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.