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Don't you think if people came to the site at certain hours and there was a page saying "get back to work, we'll reopen in 1 hour and 14 minutes" it might inter
by pg 18y ago
Don't you think if people came to the site at certain hours and there was a page saying "get back to work, we'll reopen in 1 hour and 14 minutes" it might interrupt their procrastination in a useful way, and make them think, "Ok, I'll work for a couple hours, then read the news?"
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.
- cperciva 18y agoIf people saw that hypothetical page once, I think they might respond to it the way you describe. 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.
- dood 18y agoI'm pretty sure this would just subconsciously train me to procrastinate elsewhere. At least when procrastinating on HN there's a chance I'll learn something about programming or business. 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.
- epe 18y agoFixing your brain is feature creep, but keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio is well within the design goal of HN. If intermittently turning off the site can help accomplish that (not saying it will, just that it might), it seems worth trying.
- sgk284 18y agoI think this is an interesting experiment worth trying if nothing else. You'll probably see the polls weigh against trying the change, but that's generally because people don't like change. 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.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- kleneway 18y agoTwo words: Rescue. Time.