Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care about. I think the brain justifies it since hey, at least I’m “learning” something (not really).
Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products.
People are now terrified of putting down a screen and being left alone with their own thoughts for more than 30 seconds. It's horrifying what's bouncing around up in that dome, and having to process it.
But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Idk if it's just terrified, but I think we're addicted. This probably sounds ridiculous but I recently blocked some apps and sites on my phone and actually felt a little off for a day, like my sleep was weird. I think there was a slight withdrawal from the constant bombardment of stuff. It is helping kill my Facebook habit. I don't even really like the site, I just check it impulsively. It's weird.
Reddit is another one, the infinite scroll I think is addictive. Trying to kill that habit. But there is useful information on there so it's hard to disable it completely.
Yep. I deactivated Facebook and it took a week or so to get used to not having it. I feel a lot better without it that I will probably delete it. I do want to keep messenger so that’s one of the only reasons to keep it.
True, but AFAIK, you can't keep your contacts (friends?) list when you delete the account and create a new one just on Messenger. An alternative is to deactivate the account [1] – this effectively removes your account from Facebook, but allows you to keep Messenger with all the contacts. (It probably also keeps other associated accounts, such as Instagram.) Although, it means that the moment you log into Facebook, your account comes back up, with all the relationships that were left off, tags, photos, etc.
Looking at certain sites just becomes a muscle reflex. The second I'm bored, I feel the urge to look at my phone.
If you have a large enough rotation of websites, you never feel properly bored, so you can spend the entire day mindlessly browsing.
I think it's easy to tell whether you're browsing with intent or just killing time. It's just hard to close the lid and go do something else, especially if you've been doing it for so long that you forgot what "something else" is.
Delete the mobile apps. I scrolled reddit to infinity on my phone going through news that would make me depressed. I deleted the app and have been happy ever since. I come here twice a day for 10 minutes instead and my screen time reduced by 40minutes at least. I don’t feel gloomy all the time because of news too
FWIW I did something similar. Deleted my reddit account and now just occasionally visit specific subreddits that I used to subscribe to. I find that actually going to a subreddit to find specific content I want to look at helps break the loop of endless scrolling but I still get just as informed/entertained.
Yes, definitely. I feel this way as well. It's not ridiculous at all. Forced withdrawal is the only way to begin recovery and get back sensitivity.
People are extremely scared of the word "addiction" though. I feel the same way about sugar and basically all carbohydrates at all and it's very challenging to talk about.
Congratulations! I’ve been fruit free and almost vegetable free for 3 years and it’s been the best time of my life. I’ve lost over 200 pounds and kept it off for longer than I ever have in 3+ decades of weight loss attempts.
It feels like how I treat junk food and snacks: I’m welcome to have as much as I want, but I have to go out of my way to get it every time. Never stock up, which in this analogy would mean never install the native app or subscribe to newsletters or notifications.
For reddit et al, I only view it on the browser. Sure, I get bombarded by popovers and alerts telling me to install the app, but I have to work my way to get to the content if I really wanted to view it.
You can use extensions to either delete or remove the infinite scroll.
In my opinion, the infinite scroll is both addictive and fruitless. I rarely find something fun when it's buried deep in the feed. That's pretty obvious. If it was a fun post, it would've been at the top, right?
If you don't trust any extension with site-reading capability, here's a simple solution: scroll down as much as you are comfortable, and then work upwards!
Not sure about how different the effectiveness is, but I use the Freedom app to block sites at schedules times on my desktop. I also have it on my phone, but it’s not as reliable on iPhone as it sometimes randomly deactivates.
No need for infernal advocacy here. Reddit is to some extent the unfortunate heir of newsgroups, as well as many independent forums, so of course there is going to be a lot of interesting and useful information on it.
The thing I imagine that gives some people such a negative view is coming in contact through the brand "reddit" and being dumped into large controversial sub-reddits straight away.
A lot of people bump into a particular sub-reddit through a search result and have no idea of the dumpster fires elsewhere on the larger "reddit" site.
Its helpful to get kind of organic opinions on things. See what people are saying if your shopping for something new. Its comes up in google searches a lot. At least there's no seo gaming on a reddit link.
Ive had some ok experiences on reddit too, meet ups, bought stuff, got free concert tickets once too. its hard to write the whole thing off. That might be a different era of reddit though. Its been a few years since I had something like that happen now that i think about it
I have taken 3 photography related courses that all have private groups on FB. I don't use FB in any other capacity but the value of those groups is probably among the highest ROIs on the internet for me (hobby wise at least).
Yes-ish. Not that facebook is providing anything from their side but the adoption rate of the non-technical participants is sky-high. much higher than what i have seen with private forums.
I can only speculate but my guess is that all the participants are already actively using facebook and hence don't have any reasons not to join and use the private groups. Notifications are dealt with quickly because of the already implemented workflow from their side.
Pick a programming language or piece of popular tech, chances are good it has a subReddit of discussions and links to blog posts and announcements, sometimes with some of the creator/maintainer people posting.
I can't lay hands on a link, but there was an article about the psychological phenomenon of time passing too quickly. It was a measurable state you could detect a brain as either being in or not in.
One of the most reliable ways to reset internal time perception? Experiencing nature.
Yes. The gist was that your brain gets caught in a loop in which your perception of time was continuously skewed, leading to a constant feeling of hurrying / lacking enough time.
Spending time in nature essentially jumped your brain out of the loop, even after you returned from nature.
Think it might have been a summary of this: "Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being" (2012)
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal, 1654 AD.
This is not a new problem, we are just experiencing a hyper version of it. Social media, the world's knowledge at your finger tips, is distraction on steroids.
I’m afraid of boredom because I’m not loved. When we had no phone addiction, other people were talking more too. If I get my dose of speech/interaction during the day, I could quit twitter anytime. But since I regularly don’t get it, especially as a programmer where written chat is the norm as an ersatz of human interaction, then I compulsively need to read and write information and watch (*gobble) videos, and generally fall asleep to the sound of a video talking to me.
With enough human interaction and love, I come back to being an avid reader, consume little addictive networks, and don’t mind boredom.
This happened to me as I got older. Now I MUST have something like Seinfeld on to fall asleep. I cannot fall asleep in silence and darkness alone - the angst takes over. Also the accupressure mat is a life saver.
Generating endless ideas is how my brain fights off boredom. Bringing those ideas to life is a different story. The brain is too busy generating new ideas.
Once all of your friends are hooked on their phone, it becomes very lonely to be the only one that doesn't stare at a screen. But what people naturally yearn for is not to get bored alone, but to get bored as a group. So the "quality of bored-ness" goes down as screen usage expands.
> But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Yep! I firmly believe that boredom is not just healthy, but a necessary part of life. Your mind needs downtime and your creativity and imagination need mind-numbing boredom.
Meditation is also a great way to force yourself to be alone with your thoughts. However, speaking from experience, that can lead to some uncomfortable truths -- so it's good to be prepared.
Even among people trying to be productive you sometimes see vortexes of distraction, for instance around note-taking. I like note taking (apps and paper) but I think there is such thing as an over-reliance on them. They promote collecting over being. Perhaps also they stop people from completing their own ideas. One becomes Penelope, weaving the burial shroud of a thought forever.
Note taking can be pernicious because it feels like doing something but it also gives an excuse to not put forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Then they become so large they are unweildy. The more notes, the less supple.
It's ironic because the same tools can be used to empower your thinking[0]. Instead of collecting notes, note taking utilities can be used as a sort of L2 cache when you're trying to think something through. E.g. most of my problem solving involves repeated sessions with a text file, in which I dump my stream of thought and refine it. Sometimes it means literally talking with myself via a text file, sometimes it's constructing an artifact (like a prioritized list of things to do). Same tool, slightly different approach.
--
[0] - Or damage your brain. The fact that I can't think things through unless I'm writing thoughts down or drawing diagrams may be a sign of improved quality of thoughts, or a sign of me no longer being able to think without a crutch.
I think your [0] note points to a hard truth of life. You have to be aware of how you're used to thinking so you can challenge yourself to make your brain work in new ways. I don't think this is by any means essential but I think it can be immensely useful to not always default to the same habit. 80% of the time, it's ok to exploit what you know, but maybe that remaining 20% of the time try thinking in a new way. The hard part is finding those new ways and not being too lazy or rushed to skip it.
I have the opposite experience. I can recall discussions I've read months or years ago. In aggregate, it added a bit of depth to my perception of the world. They gave me a lot more vocabulary to process the world around me, as do good books.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
Time to set up my emacs config to manage my life and stop wasting time.
I find browsing hackernews to be one of the more beneficial activities I can do for 5-20 minutes as a break between more mentally taxing activities. Meditation, going for a walk, getting a snack or a drink, and a quick chat with a friend are other activities I consider both beneficial and short duration.
But I had, and I can tell from experience, it's the one Internet activity where I find it hard to determine its net value.
With anything else - TV shows, Reddit, Facebook, browsing memes - I can tell the marginal value becomes negative very quickly (after satiating the basic need to relax/unwind). So it makes sense to spend some, but only a little time on this.
But with HN... it feels like the above, except every other week I'll find some thought that will improve my understanding of the world. Every other month I'll find a tool that solves a problem or improves something in the projects I'm working on. Every couple years I hit something that essentially alters the course of my career. And around people I work with, I'm known to be the guy that, when told a problem, half of the time will point out a solution mentioned in some HN comment a year earlier (thank $deity for Algolia making finding it again easier).
So bottomline, I suspect the total net value of HN for me, after accounting for opportunity costs, is actually slightly positive. At least the procrastinator in me keeps saying that, conveniently omitting the confidence interval, which is absurdly wide.
I have the complete opposite feeling. As long as you filter yourself fairly well on which topics you read, HN can be immensely useful. You can learn about new things that can help you a lot in your career, that you otherwise may have missed.
Of course I researched the decision outside of HN. But just the superficial exposure you have to so many different things that you wouldn't have by just browsing around is invaluable. And just by hearing something like a name can take you on a tangent that can be very fruitful.
Case in point: I'm very familiar with Kafka, and the discussions on here usually lead to hinting about new technologies that you may not hear of just by reading a Kafka threat. Things like NATS, Jetstream, liftbridge, pulsar, and the list goes on. Having that kind of exposure just knowing that alternatives are out there, and people having real-world experience with them is really useful.
There is a lot that I know which was relevant but is not anymore. A large percentage of knowledge needs constant replacing and often I do not know with what until I‘m exposed. HN gives me exposure. It is part of my solution to staying on top of developments. It does not provide answers to questions I have but to questions I should have had.
Excellent way to phrase it. For lock of a better way of saying it, you don't know what you don't know. You can become comfortable with certain things, but the pace at which stuff moves in this industry makes you stale if you don't at least look at the trends every few months or so. you could always be in the camp that says you should look at new trends, but I'm of the complete opposite viewpoint. Some of these new trends which people love to hate ended up working really well in production for me, and being on HN gave me the exposure I needed to them. It also gives you people that have used these technologies in production, and have opinions on them that might be helpful.
The gamification of Duolingo is something that has really worked for me (as an adult). It has all the parts of an addictive mobile game that keep you coming back: a streak that notifies you if you're in danger of losing it (this is the one that really works for me), social rankings, fun graphics, in game currency. I have a 410 day Spanish streak as of this morning!
I took French in middle/high school with the standard lecture/hw school structure and was a lot less successful than I've been with Duolingo. Duolingo alone probably isn't enough to really learn a language but combined with other resources it provides a great structure to keep you committed and provides a great foundation to build from.
As a language learner (working on my 8th right now), I dabble in Duolingo from time to time and agree that it provides contact time with the language, and any contact time helps reinforce memory.
Language learning in general though, I have found, is not that amenable to gamification. Some learning methods may be more efficient than others, but even with the most efficient methods, real language learning is still inherently and unavoidably a slog. So if you come across a method that makes it "easy", chances are it's not actually working. It's too easy to trick oneself to think that one is making progress, and then find oneself unable to communicate when called upon to do so.
In the polyglot (ie actual practitioners of extreme language learning) community, there are many super talented language learners but a common pattern among them is the use of surprising traditional learning methods. Most do not use Duolingo but instead elect to do things the hard way, by actually going through workbooks, talking to tutors on iTalki, making mistakes, exposing themselves to media, translating, etc. Space repetition tools are sometimes used. Pimsleur is good for speaking, but not reading/writing so it doesn't get used that much.
There are clips of YouTubers where creators show you how to learned a language to a conversational level in 24 hours etc. but if you look more closely, the experiments are highly edited and the actual outcome is not that great.
I've resigned myself to the fact that the way to actually to learn a language is to jump in and do it the hard way, rather than through easier shortcuts. Language learning is about creating new reflexes and creating new pathways int he brain and there's no easy way to do that (the brain itself resists) without discomfort.
That said, tools like Duolingo do create fun and interest in a language -- and fun is needed to sustain oneself through the journey.
> Language learning in general though, I have found, is not that amenable to gamification. Some learning methods may be more efficient than others, but even with the most efficient methods, real language learning is still inherently and unavoidably a slog. So if you come across a method that makes it "easy", chances are it's not actually working
Go to a foreign country and try to get laid. Genuine intrinsic motivation, and the difficulty increases with age. If nothing else, this education is good preparation for a career in business
Heh, that's the usual advice. However if you ask certain polyglots, they will tell you that as a general rule (exceptions exist), being in a foreign country or having a romantic partner aren't necessary or sufficient conditions, and in fact can work against language learning.
How so?
Using a romantic partner as a language-learning partner gets old for said person after a while, especially if you're not actively making progress on the language on the side. Unless said romantic partner is a language teacher, it can be annoying for them to constantly be correcting your mistakes. Over time, this annoyance can actually harm the relationship. Also most native speakers of a language aren't always good teachers -- they may know how to use the language but usually can't explain how things work. It's better to get a tutor whose job is to instruct, bear with your mistakes, and go home after. It's easier to for someone to bear with your mistakes if they don't have to spend all their free time with you.
As for language immersion by living in a country, you'd be surprised how that doesn't really work unless you're actively learning on your own or taking classes. Case in point: I lived in a French-speaking province for 4 years but can barely speak French -- I just never bothered learning. You'd think necessity would force one to learn but there are so many ways to get around actually doing it (e.g. hanging out with expats, using gestures/hand signs, Google Translate, etc.) On the other hand, there are folks who've never been in a Francophone country who can speak French at a high level, often through active learning. In fact, many polyglots often become fluent in a language without ever setting foot in the language's country of origin.
The key really is putting in the work. Getting laid in a foreign country may help kickstart the process, but to achieve working fluency, there are no real shortcuts.
(well, there is one, which is that you already know a related language. This is the only major accelerant. You can learn Afrikaans very quickly if you speak Dutch. Similarly for Malay -> Indonesian, Portuguese -> Spanish ... interestingly, this pair is asymmetric: Spanish -> Portuguese is harder than vice-versa)
Interesting, I think I largely agree. However, I think the polyglot community is probably not a great representation of what would work for most people. For a lot of people, myself included, I think the choice is realistically between lower commitment (and lower quality/speed of learning) options and nothing at all. At least for myself it would take a lot of motivation to consistently do workbooks for years, major props to the people who can though.
I believe his point is not that gamification doesn't work for learning, but rather that it has a nasty side effect of training your brain to be more susceptible to addiction/gamification everywhere, even where you don't want it.
I understand that and definitely a valid point especially for kids. I'm just making the point that in some situations there can be real benefits of using gamification. Like most things balance is important.
Duolingo is great as a beginning to language study but that’s all there is to it. If you have a 410 day Spanish streak it’s time to start reading Spanish children’s books or watching telenovelas or Narcos, anything but continuing with Duolingo.
Yeah I agree (sorry I edited the original post to essentially say this while you wrote the comment). I also took a semester of Spanish in college and Duolingo let me (barely) place into the second level class. I've also been watching Spanish media (Telemundo, Casa de Papel, Pasion de Gavilanes) and just started a Spanish meetup group to practice speaking.
What Duolingo has been best for is getting a baseline vocab and familiarity with the language. It also lets you stay fresh/keep making progress when you don't have time or mental effort to spend more than a few minutes a day.
Duolingo takes you 10 minutes a day. If it's the only thing you're doing, I agree it's not sufficient, but I disagree with stopping doing it - it has mechanisms to reinforce what you learned.
But what you’ve learned isn’t all that valuable from a language perspective. It doesn’t matter how well is reinforcing lessons of those lessons weren’t very valuable in the first place.
I have been on a streak for weeks, usually in the top 10 of that week's tournament, yet I am actually making no real progress in actually learning the language. Nothing is really going to beat rote memorization and full immersion I feel.
This isn't as big of a problem for latin based languages (English native) however.
Perfect illustration of GP point: you played for 410 days, yet you only learned the content of what is probably only a few hours of focused learning.
I’ve tested Duolinguo for languages I want to learn, for some I already know and a language BA/MA holder I can guarantee that Duolingo is total crap. This is just a feel good app. Just like another post was mentioning hiw note taking can do more harm than good because it feels like work, Duolingo is given the user the feeling of work and progression while very very little knowledge is gained. Let’s take Japanese as an example. Hiragana and katakana are each divided in 4 parts: a user can easily spend weeks on that and feel he’s making progress. University student on the other side learn that in a week... (for slow learners)
Beware of gamification. There is a great talk[1] discussing intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation as it applies to video games, with the key insight being that extrinsic rewards decrease intrinsic motivation.
The speaker references a lot of research that seems worth digging into too.
I would advise you to fight any addiction your kids might have, especially gaming/other internet points addictions. Gamification is a fix that people addicted to dopamine rushes need, but children shouldn't require it. Instead I would work on framing work in a positive way.
I don't think we should think in terms like that. We don't always have to be working toward a goal. There's nothing won't with reading, taking a nap, it sound other unproductive activities. Also, not everyone has big lofty goals of self accomplishment. For some, constant goal seeking can be both stressful and emotionally difficult when goals aren't met.
We should be careful to paint with such a broad brush.
I don't know if internet is really the culprit to how easy it is to waste time. We have long created enough distraction to fill a entire lifespan.
Before I've encountered any digital computing device, I used to just play Sudoku during class. Or read novels; I had a textbook that carved, inside which hid a small novel. Or, just day-dream and think about stuff.
On the other hand, I enjoyed Sudoku and novels. I don't consider them to be a complete waste of time. In retrospect, they made my childhood better.
HN, Facebook, Reddit, Messenger, YouTube, news websites and dozens of other sites are on a block list from 0900-1800 M-F via a super useful plugin for Firefox (on mobile now and I can't remember it!)
> It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet.
I'm just really glad I did college when the only thing distracting on the internet was Slashdot and you could only access it with a computer attached to an ethernet cable.
I'm almost certain I would not have made it past Freshman year if I had a smartphone.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
This is why I question curiosity as the prescribed value from HN leadership. In its place one could've easily said learning or mastery.
Life recently told the meaning of 'know-how' and real life has no competitor.
I spent countless hours fiddling with git tutorials, the best branching, workflow.. Nothing was even close to when I had to actual work with it on a tight rope.
Curiosity intellect is mostly dead baggage in ones head, knowing how to apply ideas as tools, to actually do something, and even have it in mind when you work so that you know you wrote enough, commit will be long, or merge will be ugly. It all balances out on itself and you actually feel light and capable.
what sort of gamification is there on HN, upvotes not much else? Maybe it's plausible to strike a deal with oneself not to look at upvotes or downvotes, I think that would make comments more sincere. It would be great to have a setting not to display upvotes and down-votes on your own comments but to still be able to respond on threads tab
Generally I'm glad that HN has minimal gamification, at least compared to the worst offenders reddit, fb, twitter etc.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
Browsing HN has never felt productive to me. At times useful, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking, and at others less so, when it can seem annoying, repetitive, pointless and so on. But never "productive".
When you increase the signal to noise ratio, it makes it even harder to stop reading. For all practical purposes, the internet is infinite; no matter how high you set your standards, gradually you will find enough sources to fill all your free time.
During the last few years, I switched from reading low quality content to reading high quality content. I am better informed about various things. But the problem of spending too much time reading remains unchanged.
Its funny because its hard to gauge – the things you think are the most productive feed strongly into your confirmation bias, so maybe they aren't really that productive after all. But that's fine.
In general though, I prefer the idea of going "all in" in whatever I'm doing. If I'm going to play video games, I'm making sure I have a damn good time doing it. If I'm going to put in work, I'm gonna make sure it gets done. Distractions will do you in in both cases. Ruin your fun time and mess up your productivity.
I completely agree with you. Some other distractions are the many intelectual hobbies overpraised out there, two of them which I know very closely: learning languages and reading lots of books (novels).
These activities by itself don’t yell any value by themselves and still free like a super productive to the extent of feeling incredibly productive. One should not forget that intelectual hobbies are in fact still hobbies.
On the other hand, why do so many highly skilled people push themselves so hard? I do not have any stats, it's just an observation looking at all the people in my environment, and then some public exponents.
I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job, had enough and enjoyed their family life.
That is also true for some of the people I later met at university and then in business, but I get the impression that quite a lot of them, even though they have much better jobs than the people from my childhood, invest a lot of their free time trying to pursue their goal. And it is extremely rare that I see someone actually reaching it. It is far more often that their life becomes a lot more miserable, think divorce or similar.
Now don't ge me wrong, I think pursuing ones goals can be extremely valuable. But for a lot of people, pursuing a goal and trying to be productive with it while at the same time being married, raising kids, earning money, staying healthy and doing chores is most likely not going to lead anywhere good. So why is it so hard for smart people to accept that fact, and enjoy one or two hours of lazyness every day? Why do people take Elon Musk as an example, if even he himself decribes his life as not too nice?
Reddit was a huge time waste for me. I'd spend entire mornings and nearly all night browsing the site and arguing with other users. I wish I could get all of it back.
I worked for a big multinational bank and was reasonably comfortable but sometimes not very busy and most of the usual online distractions was blocked except for hacker news. I spent so much time reading hacker news that it was probably a big influence in me deciding to quit my job to join a bootstrapped startup as a CTO. Also probably the biggest mistake of my life. In the aftermath I ended up working as a contractor in a remote office for a tech company to recover my finances. During that time I used to spend my afternoon coffee break reading a newsletter from Matt Levine and I think that's probably one of the primary influences that made me end up working in finance again.
Watching sports and memorizing athletes’ stats is another waste of time a lot of people partake in. Here’s to hoping people are more productive during this hiatus.
Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products.