Maybe a counter at the top of the page (karma, counter) to show how much time someone has spent on HN in the past (day, week, #{interval}) guilt-trip (some) people into spending less time on the site? Or with the number of times they've opened up a page to HN?
// edit: This is a social/mental problem, not a technical one. I'd be surprised if a complicated change did anything to fix it. Noprocrast works because its simple. Changing algorithms around isn't as obvious, any behavior changes as a result would probably be much more subtle to observe.
The only time it's a productivity hit to me is when I'm procrastinating anyway. I wouldn't worry about that. Focus on making the conversation as interesting as you can.
As a few people have already pointed out, a lot of our time is spent consuming the content and not necessarily creating it. Reading the comments is probably the biggest productivity hit for me. The reason for that is that you can quickly get stuck reading long threads of discussions - especially on the more popular articles. While this is great, maybe try making only the top 5 or 10 comments visible by default, and then giving the user a 'See More' button that would show the rest of the comments. You could also only show the first and second level comments in the default mode, which would add to the simplicity and make it less of a productivity hit. It would be interesting to see people's reaction to this feature if you ever decided to implement it.
Personally, I dislike the "more" way of viewing comments. I like to scroll with the arrow keys or page up/down (well, fn + arrow). If I have to move the mouse over to "show more," I'm just as likely to hit cmd + w. Especially if its "more" for different levels of comments and to get more comments. The button won't even be in the same place!
Make it so that comments don't need to be made right away (to get upvote exposure) to be in the top 10 or 20. Maybe you could normalize each upvote by the number of views per unit time (view rate). You could measure success by trying to increase the average age of the top 10 comments (age = time since article was posted).
What if you emailed a daily digest of the top stories? I visit hn less often when I get the content elsewhere. I found the twitter bots that post links help with this. But twitter is itself a time wasted. Email is easier to control.
Or, what if you reported on the time spent on the site in a give day. Make the font size num_hours*4 em. You make why you measure, right? Show a graph of waste and people might try to make it go down.
Have a simple graph on the profile page showing how many minutes the user spent on HN each day in the past week and/or a number on the top panel showing minutes spent on HN over last 24 hours.
I find that just measuring something is a far more powerful way to improve my habits. I am far more likely to set noprocrast=1 if I realize I spent 3 hours on HN yesterday.
Edit: Just realized Zev had posted the same idea a while back.
Have a widget on the homepage that shows the top 10 links of the day so that we don't have to read and sift through every single submission. Just reading only 10 links per day would be less of a time sucker.
I don't read it that much at work, but do more so when I am working at home, and sometimes on the train. It is my go-to place to find out what is going on.
I think it's more valuable than other ways I might waste time. That said there's another advantage that I think is more important.
I'm passionate about technology. The people who work for me like technology but aren't as passionate as I am. So I require a half hour of HN time of them every day and I've found it makes them much better employees. Conversations around the office focus on technology rather than "what you did last night" and everyone is better in touch with future trends (something that many code jockeys tend to ignore)
Yes and no. I spend a lot of time on HN because it's one of the best places to spend my time when I'm not being productive and in that sense it does hurt my productivity.
But if HN didn't exist I'd just be spending the time on other sites instead (like reddit).
I've been feeling that the Internet hurts my mental health.
Filling my brain with HN, Reddit, DrudgeReport, Twitter, Facebook, email, chat, etc., is exhausting.
And this is on top of the massive amounts of code I digest when I am being productive. New libraries to learn, more of my teammates code to decipher, new specs to write, new architectures to understand.
It's really exhausting, and my short term memory for things like names and social events is shot to shit. If I can't get a brunch appointment in my email inbox, I will forget it.
I'm not complaining too loudly -- I'm never bored, and I'm happy and successful in my career. But I'm just feeling more and more like my brain is full and every new piece of information pushes out something else, but there's still endless more information to absorb.
I think that the temporary loss in productivity due to a few minutes reading instead of coding is more than compensated by the inspiration and intellectual stimulation that I often feel while participating at HN.
It does take away from actual billable hours, but between HN and Google Reader (my two major timesinks), I learn new things or discover new products/services that end up being very valuable to myself or my clients (or at least just stretch the ol' brain muscle a bit).
One thing my clients have said they love about me that they can present me with a tough problem and I always have some service bookmarked that will solve it.
So yeah it's distracting, but it's at least somewhat productive distraction.
Not too much of a time sink for me. When in the office, I only really go on HN when I want to get away from the task at hand for a moment. This is either because I'm stuck on a problem, or just finished something big and need a quick break. Either way, I wasn't going to be writing code in the next few minutes.
I just skim the rss when I'm taking a break. This usually only lasts a few seconds unless something actually looks interesting, plus there's a clear indication of what's new and what isn't (constant reposts aside).
I need breaks from what I'm working on - and this site fills that need. There's only so much I will get done in a day and this unquenched optimism & productivity that is common here is simply not something I do. I end up thinking back to something I read here months & years later, thus cementing it's leisure value above reddit, fukung and twitter.
Yes it absolutely does, and I don't see a way to solve it or if I even should be solving it. It doesn't get in the way of my work, but I can't help to scan the front page every 30-60 minutes or load the front page on my phone at an idle moment.
Actually what hurts my productivity is after spend some time in HN. My mind is cluttered with different ideas from the articles which I have read that is more difficult to focus on the task at hand.
