Ask HN: Am I addicted to HackerNews?

Same frequency here. But I still find it better than checking the news/tw/fb/yt.

I think you are confusing addiction with eagerness or interest to learn about things, your curiosity. At least that's the reason i typically visit HN, i don't have time to visit all the sourced pages that were once featured on HN because they had a nice article or other sort of information. But i do want to read about new things, explore, for this HN is a great source.

For social 'exploring'/learning or just simple entertainment 9gag.com is a nice website to spend your 'idle minutes' at, the minutes you want to spend on non technical things.

Wikipedia defines addiction as "a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences"

I think it's important to realize that addiction is not just doing something often (e.g. we all drink water often, that's not addicition). It has to have a detrimental consequence in your life for to be addiction.

Is your checking of HN causing you some problems?

For me, I think, we all need to have a break every now and again, whether it's listening to music, going for a walk in the park, getting a coffee, whatever. I think looking at HN during your breaks is an entirely unproblematic way to spend your breaks.

So unless you are having some problems in your life due to checking HN, you are not addicted to HN, even if you check it often.

Addiction normally requires:

* tolerance

* seeking

* preoccupation

* continuing even when you know it's causing you harm

Your use of hackernews might meet one of those (preoccupation) and maybe meet another (seeking -- what would you do if it was taken away from you?) but I don't think it meets the tolerance or the continuing after harm requirements.

Block it for a month as an experiment.