I think I'm similar. But why didn't people talk about newspaper addiction back then? Sometimes I wonder—even before smartphones, people spent that time reading books, looking up information, and reading newspapers. That kind of addiction was seen as "positive." But in reality, it was probably disrupting daily life too, in its own way.
When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.
I don't think I've seen a less accessible *font* in my life, including all the dark grey on black and yellow on white ones. Those are hard to read, but this one makes my eyes hurt, they actually started to hurt after I tried reading it despite discomfort. How come? Reading random text for 10 seconds can cause people physical pain? I wear glasses for near-sightedness and slight astigmatism, I wonder if it's related, and if people with 20/20 vision experience it differently.
I have 20/20 vision and this presentation hurt my eyes. I'm glad my browser has "reader mode" to normalize things like this. I'm not trying to yuck someone else's yum. I simply appreciate the technical ability to read someone else's post in a way that doesn't cause discomfort.
I know this because the first thing I did when I got to the page was hit F12 to bring up the debugging tools and turn these styles off so I could read it. :)
I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
There’s so much more information to consume than news — or worse, tech news. Every day I find new things to learn about physics, history, geology, paleontology, biology… and not just things we discovered today, but decades and centuries worth of findings.
There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.
People are complaining at that font should take another look.
I think there's something maybe special going on there.
Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.
Wild!
And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.
Moreover, the "content" isn't always information. It can be informative and it can be news you need to know about. But it's often garbage, disinformation and the information analogue of empty calories in food.
I'm not sure there's always a more efficient way to find that same information. If you already have a question, sure, you can look for an answer. Sometimes you stumble across a post about something you hadn't even thought to look into, though. I think that's part of what he's talking about when he mentions finding things that changed his life.
If you are browsing, you aren't searching for any specific piece of information. You're just looking at whatever is presented to you via whatever algo in use. In this case reading a book would, IMHO, be better. You stumble across all kinds of interesting pieces of knowledge, thoughtfully written prose, facts (in some books), great stories and characters in other. Though I do now have to condition this with; books written before say 2022 to stay clear of AI slop books that are flooding the space as we speak. Those books are worse than browsing the internet.
My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!
I think people may disagree with you on what constitutes a tangential annoyance. Is there any point at which the format is, in fact, a legitimate annoyance?
tangential and legitimate are not mutually exclusive. the majority of the grievances are infact the latter; they are legitimate
what makes them also the former is that (and surely the reason for the rule) is that because these grievances are so commonly expressed when links are shared they create a near constant 'noise' in the signal to noise of each discussion, with signal being the idea or message intended to be shared by the poster rather than the medium it arrived in
a better way to discuss the tangent or the medium would be by submitting its own HN post. that way theres a better S/N ratio for everything
example: scientific breakthrough is shared on fbook
signal: any discussion about that breakthrough or its Nth order effects on anything
noise: any discussion about the fbook website, walled gardens, zark muckerburg, anything that would be on any link for that site regardless of the message inside the medium
those discussions arent illegitimate, they are better served by targeted discussion on their posts like..
some websites are stylized the point of illegibility
fbook website dark patterns
popups make alt F4
..rather than increasing noise across the whole of HN. this rule is closely related to another site rule: "use the best possible interpretation of the parent comment" because it too is a rule that is in place as an attempt to steer toward "curious discussion" (high S/N ratio)
What's the point in linking unreadable website? I just opened it, saisd "Jesus!" and immediately closed it, I like my eyes. People should just flag unereable mess like this.
Good dang, you're right but the annoyance with this one is far from tangential or "common"...
If the site used a black font over black background it would be more readable as I could at least select the text and read it.
To add insult to injury, the site's name flashes. I'd say that the ONE interesting thing about this link is exactly how exotically bad the presentation is!
If you zoom in its actually 3 fonts. It looks line one of those Lain fan sites.
I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
I think parent is within bounds to complain here.
This is a pretty horrendous font that is an accessibility issue not just a “tangential annoyance”— this is also a uniquely nauseating multi color font with flicker effects that is both interesting in its own right and hardly common.
you shouldn't take it into consideration, they aren't a mod and clearly have nothing better to do with their time. the pedantry on this site sometimes...
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 57.6 ms ] threadIt looks gorgeous as an art piece, but it's impossible to read.
Form over function to the extreme.
When I see things like this, it sometimes occurs to me that the people who create "addiction" are the ones in power. Come to think of it, it makes me wonder why there was never any such thing as newspaper addiction.
It isn't personalized, so many sections aren't of much interest.
and: https://archive.org/details/americannervousn00bearuoft/page/... - one note on this, Beard blamed nervous exhaustion on steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and uh... the mental activity of women... This excerpt for a tl;dr: https://english.web.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/english/doc...
For how addiction is defined, google ICD-11. (I'm an alcoholic, 5 years sober)
I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.
The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.
As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)
When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.
I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.
This is me on eBay :)
There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.
I think there's something maybe special going on there.
Probably unintentional ... but I swear reading 'word at a time' the words are in a way clearer, like your mind is able to abstract them out of the background.
Wild!
And yes, information is 'the thing' but it depends on how it's presented obviously.
That's the addiction, not the information.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
what makes them also the former is that (and surely the reason for the rule) is that because these grievances are so commonly expressed when links are shared they create a near constant 'noise' in the signal to noise of each discussion, with signal being the idea or message intended to be shared by the poster rather than the medium it arrived in
a better way to discuss the tangent or the medium would be by submitting its own HN post. that way theres a better S/N ratio for everything
example: scientific breakthrough is shared on fbook
signal: any discussion about that breakthrough or its Nth order effects on anything
noise: any discussion about the fbook website, walled gardens, zark muckerburg, anything that would be on any link for that site regardless of the message inside the medium
those discussions arent illegitimate, they are better served by targeted discussion on their posts like..
some websites are stylized the point of illegibility
fbook website dark patterns
popups make alt F4
..rather than increasing noise across the whole of HN. this rule is closely related to another site rule: "use the best possible interpretation of the parent comment" because it too is a rule that is in place as an attempt to steer toward "curious discussion" (high S/N ratio)
If the site used a black font over black background it would be more readable as I could at least select the text and read it.
To add insult to injury, the site's name flashes. I'd say that the ONE interesting thing about this link is exactly how exotically bad the presentation is!
I actually like the font even though my eyes hate it. Its a short read so no biggie. Maybe remove the transparency for a sharper look and make the spacing of the 3 fonts slightly closer to each other.
Maybe try to avoid making a statement using a font which literally hurts my eyes, and possibly the eyes of many others. That's messed up.
Also information addiction should be a human "feature" I suppose, shouldn't it?
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge and so forth.
The font is actually cool but it belongs in games like Alien Isolation (and possibly others) it's just not good for blogging methinks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(reader mode works perfectly well on this site afaict)
I noticed this about myself about 25 years ago... before the internet really took off on the dopamine rollercoatser it is now.