after posting one's own submission. So if one really wants to search for content on HN, they'd be continuously refreshing new.
There are also plenty of heated discussions on HN. Just because they are using highfalutin pseudo-intellectual speak instead of common vulgarities doesn't mean there aren't as controversial topics here. And these days, HN is scarcely less politicized than Reddit, or any other place in the world online or offline is. Moderation can only go so far, and there are many threads that fall through the cracks.
The comment system of HN, without notifications, also invites one to continuously refresh threads. I personally use Dan Grossman's HN Replies service, but those who don't and wish to see replies on their content would have to no choice but to refresh their comment history.
HN can be just as bad as Reddit, but in different ways.
You missed the point. Try to keep up with everything on Reddit or Facebook or Instagram or Twitter if you follow enough people. You can’t. It is impossible. It is designed to be impossible in order to be addictive.
HN it is not only possible, as you can wait a whole hour without any relevant update in posts. In the other sites soft reload of the feed after 1 second will change the posts.
But answering your question, I don’t see coming back every hour as a problem. Precisely because it is enough interval time to not incentivize an addictive behavior so you don’t feel the need to come back every hour. It is much easier to ditch any addiction you might have on HN because you are forced to take a break since you know there won’t be any new thing to give you a reward. On Instagram you can consume it 24/7.
Imagine if slot machines had to make you wait 5 minutes between plays. They would be exponentially less addictive
I agree with that completely, I don't think it's designed to be addictive, neither was email. But the randomness of the reward can create that compulsion to check.
In the video game space they have intentional implementations of those: Loot boxes and the acronym FOMO (fear of missing out) in content that can only be obtained in a given game season (quarter.)
Yeah, same for punishment too, or like a shock collar / geofence. If the dog knows the shock is always coming they can weigh it. Obviously not just dogs too, it's how humans in some cases stay in an abusive relationship. Every encounter is a roll of the dice and that variability creates an addiction.
I wonder if there's an evolutionary reason for that preference or if this is just an edge case in our rewards system that never mattered until it became heavily exploited by other humans in the modern world.
I think it is a learning mechanism. The real world is very deterministic, if a process has seemingly random outcomes then most likely there is something about it you don't understand, so you repeat it over and over trying to make connections to understand why the different outcomes happens.
You can see this a lot in gambling addicts trying to find different ways to beat the system etc, trying to predict which number will appear (even though it isn't possible) and so on. Our brains just aren't made to deal with lotteries since lotteries isn't a thing found in nature. Some things looks like lotteries, some nuts might be bad after you open them so was a waste of time, but then you open many nuts and think hard trying to predict which nuts will be bad, and then you no longer need to open the bad ones saving you lots of work. But the artificial nuts are just random, there is no system to solve, so people just get stuck.
Imagine that a flaw is exposed in a cheap slot machine that slightly shifts the odds in the player's favor. Because of the low bet value in the slot machine, the rewards ends up being something like $10/hour.
Case A:
The bug neutralizes the slot odds and adds a constant $0.005 usd that accumulates every pull. Times 30 pulls per minute times 60 pulls per hour = 9 bucks an hour.
Case B:
The reward neutralizes the odds but adds a random $600 drop with 1/126,000 probability (ie, once a week).
The expected value of both games is the same, but I feel like people would get addicted to the second while the first would feel like a job.
> I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is.
When a chess engine searches a billion of notes to find the best one, it wastes time, because the next move of the opponent will make the most of found nodes as unneeded. /s
If I read random articles and one of ten is interesting for me, it doesn't mean that I wasted my time reading nine others. (Though I do not read random articles, I read headlines first, I click may be on one of 20, and then I do not read every article through.)
Yeah, I know about addictive behavior in general and the gambling addiction in particular. But we shouldn't believe to an opinion that an addiction is inherently bad. It doesn't. If it was bad, it would be wiped out by an evolution. People just talk more about negative consequences of an addictive behavior, while positive consequences they tend to explain by a "dedication" or something like that. When some socially awkward nerd hiding from people in his basement did something great, no one is going to paint this story in a way that makes his awkwardness to be the reason of his achievement. People will appoint something else to a role of a cause, something that is considered "good", like his skills, brains, dedication, and so on. "Good" outcomes we like to explain by "good" reasons, while "bad" outcomes we like to explain by "bad" reasons.
Addictive behavior supports us when we search for something valuable in a vain. It doesn't mean that addictive behavior is an inherently good thing. (This last sentence doesn't need a justification, so I'll skip it, to not talk about completely obvious things)
So we have: addictive behavior is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad, it just is. But what the collective unconscious does next? It says "addictive behavior is fun, therefore it must be avoided". But it is bullshit. As addictive behavior is neither inherently good nor bad, so fun is neither inherently good nor bad.
The very idea that we must consciously drive ourselves through the life, to think rationally and do not allow self to relax is a bad idea. We have no mental capacity to predict our life good enough. We are doomed to make choices that turns bad in a hindsight. So when we allow our mind to wander a little, to do some activity that have no rational justification, we are preparing ourselves to unexpected turns. We cannot know what information or skills will come useful for us. We do not know how different learned things interacts in our mind (does learning chess makes me a better coder or vice versa?) Therefore a "rational" behavior rejecting fun just rejects the evolutionary tools we have to keep ourselves adapted to a changing environment. We are rejecting our intuition (with its evolutionary roots and deep neural nets to see patterns), that uses "fun" to say what it predicts would be better for us.
From other hand, just following fun is worse than rejecting it entirely. So a lot of people choose an easy way, they reject fun, because it is a guaranteed one step from the worst strategy. But I personally see it as a weakness: people are afraid of themselves, and doesn't dare to make the next step, because it may become a step back.
Or, if we stop listening for what people say, and look at what they do, we'll see that they are exploiting a great strategy. They are using an idea that addictive behavior is bad to restrict it, but nevertheless allow themselves some fun of reading HN and commenting. =)
If you have such a hard time not reading reddit or hackernews maybe the correct conclusion is not that you're 'wasting' time but that there's something enjoyable about so called low quality or idle activities and that they're normal part of a healthy life.
I think it's deeply ironic that people will judge videogames on that basis but then to proceed to gamify and min-max their entire life because of this rat race mentality. If you think that kind of stuff is meaningless when it turns up as a hobby the correct conclusion is probably to not structure your entire personality that way.
Just be less judgmental with yourself. things don't need to be highbrow or particularly meaningful to be a good use of time. It's mostly just a cultural artifact of our time that puts ripped busybodies and entrepreneurs, and celebs and intellectuals on pedestals.
I spend on average[1] 4+ hours a day here, reddit or 4chan. I wish I had spent the time on other pursuits that I have consistently found more enjoyable and rewarding. 4chan in particular usually leaves me feeling some subtle mixture of mentally nauseous and despondent, although I laugh a lot and find interesting things I don't elsewhere. My over-browsing habit is absolutely an unhealthy and compulsive behavior.
I'm 30 now and started on SomethingAwful and StumbleUpon and videogame/software enthusiast forums I think when I was about 9 or 10. I wonder if I'm sort of like a person who started smoking cigarettes at that age. My relationship with compulsive browsing seems to be rooted in experiencing it differently than normal people[2]. They seem to lose interest after a period of time. I can (and do) browse for 9+ hours about 2-3x a month. Interestingly, when I travel, my relationship with browsing changes. The feeling of "magnetic attention" (present even right now) is entirely absent and I lose interest after 5 minutes, max.
[1] The 'wellness' screentime monitors have been a godsend. Assembling histograms of my usage stopped me regarding myself as entirely pathetic and got me to think that maybe I have a problem along the lines of nicotine, perhaps something not well understood by psychology yet. Still pathetic, but maybe less so.
[2]It seems that the issue I have is increasingly present in others, especially younger people who had connected devices even younger than I.
> Interestingly, when I travel, my relationship with browsing changes. The feeling of "magnetic attention" (present even right now) is entirely absent and I lose interest after 5 minutes, max.
Oh wow, interesting that you mention it because I experience the same. Can and do spend hours a day looking at random stuff on various forums / youtube / hn. But once I'm out traveling the need disappears and it just doesn't seem to grip as much anymore.
I believe the almost obsessive browsing is some kind of escape or avoidance mechanism. An escape from being somewhere doing something that you don't want to be doing. It is an easy of taking the mind of whatever is going on in reality. Not that it helps much.
I’ve been thinking it’s a sort of “escape from the void”. When there’s nothing that particularly needs focus, there’s a feeling of wanting to escape from the discomfort of the silence. When I truly have no plans, I find myself seeking out lots of cheap fillers - HN, reddit, snacks.
As Blaise Pascal said, “ All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone”.
The question is why? Why is it so hard to sit quietly in a room alone? What exactly is it that we’re trying to escape?
Same here. My theory is that when travelling you are not bored, thus you have nothing to "escape" from.
The only problem with my theory is that this effect (ie. not wasting time) lasts a couple of days after returning from a trip. This should not happen because you are in the same context as when you were liberally wasting time.
I also move countries a lot. The first 1-2 months at a new country I am wasting time significantly less compared to when I have settled.
>The only problem with my theory is that this effect (ie. not wasting time) lasts a couple of days after returning from a trip. This should not happen because you are in the same context as when you were liberally wasting time.
When you return back home, home is somewhat a different experience from the day to day drudgery. I think it's just that our brains hate boring routines and modern capitalism has made your life extremely Specialized and routine.
It's incredible. I was dependent on prescription stimulants to be functional and I managed to give those up. But 4chan? I've tried 4 times and made it to a month, max.
As someone bouncing from different addictions of sorts through my life (gambling, some recreational drugs, overwork, compulsive browsing, video games, etc.) - I’ve found that breaking that compulsive browsing habit was fairly easy with good blockers. A lot of it was just kind of a learned habit. I’m bored or tired for a nanosecond, better pull up a stimulating website and get a hit. When I get a boring error page instead I snap out of the craving. I also started on genmay and SA and kept going until this year when I realized I have a problem
Anecdotal experience, but I am 5 years younger than you and recently bought myself a Titan Pocket, a small phone with a square screen and a keyboard, so that my phone would no longer be as exciting to use. So it's a very unusual device and whenever somebody I know sees it they ask me why I bought it. When I explain my reasoning most of the people my age seemed to understand my reasoning and also said that that they spend too much time on their phones. Out of the people few years older most of them did not express having that much of a problem with their internet habits.
I definitely think that unhealthy usage of internet is a problem of which the extend in society is not yet fully understood. Especially due the problems that come along with it such as depression and sleep problems. (Atleast in my experience.)
And I also agree on the traveling part, my usage was even more extreme with >8 hours almost every day since the age of 17/18, but whenever I travelled I did not have any desire to spend that much time on the internet. Probably due to the "quality" of feelings that one has when travelling and the ability to spend lots of time with a friend or loved one. (When not travelling alone)
Many of the highest impact decisions in my life, I made because of things I learned reading HN and reddit. And I've even been able to promote my own projects and other projects I like with some success. It's hard to tell whether I'm wasting this time or whether I'm learning about the next Tesla or Bitcoin or deep learning before it's big. Or learning the skills to communicate effectively and promote my work to a big community. I can't separate those things. If I amortize the benefits over the time spent, I think the ROI is pretty good even though the time is large.
Many of those I made were on weird dilletante times: I learned English because I wanted to read mangas earlier than their French translations, I learned CS because I just found it so fun I failed every other subjects in my first year of engineering school, I moved to Hong Kong because I fell in love with a girl here when in vacations, I joined an investment bank paying a lot because I had too much fun watching bloomberg and I wanted to understand the whole thing, etc.
None of this was planned or even rational, yet they are the few transformative milestones in my life. So I don't know if there's really an argument we should use time wisely: we should just jump around and do what drags us naturally and as long as we're happy, we'll find a way.
One could look at my progression from random nobody in Normandy to somewhat rich Hong Kong bank employee and think there s a story but in fact it's a disjointed set of irrational opportunities ... which I think is what life should be seen as.
This rings true to me. Most of the best things in my life are the same. No big plan and then engineering the small pieces to build it. I've mostly followed the small pieces that drew me at the time. I'm aware that this approach could just as likely lead you to wasting your life on whimsy and end up with nothing, but I have to say I'm surprised with how well all the parts fit together for a pleasing whole. Looking back it's amazing to see how many decisions were "just in time," even though I never had any kind of prediction about the future. Signal is baked into everything and making localized decisions doesn't have to paint you into a corner in life as it can in engineering.
I got into CS completely by accident because of my fascination with computers as a pre-teen. I would spend most of my free time tinkering with HTML, exploring IRC networks, chatting with strangers on AIM. All of it was idle, wasted time. I never even considered that it was a job option until my twenties. I spent my would-be-college years alternating between working crummy hourly jobs and traveling. Instead of going to school, I went hitchhiking around Europe, backpacking in South America, waiting tables, washing cars, working in a carpet factory, you name it. Again, because I was following some whims. I loved learning languages and exploring foreign cultures. At 23, broke, and desperate to get out of the pizza delivery business for good, I dusted off my old teenage hobby and got a job doing web dev around the same time that other people my age were graduating and doing the same. A few years later the gig economy arrived, and I am glad I exited delivery before that happened.
Sometimes I briefly have anxiety about the future. Am I learning the right skills to remain employable as I get older? What about agism in tech? Did it make any sense for me to move out of the US where career development is best? Is some black swan going to come along and completely obviate my profession? The confident side of me shows up and says "you didn't make a plan to get where you are right now either. Keep following what you enjoy and the future will turn out alright. You've only got a few more decades to avoid disaster anyway."
> No big plan and then engineering the small pieces to build it. I've mostly followed the small pieces that drew me at the time. I'm aware that this approach could just as likely lead you to wasting your life on whimsy and end up with nothing, but I have to say I'm surprised with how well all the parts fit together for a pleasing whole.
In a way you’ve to be lucky that your interests are valued by the time and culture you’re living in, because you can’t control them. That might be the only difference of wasting your time or making it.
Or as Hamming says in his famous essay: He who works with a closed door is more productive today and tomorrow, but over time works on just slightly the wrong things to make an impact. But those with an open door are full of flitting and scattering and keep getting distracted, yet over time stay aligned with the field and are much more likely to do important work
The lecture is part of a series of lectures by Richard W. Hamming and is collected into a book The art of doing science and engineering : learning to learn
It's a matter of balance. Too much "open door" mentality, and you'll never achieve anything that distinguishes you from the rest. You won't create a new trend if you're always chasing the latest trends.
But for me finding that holy balance is in itself is tiring. some times the contents are no engaging and so it feels easier to skip through the slacking and get some work done. But in other times it is hard. The balance of this mechanism seems so dynamics.
You have to keen an open mind, when it comes to the next big thing. The first Bitcoin post of HN didn't get much discussion and, of the few comments that were present, they were neutral to negative. If you really want to find that next thing, you best be reading the 'new' tab above.
What's been tough for me was I had fantastic stock picks (but no capital, I was in high school) in the mid-naughts. Anybody who's bought-and-held blue chip tech stocks since then would tell you. Today I do diversified index funds with the fear that it's "too late" to have a tech-skewed portfolio. As we all know, the public perception of tech has waned, though that realization is a separate discussion from potential future values, but the bad public perception biases me too much (fear of buying "the peak").
Yeah, I frequently disagree with the prevailing sentiment on HN. But I find that even stuff HN hates, like Bitcoin, gets enough airtime that I can judge it for myself, even if I don't read new.
I had fantastic stock picks a few years ago as well, but didn't act on them (though I've heard from a friend that they made good money on my recommendation of Nvidia). I don't feel like I have any today, everything seems overvalued and I don't feel that I have insights others don't. Which worries me a bit. Maybe there are other forums I should be reading now instead of HN to get those insights in different fields. I kind of feel like we've reached peak HN and the most exciting future stuff may be elsewhere.
Care to expand? It may depend on your values. Is the purpose of a life to be as productive as possible? Is it to share love with friends and family? We have this sick obsession with productivity that harms our quality of life. Wouldn't you rather make the world happier "wasting" good time with those close to you (even yourself, e.g. video games) than being "productive" for someone else's bottom line?
There are different types of wasting time. I often feel like I overlook hobbies and pastimes that are more productive (reading books, learning languages) over ones that are mindless (browsing HN, watching YouTubes).
Read digital minimalism, install pihole on your network, use Tailscale for DNS to point it there, implement blocks on the offending websites and categories. Make your smart phone dumb so you are limited to what you can do, and get an offline hobby.
Be easy on yourself, you will relapse, and realize that nearly everything on a digital platform can be shut off and ignored with the click (or long press) of a button.
Set up your environment for success, and make the path of least resistance align with your values.
You say you want one hour a day, but I’d scale back to nothing for a while and slowly re-introduce it. Or make it less convenient to do the activity.
This kind of thing works to begin with at least.. when that browser plugin in chrome stops me opening HN after 1hour it interrupts the impulse to browse, but then I can alway just open Firefox..
Limits outside ones control are best.. it's amazing how uninteresting youtube is when your data is rate limited.
Use a network level solution and don’t do a 1h block. Do a 365 day block to begin with. We’re like those rats with the cocaine button we keep pressing unless you can somehow disable it and go do something else with your time.
Given the amount of useful things and new perspective I get here, HN in moderation is a net positive on my effective use of my time. Blocking it outright for a whole year is a bit extreme. I might miss the news that pihole project was suddenly taken over by IBM or something.
I edited the hosts file on my Mac to send all these sites to 127.0.0.1... doing something means you're quite likely to know how to reverse it too though, hence why I'm writing this comment during the working day.
A little of it is normal. Too much of it is wasteful.
I have clocked a thousand hours in a video game I like. Many of that hours were not fun, but still just entertaining enough to prevent me from seeking greater pleasures. I was just killing time, not enjoying it.
I realise now that reddit is just the same. I sometimes use tools to block it, and I end up doing much more during that time. Not more work, but more time well spent.
I'm not being judgemental. I'm realizing that mindless browsing has a negative impact on my life and I choose to address it.
What you want to do is entirely up to you. It doesn't have to be meaningful in anyone else's eyes. But if it matters to you that you get X done, and you never get it done because it was usually easier in the moment to do Y instead, then you'll end up regretting that. In that case it's worth figuring that out in advance and trying to fix it.
In that case it's still not a matter or judging Y as a waste of time or low value activity, it's just that committing to doing things to get X done a better choice
The article is written by someone who regards their habit as a problem, and, without knowing anything about it, you try to minimize it.
"Why quit smoking? If you're smoking this much, it must bring you great joy!" You don't seem to understand how addiction works.
The fact that it's not scientifically proven that compulsive browsing is harmful was explicitly addressed in the article. That's a problem.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with compulsive browsing is that you give up a proactive design of your own free time. You hand over all decisions to the algorithms. The only decision left is whether or not to open up a thumbnail. It's a slot machine, it's gambling. For a laugh, for entertainment, for the next dopamine hit.
"Why quit gambling? It's only a couple minutes every night, and you have so many minutes left."
While I believe that the problem is insidious, you're not bringing any actual evidence to counter the article. All you have is contrived counter-examples about other negative behaviors unrelated to the article. So you haven't added anything substantive to the discussion.
Something can be both useful and a sort of “something to satisfy my need for simulation” at the same time. Most things can be and are overdone. Many people recognize this in themselves but have a hard time tearing away from it or only doing it in moderation.
You can enjoy something while admitting to yourself that you’re not happy about spending 9 hours today glued to X for no particular reason.
Or maybe you could credit that people can sometimes recognize which urges toward consumption are unhealthy?
I agree the rat race mentality is also bad. But it shouldn't surprise anybody that products engineered to be compelling end up with some people feeling over-compelled to consume.
Facing a very similar issue and trying similar things unsuccessfully, I've found out lately with my coach that a more promising way to break out of the cycle of "wasting time" and beating myself up over it might be very counter-intuitive: Self-acceptance.
I've found that acknowledging my need for relaxation and satisfying my curiosity was a solid first step in helping cure my addiction on a more fundamental level.
Changing my own internal reaction to realizing I spent the last 30 minutes on Reddit from self-punishment to "Oh, interesting. Looks like I needed a bit of a pressure vent from the complex work I'm doing. I'm worth that. Is there anything even better I could do to myself so I can relax more effectively with quality time off?" at least to me was a way better way to deal with it.
I wouldn't say I'm "cured", but I spend way less time with these things, more time I would define qualitatively highly (like playing some piano, walking or just dozing a few minutes).
Stopping the internal conflict from the other end might be worth a try for you too, even if it sounds weird.
One aspect of that I think is related to "mindfulness ". Oftentimes we get to reddit/hn/twitter as a dumb reaction to a brain feeling. If we think of it explicitly, it's easier to control.
One technique that can also work is pomodoro: time 20 mins segments of the "productive" stuff, 3 of these segments separated by a 2 min break. Then reward with 15 min of reddit browsing.
It helped me hugely while writing my phd thesis. Which was very painful and prone to lots of distractions.
This thread resonated with me a lot - instead of dividing time into 'good/productive' and 'bad/unproductive', it's worth acknowledging the signal my brain is sending when it wants to scroll HN/Reddit and responding to it directly, instead of scrolling on autopilot and then feeling vaguely guilty/dissatisfied.
The times when I'm able to intentionally take a break feel much more restorative than the times when I'm acting out of avoidance.
I find that time of day and amount of sleep received heavily influences time wasting behavior. If I catch my mind craving to watch a movie I know “100%” I need sleep - the movie my mind is craving are dreams. Same with social wasters. A good night of sleep and the brain feels perfectly engaged, focused and productive in the morning. Not getting sleep leads to anxiety and fear of missing out which leads to more social media - what if that next HN post solves all of your problems. Social and TV content is optimized for ads because they know they are consumed when people are tired from their day - personal willpower is exhausted, and you give in to suggestion very easily. There is a reason late night shows compete for the prime spots. So when tired or overly interested in distractions, I try to actually sleep/nap when possible and get more hours with my best brain than my worst. A nap gives you 2 productive days in 24 hrs, and that may be worth something if you value you brain.
I think from an evolutionary perspective most of us aren't wired for long focused mental work, especially not after studying/working the whole day already (that's why most side projects fail). It had very little evolutionary gain throughout history. I think life was mostly about surviving physically and then socializing and chatting/games in rest time. I'd note that even when we lived in caves we had to do mental work (like building a shelter) but it was never for months or years end and it was always very physical. The physical part makes it much easier to persevere for biological reasons (adrenaline, edrophins etc), and also our survival was at stake (!). Compare that to learning to play the violin which has no significance to survival at all.
So it makes sense to me many of us have an inner resistance when we want to exercise/read a hard book/learn to play the piano even though intellectually we prefer those activities. The people who still manage to do that and persevere somehow have a subconscious that values those activities highly.
It's the best explanation I can come up with - it is what it is because of how we are wired and because fast gratification activities made a lot of sense when we lived in caves.
I have felt this in my own life. The idea of wasting my time away mindlessly consuming internet content like social media, memes, news articles, etc, as well as the comments attached to them. It's in a way the boob-tube of the current year, even though the original boob-tube still exists.
I see a few other posters mention that time enjoyed is not time wasted. However, for me at least, there's an emptiness to those activities that makes me feel like after all that time, nothing of value has been gained. Like a time vampire sucking away your day. Maybe unlike the author, I don't think that I need to be doing something "productive" to feel like I'm not wasting time. I enjoy gaming for example, and getting sucked into one does not give the same sense of emptiness. I guess there's a satisfaction from experiencing it, that I can reminisce on. I don't regret it.
While I certainly don't know a silver bullet to making you manage your time better. I've found that sometimes I'll tolerate things up until a point, and then one day I just say "no more" and start making a change that sticks. In this way I've seemingly managed to break away from various social sites, deleting accounts and bookmarks, and generally avoiding the site. However I would point out that now instead I am on HN more often.
I totally agree and I am not worried about my productivity. It’s just that these activities kind of suck and are simply short term rewarding but long term soulless. I’ve reclaimed some of that time for simple things like reading interesting (not work related) books, being present with people in my life, being alone with my thoughts, meditation, taking a walk. It’s quite a big change to not be constantly bombarded and numbed by the tidal wave of content
Man Wow! I did not get a chance to read the whole thing carefully (read the first bit properly and skimmed the rest) but man that is exactly the " "blog" post I've wanted to write since so long.
It pains me to not be able to send advice with a straight face.
Three of the rare things that have been kinda helpful and consistent (ie. not in a motivational bursts way) has been: seeing a social worker and getting diagnosed with ADHD (not gonna claim that I conquered my productivity yet, but having a deeper understanding of ones self, and having the words to describe my self-observations is really valuable), doing things with people/close friends, and religion.
Not claiming that I am satisfied with myself or anything, but these are things that I have found made a small consistent deltas in my life, unlike the bursts I get when I understand a new programming paradigm or watch a Rich Hickey talk.
I with to write more and edit better, but it's in the AMs here and I have a meeting early morning.
Yeah I was diagnosed with ADHD this year and this read like a very clear summary of my symptoms, how I feel about those symptoms and various strategies I've tried.
The point about the "new todo-app effect" is very real, and so I have now accepted that no productivity system will work long term and instead try to enjoy switching to new systems every few months
Different ADHDer here, can definitely confirm, "this read like a very clear summary of my symptoms".
No idea on how to solve the issue they describe, though. I'm experiencing the exact same thing, a lot of time in my day is spent in a loop from reddit -> discord -> hn -> the verge -> general news -> online shops, rinse and repeat.
It feels like my mind is trying to escape or hide, I just don't really know what from.
Asking as an adult that increasingly suspects he may be undiagnosed ADHD: Did the diagnosis result in being prescribed a treatment? If so, what, and has it helped?
I'm conscious that each case must be handled individually, and whatever happened with your diagnosis/treatment would not be the same with me, but I'm interested to hear nonetheless from anyone that's willing to share.
Before then I spent my life being unable to put any time or energy into something for more than a few hours, and then I got bored and could never focus on that thing again. I couldn't do homework, I couldn't study for tests, I couldn't do much at all unless it was something hyper interesting that I could focus on it for a few hours before it became boring again. Even if I locked myself in a room with only that thing I couldn't focus on it.
Then a decade out of high school and after struggling with finishing the last bits of college so I could graduate I got diagnosed. The pills they gave me meant that suddenly I could sit down and focus and finish tasks. Suddenly everything that was impossible before was now possible. I could sit down and do all the homework no problems. I could sit and learn programming on my own no problem. I could perform at the software engineering job I got thanks to that self study no problem.
If I stop taking the pills I stop being able to do all of those things, even if I go months without, so there is nothing addictive about it at least for me, I just can't perform a job without them. I just take them because I want to get things done, I've never felt a need to take them to have fun or so, if I don't work I don't take them.
I didn't think I had ADHD initially, I just assumed I was lazy and that everyone else just pushed through the mental challenges ADHD people has to deal with, but after a decade of nothing working I looked at the criteria again and realized it fit me. So then I went and directly asked to be tested for ADHD describing my symptoms. The science about ADHD isn't that good so sometimes you just got to do what I did, if you go in without an explicit goal chances are they wont find anything wrong with you or just try to treat the symptoms. Like I was depressed since trying to put so much effort and still failing to even focus was an extreme burden on my mental health, trying to treat that depression was hard, but now that I can focus most of that disappeared.
Edit: I think the biggest misconception about ADHD is the "the kid is loud in class, how do we make the kid stop being loud in class?" and thinking that disturbing class is the main problem the kid deals with. That was how ADHD started and what people know today is very biased in that direction, even among professionals. There seems to be very little information about ADHD and career prospects. Like lets say I want to build something, but my ADHD prevents me from building it, but with medication I can build it and I take pills to make that project into reality. That is what I care about, but most studies just look at how these pills improve kids behavior in class.
This blog kinda orbits the idea that intent is more important than the activity itself. Browsing Reddit can be a brain-dead time sink or it can be a thought provoking exchange of ideas. I used to play World of Warcraft and I still have fond memories of “wasting” 300+ hours on it. Rather than viewing specific activities as bad or good just be aware of what your intentions are going into them. Distracting yourself from responsibilities you don’t want to face? Who cares if you do that with chess or Twitter?
For a year I've been constantly thinking about this state and how there must be way way more people with the same experience.
I recently managed to ask a few people about their current situation. And indeed, they too share this experience.
Thank you for the short "Absence of more meaningful activities"
paragraph. I was about to head down a rabbithole and procrastinate higher priority tasks but the text reminded me of more important things.
One thing I'd like to share with you all, it was by far the most helpful regarding this topic: Dr. Andrew Huberman (hubermanlab.com) recently published a video called "ADHD & HOW ANYONE CAN IMPROVE THEIR FOCUS", I couldn't possible summarize it nearly as good as Dr. Huberman did and I kindly ask you to use your favorite search engine to look it up.
It opened my eyes to new options to get out of this time wasting loop that I wasn't aware before.
That's an important problem that most of us struggle with. All these sites like hn/twitter/reddit/youtube are not a waste of time, they provide value if you use them correctly, like this blog post that I just read. I think the reason they become a waste of time is addiction - assuming you're mostly a consumer of these websites, instead of checking your twitter/reddit/etc feed once a day (or once in a few days), you check it every hour. That's a huge problem. There's no added value in checking it frequently, it's just an addiction. A nice benefit of checking it only once a day is that there's a lot of new content so you actually get value instead of seeing the same tweets again.
Yeah, specifically, I will occasionally read things of great value on HN/Twitter, but most of the time there's nothing good on there. But intermittent rewards are more addicting than consistent rewards, so I keep checking them.
If I go on Twitter/HN a few times and see nothing good, I try to convince myself that they're on a cold streak right now and stay away for a few days, at least
yeah it does suck, so I blocked hn and reddit and a bunch of other sites on my ipad (I guess I can override it but I can resist that urge for some reason) and only look at hn/reddit on my laptop
It’s weird how much guilt we have about how we spend our free time. We are constantly measuring our activities against what society, our parents, our friends, and social media say are worthwhile pastimes. I care far less in my 30s what others think of my demeanour than I did as a teenager, but somehow I find myself difficult to admit to friends without guilt how I spend a few hours a day playing video games, despite how much I enjoy that time. It should be as simple as: “if you enjoy something then do it”. If it’s meaningless then you’ll eventually grow bored of it (or realise it’s an addiction). It should be as simple as that.
I'm measuring mine by my own standards. I don't want to be more productive. However I don't want to look back at my prime years and see that I spent most of them scrolling.
I'd rather enjoy more rewarding activities that involve learning, getting exercise or meeting people.
It's a bit like snacking. It's not harmful in moderation, but sometimes you need a proper meal.
Allowing oneself to be bored, or at least idle, without self-judgement, can be extremely valuable. You're likely processing things in the background (often without realizing it), which will make your active decisions and activities easier.
I should bill for my shower time. It's usually the most productive part of the day. After that I know exactly what code I need to write and how I'm going to tackle it.
On the other hand, I miss taking showers without muttering to myself.
For the last few weeks I have been successfully blocking time wasters via DNS using nextdns.io.
The nice thing about this is that you can't get around it by altering anything that you are doing on your computer other than changing DNS settings. For example if you are using a browser extension you could have switched to a different browser.
Perhaps because I am independent/rebellious by nature it is helpful that there isn't a program actually telling me that it is blocking me.
It also helps with a layered approach: you can use this with any other tool such as a browser extension.
Another simple layer that I like to use is to locally remove some sites via an /etc/hosts entry.
> to locally remove some sites via an /etc/hosts entry
+1 for this. It helped me a lot to reduce usage. I can now go for weeks without checking news sites, and I must say my mental health has been much better for it. The need for information consumption is still there, but I started reading books and papers, not blogs and news articles.
To get the /etc/hosts block going on your machine, follow these steps:
1. run: `sudo vim /etc/hosts` and press `i` to enter insert mode
2. add a line with `127.0.0.1 domain.com` for each website you want to block, e.g
Recently I bought a Hisense a5pro eink phone as my secondary phone and commenting from it. I'm experimenting with reading those addictive sites only through this eink screen(block them on colorful screens). So far the desire to continue browsing or comment has dropped by a great deal. I think it might work if those sites are less visually stimulus than your workstation.
I have even found that just changing my phone to grayscale helps a lot and it’s an easy thing to do. I use a shortcut to toggle it so I can easily enable colors when I need them.
One aspect that you might want to consider is not to ask "why am I wasting my time" but "why am I not in control over how I waste my time". Or maybe "why I'm not happy with how I waste my time". Or, even less judgmental: "Why I'm not happy with how I spend my free time". If you look at the comments here, most people who don't have this problem just don't get it. "Just be less judgmental with yourself." But it's not about that, is it?
When you watch something like "The Bachelor" every day together with your girlfriend, some might consider that wasting time. And maybe it is, but I wouldn't consider it problematic. It's limited to one episode per day. And when you're watching it with someone else there's a social aspect to it. Ultimately it might not be valuable. It won't make you smarter, hustle harder, or improve your life. It's not a worthwhile endeavor. But I still wouldn't consider it problematic.
So that's one hypothetical situation. Another is when you open up Reddit because... well, that's what you always do while eating. And then keep scrolling /r/all for three or six hours, and go to bed at 3. What I consider problematic here is that the decision of what I feed my brain is deferred to a website. And that sometimes I have a hard time willing myself to stop.
So I don't think it should be about wasting time, because that derails the discussion into what is considered a waste of time and what isn't. That's a question everybody should find their own answers to. The issue is that you're not happy with how you spend your time. It becomes problematic once you can't control your usage, can't stop once you start using, and feel like you're no longer in control over what you're watching.
I really enjoyed this, op. It was like reading a diary of my own struggle with screen usage. I haven’t found a magic bullet, but it was comforting to read that you’ve gone through a lot of the same iterations. I once considered making a screen time + throw away the key app that would let you lock your pin and have a timer or a buddy unlock it for you.
One thing I have found, like you, is that the dissatisfaction is cyclical. When I was bike touring around Taiwan, I didn’t think twice about how much screen time I spent. When I was stuck inside for months during level 3 epidemic prevention measures, I thought about it constantly. Seek to grow the times that make you feel better and give yourself a break during the “wasteful” times. I don’t think there is a tool or practice that can long term take your ordinary life and tweak this one part where you feel like you aren’t wasting too much of the day on Reddit.
It seems we can all relate, so I'll share my version of this as well. I'm not concerned with social media or Hacker News or whatever mainly because I remember the even worse crap I used to waste time reading before I learned of HN.
My problem is control. I had a side project I started in May and I worked on it roughly 16 hours a day, every day for ~6 weeks with only one or two hour breaks to eat and exercise. When I finished the project, I went back to my 9-5 job like nothing happened. I've had similar "episodes" of grinding before, but not quite as extreme.
Since then I haven't had the motivation to spend more than a few hours on anything outside of my job. The thing I want most is to control this. It would be a superpower.
Instead I spend most of my free time reading random shit on hacker news or Twitter. And next time I binge on work, it will probably be something silly like mining crypto on a thermostat.
Interesting post, it inspired me to think about why I do similar.
Conclusion I came to, is that my brain doesn't want to expend a lot of effort and energy on optional things.
If I've got a deadline coming up on something that's hard it goes into brute force mode in order to get it done, irrespective of the energy cost, because it has to be done.
If I've decided to learn chess, it rebels against brute forcing it because the energy expenditure is not worth it on something that's optional. In that case subconsciously I want to find a better way to learn chess than whatever approach I'm currently taking because the current approach isn't worth the effort.
As for reddit and HN, I think it's the brains default goto way of getting you off the thing you're spending too much energy on (without a good enough plan to accomplish it) to something low energy but interesting enough to distract you.
This reminds me of something I did last week. In our team we share a Keepass file on a Windows share to exchange important passwords.
If I am WFH I have to connect to the VPN, login to said share, copy the file and paste it to my linux laptop. This takes less than 5min but it always feels like a waste of time.
So then I had a genius idea that I could automate this process, to save time you know. Well, after 1,5 hours of trial and error I came to the conclusion that doing it manually is maybe not the worst thing.
Could be. The issue I had is that my file browser can connect to a windows share, but doesn't cache anything. I need a local copy of this pw file, else I always have to be in one of the two VPNs we have.
Apparently Unison[0] could be a solution. But to be honest, I grab this file once every couple of months because 99% of the pws I need don't change, so I only sync when someone has built a new service I need the pw for.
I actually had the same setup just privately to sync KeePass between different clients. I used OneDrive, and the Linux solutions were not very reliable. But that may have been specific to OneDrive.
To be a bit philosophical about it; I sometimes think that perhaps these sites are so addictive because they offer us an escape hatch from the loss of meaning (or passion) we have in our everyday lives. And so these sites are never the actual problem, but merely a symptom.
Hacker News nurtures an addiction like nothing I've ever seen before. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok don't even come close. I wonder if we give "algorithms" too much credit, considering HN does such a good job of capturing my attention without them.
I agree. I think part of it is I feel like I actually might miss out on learning something interesting/career improving if I stop reading HN whereas to me the other platforms are more pure entertainment. I find it’s generally harder to do something in moderation than to give up cold turkey and when you’re worried you might miss something important if you stop all together, cold turkey isn’t really an option.
Also discussing things with people who like discussing things is like the best way to learn and internalize things. And HN has a lot of people who like discussing and actually read what you say and pokes holes at things you miss, it is like having someone review your thoughts for free.
I want to build a community with the breadth of topics of Reddit, the communication skills of HN, and the non-nonsense rules of StackOverflow: some levity would be ok, but the goal is serious conversation, not karma.
I hate how reddit's top comments are always off-topic attempts to be funny.
I love blog posts like this- personal thoughts, not overly edited, and not professing a solution. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, scattered as they may be.
I've been thinking about the "motivation bursts" section in the post- I have certain things (quotes/songs/videos/books/etc) that are motivating, and giving myself easier access to those when needed may be able to help address those times I can't seem to stop wasting time.
Of course, as many other commenters have mentioned, many activities we consider "wasting time" are enjoyable, normal things to do. The goal doesn't need to be eliminating idle time.
Great post. I can relate; I've struggled with it for years. But last year I quit Twitter and Reddit for good. I've quit commenting on news websites. HN is the only place I time-waste anymore. And at least HN is obliquely related to what I do for a living and to my side projects, and it's frequently educational. I'd say I learn something new here that's actually useful to my work or gives me new ideas almost every time I come on.
I got to the point where most other things online - like the diet coke in your analogy - just became unpalatable. One day it just happened. The thought of going on Twitter sounded gross and contrary to how I view myself. I unfollowed everything. On the rare occasions I have the impulse to check it now, I only have to stop for an instant and remind myself: It's a cesspool. And I don't want to be part of it. This is not who I want to be.
In particular, I think, it was the anger and meaninglessness of random people's uninformed opinions, and what it did to me psychologically. Idiots yelling at idiots all day, all night. I was brought up to always argue for what I thought was right, but the rage machine finally just overloaded my circuits. The urge to jump into that and "fix the world" with my oh-so-special opinion just evaporated. The feeling I have toward Twitter now is finally a pleasant numbness, and a vague sadness that it exists.
I also remembered a compliment an ex-girlfriend paid me once, long before the days of time-wasting on the internet, when I was just a kid who never watched TV. She said I never wasted any motion in anything I did. I think about that, and it reminds me that efficiency is more central to my personality than any bad habits that have edged their way in since.
One final thing about side projects. It's hard to sit down at a blank page, and you'll look for almost any way to procrastinate. But once you view it as a problem or something that needs to be fixed, you'll spend all night on it without hesitation. I've found that the best way to motivate myself is to start showing it early to people, and have an audience in mind. Wanting to show friends your progress has a wonderful effect, and lets you know if you're on the right track.
tl;dr, I think you're onto something about associating the good habits with your identity, and the bad ones with something anathema to your being. Don't be too hard on yourself; the human brain was not made for this environment.
I loved Marcus's example about how he was successful with Puzzle Storm:
> I had been studying chess for a long time, and discovered a new mode on Lichess, puzzle storm. It’s a timed mode where you solve as many puzzles as you can in about 3 minutes. It was fun and lined up with a skill I was learning, so it ended up winning in whatever calculus my subconscious does to decide how I’ll spend my free time. This was a nice fluke, but there’s no chance that coding on a side project, for example, will ever win out in in an immediate gratification battle with the time-wasters. So I don’t see how it could be the path to a general solution.
I think in general, the key to "wasting" time effectively is to find high-reward time wasters and make them as convenient as possible.
For me, this has meant selectively blocking websites so that you aren't fully out of options, but so that you read long-form magazine articles instead of Reddit. For others, it could mean having an interesting series of Youtube videos on how to engineer spaceships or on how to apply a new technology you've been curious about.
In times when we have foresight or hindsight, we can bank that and take concrete steps to nudge ourselves towards better choices.
That's me, and probably everyone here and everyone who calls themselves human.
I highly recommend the book 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.
The main point is that yes, these sites and activities are terrible and addictive, but let's face it, we partly desire to enter their gates and escape the notion that we are limited beings, in time and energy, with pending important tasks.
Procrastinating is an emotional issue, not a planning issue. On the one hand, it relieves us from the anxiety of the pending task, and on the other hand, wasting hours is a subtle and psychological way to make it seem like we have plenty of time (that's why we "allow" ourselves to waste it), until one day it is too late and the deception has caught up with us.
Facing an important task is the difficult thing to do because it reminds us of our finitude. That's why we do it now, because the clock is ticking and it's now or never. We are doing the right thing, but it's the disturbing thing too. I think that important things always have mixed feelings intertwined.
Sorry for my English, it's not my mother language.
I’m not trying to avoid wasting my time so I can hustle for shiny things though. I’d just rather have spent one of my limited days on this earth not browsing through Reddit.
A twenty something wasting 5 hours is wasting future benefits of using that. The opportunity cost is horrendous. Multiples of any later hourly rate because of how early its wasted.
Addiction is often poor social connections and relationships. That's why isolation is so dangerous. Most addictions thrive in people who have poor interconnections with others. This isn't the only factor but its a big one. People operate better in tribes or groups of connected people.
> By what am I judging a given 10 minutes as being spent wisely?
Perhaps we can all make these same judgments easily (acting on them is a different matter of course).
Some of these things (perhaps learning chess, not my thing though) harbor calm in my psyche, allow my thoughts to unwind. Walking, reading, writing are things that have net-positive karma.
Other of these things (for me the news) can instead leave my mind troubled, anxious. These have net-negative karma. Often though these are seemingly addictive.
I allow for the negative because I want to be informed and often creative ideas come from exploring what others are doing, what is happening in the world.
I am trying to learn to time-bucket the addictive (and not-often creatively productive) activities though. At the same time I am beginning to recognize that I cannot be always on for the writing or other creative pursuits.
I lost interest in reddit and other social media when I saw how much attention it steals from my children. Even if I do it at night in bed it steals my energy from them. Same with Doomscolling. It takes time and energy and gives nothing in return.
Then I found a new hobby in HEMA sword fighting and gave the people in the club a real chance to get a little closer. Now with a fixed social life I feel much better. Also the time I spent there in the club and with the people in offline activities returns self esteem and health gains.
Last I have some rules. Never look at your phone while speaking with someone. Only one type of media consumption at once. Do something voluble while compiling (reading docs, write more tests, swing a sword)
To sum up, try to get a physical hobby that involves people and get some rules for yourse
The time is either your own or wasted. Doing whatever makes you feel good is not a waste. The only time wasted is when you do what you hate and receive low pay for that when there are better alternatives available.
This is nuts. Hacker News keeps me thinking about smart people's opinions about everything that's going on today. He wishes he was playing chess instead, a fun game, but one that is more a competition of raw processing power and memorization than anything having to do with the human experience.
What worked for me was SelfControl on my computer and Adblock rules on my phone. This effectively kills my impulse to switch to Reddit or another website as soon as my scripts takes over a second to run. I block reddit and a few websites for days on end, and usually end up seeking better entertainment.
Chess?! That's my most pointless hobby! I guess it's a matter of perspective.
Sometimes I feel doing my own yard / auto work is a waste of time, that an hour of my work could pay an hour of theirs, but as long as I can draw the line I think it's ok.
Why not keep "wasting time" but through a filter, like a different language? Language learning by immersion is a thing, and by consuming stuff you're drawn to (just in a different anguage) you're likely learning faster doing so.
It will click one day. I still remember how english clicked for me, from that day on I got everything without any "processing", mostly through TV shows and video games.
Before that I got fluid in Spanish by living in a non tourist location for several years.
About Reddit: how can users be comfortable with a repository which does not have a decent navigation of past submissions?! You cannot navigate by page, you cannot search by date (or time range), you may be bound to an "infinite scroll" system without a "bookmark" to return there later... Do not users demanding by trade decent control have the disappointing impression they are driving a car without seat or floor, or with a faulty steering wheel?
(Just one of the issues. Implicit: users have a number of severe faults with the instrument to get detached, if they do not orient themselves to forget them.)
One silent downvoter (random phenomenon, part of the noise) highlights though one answer to
> how can users be comfortable with a repository which does not have a decent navigation
: because some are not using it as a repository, they are there for the experience. Completely different mentality in approaching tools, to feed mouths in very different places. The information seeker and the gambler. The "feeler" of "r/aww" not there for a catalogue of kittens.
the train of thought i usually get on when i start thinking about using a screen time tracking app or some app that helps you change your habits, is that we supposedly have the most complex brains in the known universe so its kind of embarrassing that i should even need something like an app to help me. usually that and the amount of effort and maintenance involved is enough motivation for me to stop whatever stupid shit I'm doing
One thing that struck me while reading this is the potential connection of doomscrolling to our evolution.
Humans are in large part "information foragers", in the sense that information has been vitally important to our survival as a species, and potentially a part of why we've developed larger brains than similar animals. [0] For example: A poisonous berry has a very different utility from an edible berry. Or: A monsoon season changes the climate enough to make an important difference for your tribe's survival whenever it happens. Querying your surroundings, or other humans for this information might have a large impact.
In that sense, it makes perfect sense that we "can't stop seeking novel and potentially interesting information" on these sites. Of course the way some of them are designed to be addicting doesn't help. But it illustrates why it's hard (or impossible) to quit doing this activity in it's entirety.
Maybe we shouldn't strive to quit searching for information, but make sure we have a satisfactory information scavenging activity as our go-to? I don't know what that would look like in practice, but the first thing that pops up in my mind is something like having a list of topics that seem interesting, and that you actively seek out information on, where you partially investigate some of the forks in the road.
Then there's the problem of being too exhausted to do something actively, which might need another solution entirely of course.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3n5qtj89QE
Sadly I don't remember the timestamp of Jordan Peterson's statement saying humans are information foragers, but intuitively it holds up.
everyone else (twitter/reddit/facebook, your boss, MLM-idiots, ...) constantly undervalues your time, so how are you supposed to know your times value at all?
The old thing was email that people were addicted to checking because you MIGHT get an interesting email. It's the same way with training a dog. You don't always give them a treat for behavior. If you only randomly give them a treat they are more likely to perform the behavior because they don't want to miss the reward. If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior.
That's how social media and more specifically sites like reddit and HN are addictive.
I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is.
But we are compelled to continually check because of the fear of missing out on some piece of beneficial information. If we were always presented with good information then we could more easily delay checking the sites.