Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
I worry about News.YC being a time sink, so here's a crazy idea: what if it were turned off a few hours a day? Time zones are obviously a problem, but we can tell when most users are active from the logs, so if we went black for a few hours during that time we'd help the most people.
It seems worth at least trying. Just a few hours would be enough to break most people's cycle of procrastination. And if anything it might improve the feeling of community, because users would tend to all show up together at opening time.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadAlso, does anyone have any interest in a news.yc book club of sorts, maybe a book of the month type thing? I'm guessing everyone else will read the new Gladwell book eventually so it would be fun to discuss.
As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all at once? It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.
Maybe there are other means to limit it - for example, only let users submit a max of (say) 2 links a day.
Not sure limiting comments would have a desirable effect - But you could limit the number of story/comment votes users get a day.
Might make people more frugal with their time - but still keep a high standard of contribution.
You're right, we should make the down hours fluctuate a little bit randomly. Like within the peak visit zone, make one or two of the hours a blackout period, and let that change every day (randomize it).
The page that replaces YC News during that time could be anything. What if YC did some advertising? That way, the silly folks who sit there refreshing (probably me) will at least be doing something productive (generating pageviews)?
Yeah, on second thought, it's probably a bad idea to make a service like this spurious. Imagine if Google decided to do that to keep me from checking my email.
Don't social news sites sort of depend on them being "up" in the background "working out" what is interesting? Won't bringing it down for 3 peak hours just reduce the churn of good material?
I tend to check hacker news/reddit/etc. at very specific times (like first thing in the AM, right before and after lunch, etc.). If it's down during those times, or if the content is stale (because it's spent the past 3 hours being down), I'm not going to get more work done. I'm going to just stop coming.
Thus returning the site to it's original, smaller, more committed more elite character and hopefully raising the level of discourse, improving the signal to noise ratio, etc.
I'm not sure what pg is thinking but I could see the factors you describe as being a good argument FOR restricting access to the site.
I find the site itself and pg's experiments with attention management to be a fascinating exercise in cognitive science. Taking one of the most addictive forms of news display (look up variable reward schedules and operant conditioning if you want to see why it's so compelling) and attempting to manage it so that you get the benefits (better informed people, faster diffusion of ideas, a 'hotter' intellectual environment) while limiting the time and productivity sink.
//and by the way, thank you Paul Graham for making this possible.
In addition, one needs to fix the problem at the source; the thing that works for me is to turn on "Freedom" and dis-connect myself from the Internet for a few hours.
I find when I've been procrastinating and there's some kind of reward coming in an hour or two (e.g. dinner) that often makes me buckle down and start working.
But once people subconsciously know what that page looks like, I doubt they'll actually read the text -- they'll just come here, see "oh, news.yc is broken right now" and bounce off somewhere else.
I find this idea and noprocrast a tad bizarre. HN has a simple goal (sharing info of interest to hackers), which thanks to focused design it does pretty well. Fixing my brain is feature creep, and should be well outside it's scope.
The way I look at it, no one loses anything by trying it... and it's not hard to put things back to normal if it doesn't work out.
Though, it would be an interesting experiment to do for awhile; I'd like to see if your thought about improving the community by taking it away for a bit each day would have any noticeable effect.
Also, among the sites to procrastinate on, I imagine that HN is one of the better ones - There's mostly intelligent conversations and submissions on here (as opposed to "Guide to Smoking Pot Around the World" on Digg, "Has to be the most disgusting crime ever... WTF!" on Reddit, or something similar on $insertOtherSocial"News"Site)
It's a bit different - people come back as there is always something going on. noprocrast just excludes you.
If the site is blacked-out there is no reason to visit.
I find it a very useful feature, but sometimes I click override when I know I should probably be working.
A way to effectively ban myself by removing the override option (by choice) would be effective for those of us worried about YC being a time-sink.
You could log out of your account if it was that important, but it seems like putting another barrier in-place as an annoyance will accomplish the desired effect.
I often find noprocrast does exactly what it's supposed to do and reminds me that I should be working.
A good solution would force the user to become acutely aware of what he is about to do and give him time to regain enough discipline to stop.
Perhaps it would help if the user were forced to watch a video about procrastination or answer a series of relevant or time consuming questions before proceeding to override noprocrast.
I used to use noprocrast until I got in the habit of using override. Now I uncomment a line to my /etc/hosts file that points news.yc to another IP. It works a lot better because if I go to news.yc while the IP is redirected, my browser caches the IP and I can't access the site, so I have to remember to unblock it before I try to access it. This forces me to think about what I'm doing.
Good idea.
This will also have a kick-on effect to searchyc and a few others. It seems the time-sink idea is something that should be looked into more. Different people procrastinate at different levels. I smell the beginnings of an algorythm.
"... because users would tend to all show up together at opening time. ..."
This bit's hard. I log in at GMT+11 and it seems I log in out of sync with a lot of stories. Having a break will also do funny things to submissions as news never has a break. Expect the server to be hit at opening time.
I am asking this because I am in another timezone and I would like to get a snapshot of HN at the right time.
I think the concept is a little like a departmental morning tea.
I'll check that out. (And, as an aside, I love the level of feedback that Hacker News gets on YCombinator's stuff. It's so cool that people like you are members here.)
Besides, people are going to procrastinate one way or another. More importantly, if you are spending too much time on the site, then just stop loading it. Nobody else is making you reload the page X times a day.
Its like my grandmother told me as a kid when I took apart her iron, "Don't fix what ain't broke."
That leaves the morning (7:30-10am) and evening (4:30pm and later) to getting things done. I'd rather see news.y.c allow people to apply whatever means of time management they use (my "idea", RescueTime) to managing their y.c time.
One in the middle idea is to disable posting during those hours, allow only reading.
Or as captain kurtz said ..
"In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. "
Signed PG is an extra effect: Many take your words religiously :)
As an aside, my deskmate habitually edits his /etc/hosts file to keep himself under control :)