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My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

alexanderell.is

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Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#401

Post by blindmute »

sodality2 wrote: post #24

I'm still young so maybe my mind hasn't matured enough to where I can combat this well. So I went heavy-handed - I have a button on my desk that when I press it, my server's DNS server (through which all my devices and router resolve) begins rejecting requests to reddit, instagram, twitter, hackernews, news.google.com, etc. For the next two hours, there is nothing I can do outside of SSH'ing through my mobile device…

What would be cool is to flip it. Press the button to get a few minutes of browsing allowed. Then, make the button deliver an electric shock upon being pressed. I bet you'd soon stop pressing it

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#402

Post by gigaflop »

elxr wrote: post #298
gernb wrote: post #289

I feel like I could say the same about infinite news which I'd define as a site I can check several times a day and see new "top stories". This would include Reddit and HN. I find it super addicting to check too many times and then get sucked into spending too much time reading comments and sometimes articles. Rarely am I actually better off for it . Contrast to 20-30yrs ago where at best you got a newspaper once a d…

I recently decided to take a month of reddit for the sake of my crippled attention span. Over the past year, I've already narrowed down my subreddits to what I'd consider useful information, but that only helped a little. There's just too much stuff on there. From now on, it'll be mainly HN and books for me.

Reddit rewards people who know how to repost or start flame wars, with their karma points. This can also optimize for low-effort content.

I wouldn't be surprised if certain subreddits could be entirely replaced with bots, automatically generating memes and image macros in response to things happening on the web. The biggest subreddits already look like this, imo.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#403

Post by onion2k »

Freak_NL wrote: post #327
onion2k wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two drinks each night versus one is quite a difference. It's double the amount of alcohol! 2 bottles of 5% abv beer has a little less alcohol than 1 normal sized glass of 13% abv red wine.

How are you calculating that? One standard 330ml bottle of beer at 5% has a little less alcohol than a standard pour (150ml) of 13% wine. As soon as you move to a pint or 500ml can of beer you go over it. This is why a glass of wine and a bottle of beer are taken as roughly equal in terms of alcohol content. 330×5%

A glass of red wine is 250ml.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#404

Post by gigaflop »

magneticnorth wrote: post #93
sh4rks wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to do this, but years of mindlessly browsing social media has seriously shortened my attention span. I used to read books all the time. I remember staying up late as a kid just to read the new Harry Potter book. Nowadays I pick up a book, read a few pages, then immediately lose interest and go do something else. Anybody know how to get back into reading?

I've had some luck by going back to "simpler" books for a while - page-turner scifi, bestsellers, YA literature. For a while I only read things that really grabbed my attention, and I think that is gradually re-training my brain. I'm not back to being as avid of a reader yet, but I'm optimistic I'll get there. I'm reading more now than I have in a few years.

I've started working on this, too.

I first kicked myself into it by starting the Discworld series of books. Pratchett is a great author (imo), the text has a certain kind of easy charm, I don't need to go in sequential order, the books are cheap to buy, and none are terribly long or dense.

I've also added some longer, more serious stuff to my reading list and bookshelf, but those are things I'll get to in time. I try to make myself read 100 pages per week, and if I don't like doing that with a certain book, I'll pick up another one. I can manage that at a leisurely pace in 2 to 3 hours on a weekend, or grab 20 pages a few times per week.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#405

Post by dbrueck »

LiquidPolymer wrote: post #111

I’m curious what the generational divide is for this. I’m 57, love tech and enjoy the positive side of the internet in limited doses. But I find most social media boring. There is incredible and AMAZING art, accidental moments, serious discussion and fascinating analysis of the world to be found online. But without grounding myself in genuine experience in the stinky, cruel real world of human interaction, nature, an…

A scary possibility is that it has to do with how much of the alternative you've experienced in your life, i.e. infinite scroll grabs you less if you've experienced the joy of a hobby, a good book, being outside a lot, etc. - things that take more effort but that can give deeper satisfaction. If this is true, then the more damaging it is to encounter infinite scroll at a younger age.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#407

Post by wintermutestwin »

Alex3917 wrote: post #399
janmarsal wrote: post #306

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm…

> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. The whole point of modals is to enable the user to close them by clicking outside of them. So this way if you want to show new users something like an onboarding tutorial, they can just click outside of the modal if t…

The way Notion does this is annoying as hell. I am in a data entering view and there is no "submit" button??

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#408

Post by PopAlongKid »

blable2 wrote: post #369
janmarsal wrote: post #306

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm…

Explain "Paints" as this primate can't understand.

Selecting the text as if you were going to copy it

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#410

Post by mikewhy »

mr_mitm wrote: post #338
janmarsal wrote: post #306

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm…

This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate…

> > modals and other horrible UI features

> and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood

Y'all, with your expert knowledge, know there's a dialog element in HTML, right?

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