I have the problem that my addiction (scrolling 4chan* and HN for hours) has materially added value to my life. I've been introduced to books and resources and technical advice that I've found nowhere else. But I have trouble controlling the amount of time I spend browsing.
*4chan is full of hate, but if you grew up with it and have a sort of auto-filter, there are surprising things there. I would not have read (and deeply enjoyed) Moby Dick if not for 4chan. Weird. This is not a recommendation though, generally speaking, avoid the place at all costs.
I feel the same way about HN. I feel like I’ve learned a lot about technology, software, entrepreneurship from this site. But it would far more valuable to have spent the majority of those hours reading books, learning new skills, networking, or even just being more focused at work. It’s tough to find balance.
An aggregator like Feedly is really good in this regard; you can set up sources of interest, add filters, and then- critically- when you reach the end of your feeds for the day, you're done.
Something like hackernews or reddit is more endless, without a neatly defined "stop". (Of course, I'm still here)
If they're genuinely useful, maybe you don't really need to quit them so much as establish firm boundaries as to their use. Not just as a matter of time, but also space and even circumstance.
Something for instance, like "I can only browse HN on my phone, during lunch." if you can successfully establish it as a ritual, that limits your potential window to time waste. Perhaps this is not a sentence entirely directed toward you, but: There's diminishing returns to HN's utility the longer you spend time on it. Knowledge you collect but can't/won't act upon is meaningless.
>*4chan is full of hate, but if you grew up with it and have a sort of auto-filter, there are surprising things there. I would not have read (and deeply enjoyed) Moby Dick if not for 4chan. Weird. This is not a recommendation though, generally speaking, avoid the place at all costs.
I wonder if your in some kind of local maximum, i bet if you stopped wasting time on 4chan you would find other things that make your life richer. like you just dont know how much value can be added to your life from other things, especially ones that wont require so much filtering on your part
I've quit for up to a month at a time here and there. Where I don't fill that hole with a similar diversion and instead one of my productive hobbies, my life indeed becomes much richer. Although, my participation some of those hobbies were very much improved by some of the time spent on 4chan.
Altogether, I intend to quit visiting. Hopefully sooner than later. I 'quit' rather frequently. The best comparison I can make for my compulsive usage is to someone who started smoking before they were 10. I was heavily browsing forums by 8 and 4chan by 12.
Consider something like Cold Turkey, the paid version (one-time fee) has an included scheduler if you can't trust yourself to turn it on when you'd need to. If you don't want to pay for it, the free version includes CLI operations, you can make your own scheduler script without too much trouble.
HN has an included time limiter in the options.. but nothing stops you from launching it in incognito so it's only useful as far as you have willpower.
Linux user, so no on the cold turkey. I'd just circumvent it anyway, I don't believe it could prevent me from uninstalling.
I've done the hosts file thing and other efforts. It is clear the only thing that will work is looking right at the bottle and realizing I don't want it anymore, much like the article in question suggests.
Leave. Seriously. Don't visit if you can help it. There are other, better places to go now. I only visit because I'm semi-involuntarily hooked.
If you instead mean to ask "It's hard for me to imagine anything positive coming out of 4chan. How did you get value out of that site?":
I prefer to remain anonymous and won't describe my hobbies in detail, but among other things I was pointed to new (to me) bands, books and study resources, sometimes quite obscure. The 'what I read, what I expected, what I got' memes persuaded me to read literature that I ignored when it was suggested elsewhere. I learned a lot about computers on /g/, a lot about cars on /o/, etc. Iirc, those communities were developed earlier than their reddit counterparts. There may have been other car forums, but they weren't as funny. Additionally, the site was always hateful, but much less so than it is now.
I suppose also that it helped with my lonliness. For many years I found 4chan, at it's best, to be a much more sincere place than other more moderated communities. Elsewhere, someone might get banned for a clear and honest opinion on my post if it is unkind. On 4chan, someone might insist that I kill myself.
So if I made a post on 4chan and the worst I got was 'you're stupid', or even positivity, I knew it was genuine because that person had the other options available. Elsewhere, I was not so sure.
*4chan is full of hate, but if you grew up with it and have a sort of auto-filter, there are surprising things there. I would not have read (and deeply enjoyed) Moby Dick if not for 4chan. Weird. This is not a recommendation though, generally speaking, avoid the place at all costs.