One idea is to make the site deliberately slower. As for myself, there is so much content on the internet that if a link is slow, I'll just close the window an

One idea is to make the site deliberately slower. As for myself, there is so much content on the internet that if a link is slow, I'll just close the window and move on to something else. When the work network is laggy, I close the browser alltogether. And get back to work in my IDE. This implies two things. Since a slow site would making participation (viewing links, posting comments, reading comments) much more difficult, people would only have an incentive to do so when they really felt it was worthwhile. The second is that those of us at work would be more productive. Either that or open a tab for Slashdot, but all you can control is the amount of time wasted specifically as a result of HN. Of course, people will complain that the site is too slow, but you could be "smart" about performance degradation. At what rate has a user opened links? Often if I'm cruising away clicking articles and then the network slows, I'll stop and think "Man, I have 6 tabs open. Maybe I should just close the browser and get back to work." Or "Posting this comment can wait. I'll just do it later" and never get back to it unless I really felt the need to contribute. This is consistent with what you yourself have posted about with respect to internet-vs-non-internet computers. Rolling your chair across the room (45 seconds) is equivalent to a 45-second network delay - possibly enough to get your head back into the game.