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I don't want to speak for silicon2401, but at least for me, cold turkey worked fine. But we need to be clear about what needs to be quit. It's any and all news.

I don't want to speak for silicon2401, but at least for me, cold turkey worked fine. But we need to be clear about what needs to be quit. It's any and all news. Consumption of information is important for various reasons, if for nothing else then to satisfy basic intellectual curiosity. But you need to be judicious about where it is coming from and how often you spend your time consuming it, along with the extent to which that consumption is interactive. So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have. Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs. There is where Hacker News is still useful. You can discover quality blogs. They'll be repeatedly linked to here, rise to the top, and not be causing long arguments and flame wars. Facebook honestly used to be useful for the same purpose. But there is always a balance between discovering useful sources of new information and time spent getting sucked into long arguments and rabbit-holing yourself with outrage bait. At some point, Facebook became not enough of the former and too much of the latter. Hacker News hasn't reached that point yet, at least for me. When it does, I will leave Hacker News as well. Meanwhile, since I bookmarked the highest-quality blogs that consistently show up here, I'll just start going straight to the source. A few key reasons I don't think Hacker News is that bad yet include the comparatively small user base, somewhat of an industry focus, active and consistent moderation that is fair and well-explained, and no personalization. Everyone sees the same list of links. The list is still algorithmically sorted, but since the algorithm is largely just upvote count and recency and isn't personalized, I don't find it that bad. At least not yet.

FollowingTheDao 5y ago
Thank you for writing all of that. But now it seems that hacker news is shadow banning me so I’m just going to stop hacker news as well. (I am posting too fast????) What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction? So that’s just not useful to my well-being. And I think also it enables a fear of missing out.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  > What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction? That's actually a great way to summarize my views on social media/news. It's letting yourself have an addiction, which only corporation XYZ can satisfy at the cost of at least your time, but often even money, energy, or well-being as well. Here's one more tip from my experience: if you think you need to know something, go out and do your own research based on action. Don't just watch Yahoo Finance videos every day. Question your lifestyle, and if you're not sure of your financial habits, do some research. Maybe learn how to invest for retirement, or check in on how your investments are doing if you've already started. If you hear bad things about the economy, what change is that going to make on your life? Are you concerned that you're spending too much? If so, then take a look at your budget, do some research on the current state of the economy, and then assess what your budget should be starting tomorrow. Don't just passively sit there endlessly consuming news. Leave it alone, and just come back to it if you have a specific use case that it serves.
silicon2401 5y ago
> I don't want to speak for silicon2401, but at least for me, cold turkey worked fine. But we need to be clear about what needs to be quit. It's any and all news. Consumption of information is important for various reasons, if for nothing else then to satisfy basic intellectual curiosity. But you need to be judicious about where it is coming from and how often you spend your time consuming it, along with the extent to which that consumption is interactive. Funny enough, I couldn't have expressed my own opinion better myself. I couldn't agree more. > So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have. I agree this is necessary if one can't stop myself. My approach is (I use hckrnews.com for HN) if I want to see whether there's anything interesting on HN, I load it up and scan the current page. I click whatever's interesting, maybe check for replies if I've commented recently. That's it. No scrolling or going to previous pages. With this approach I can still benefit from the genuinely useful info and discussions that sometimes get posted here, without falling into the trap of scrolling forever. Otherwise I do completely avoid news > Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs. Also agree with this. It's actually crazy that once I put effort into consuming content with purpose, I realized how painfully boring most content is. Most of Netflix is boring, most of youtube is boring, most of reddit is boring. After years of too much social media, watching too much youtube, reading too much reddit, reading a book or watching a movie that I found through looking for specific things I enjoy (rather than what a feed or algorithm suggests) was unbelievably engrossing. I thought I didn't enjoy reading or movies anymore, but it was actually that I developed a terrible habit of scrolling and hoping something good would eventually come my way, much like gambling. I actually read a great article on HN sometime in the past year (actually 2y ago, how time flies) that fits perfectly here: > My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it. > I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight. > My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23938007#23940090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23938007#23940090 And that comment speaks to your next point about how HN can still be useful, with moderation.

FollowingTheDao 5y ago

Thank you for writing all of that. But now it seems that hacker news is shadow banning me so I’m just going to stop hacker news as well. (I am posting too fast????) What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction? So that’s just not useful to my well-being. And I think also it enables a fear of missing out.

silicon2401 5y ago
> What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction? That's actually a great way to summarize my views on social media/news. It's letting yourself have an addiction, which only corporation XYZ can satisfy at the cost of at least your time, but often even money, energy, or well-being as well. Here's one more tip from my experience: if you think you need to know something, go out and do your own research based on action. Don't just watch Yahoo Finance videos every day. Question your lifestyle, and if you're not sure of your financial habits, do some research. Maybe learn how to invest for retirement, or check in on how your investments are doing if you've already started. If you hear bad things about the economy, what change is that going to make on your life? Are you concerned that you're spending too much? If so, then take a look at your budget, do some research on the current state of the economy, and then assess what your budget should be starting tomorrow. Don't just passively sit there endlessly consuming news. Leave it alone, and just come back to it if you have a specific use case that it serves.

silicon2401 5y ago

> I don't want to speak for silicon2401, but at least for me, cold turkey worked fine. But we need to be clear about what needs to be quit. It's any and all news. Consumption of information is important for various reasons, if for nothing else then to satisfy basic intellectual curiosity. But you need to be judicious about where it is coming from and how often you spend your time consuming it, along with the extent to which that consumption is interactive. Funny enough, I couldn't have expressed my own opinion better myself. I couldn't agree more. > So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have. I agree this is necessary if one can't stop myself. My approach is (I use hckrnews.com for HN) if I want to see whether there's anything interesting on HN, I load it up and scan the current page. I click whatever's interesting, maybe check for replies if I've commented recently. That's it. No scrolling or going to previous pages. With this approach I can still benefit from the genuinely useful info and discussions that sometimes get posted here, without falling into the trap of scrolling forever. Otherwise I do completely avoid news > Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs. Also agree with this. It's actually crazy that once I put effort into consuming content with purpose, I realized how painfully boring most content is. Most of Netflix is boring, most of youtube is boring, most of reddit is boring. After years of too much social media, watching too much youtube, reading too much reddit, reading a book or watching a movie that I found through looking for specific things I enjoy (rather than what a feed or algorithm suggests) was unbelievably engrossing. I thought I didn't enjoy reading or movies anymore, but it was actually that I developed a terrible habit of scrolling and hoping something good would eventually come my way, much like gambling. I actually read a great article on HN sometime in the past year (actually 2y ago, how time flies) that fits perfectly here: > My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it. > I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight. > My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23938007#23940090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23938007#23940090 And that comment speaks to your next point about how HN can still be useful, with moderation.