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Ask HN: Thoughts on cyclical content refreshing?

4 points by ak86 ↗ HN
I spend a fair amount of time consuming content from various sources - feeds, HN, twitter, reddit - dedicatedly and in between activities. While obviously a personal commentary, I was interested in why I end up spending so much time - despite understanding full well that I had a ton of other activities I could productively engage in, and what could I do to overcome it.

My theory is that random reinforcement is the culprit, at least in my case. I'll find a few gems once in a while, unpredictably, and I'll be scanning my sources looking for the next gem.

My proposed solution is to create personal cyclical patterns of consumption, so that users are only exposed to new content at regular cycles chosen by them - increasing the predictability of finding great content, and reducing the addiction. This is somewhat similar to the noprocrast option in HN, but I'm imagining a broader user controlled layer between the content creation and content consumption, and possible native integration within a site's features.

I wanted to get some quick thoughts from the community on this? Does this affect you? Do you think such a solution would be helpful? I would be happy to flesh this idea out in more detail and discuss more if there's interest in the community.

Thanks for your thoughts!

2 comments

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Sander_Marechal
I'm interested in this. Random reinforcement definitely had an effect on me in the past. The hardest part is IMHO recognising the problem. I once read an article about how games were made addictive using random reinforcement. After that I could spot the behaviour in my own online activities and I cut back. I now check e-mail and news sites only three times a day on set hours instead of all day long (once in the morning, once at lunch and once at the end of the day).

But, I have never had to use technical solutions to help me with this. Once I understood the problem and could spot it, changing my behaviour and sticking with it wasn't hard for me. But it took a while before I really understood the problem.

pratikpoddar
I agree with you. One very simple technical solution that I used a few months back was to use a firefox addon which blocks my facebook, orkut, twitter for 15 minutes after I have used it for 15 minutes . Will that work for you?