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Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

#51

Post by lbrandy »

cperciva wrote: post #4

If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently. As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all…

I couldn't agree more.

Don't social news sites sort of depend on them being "up" in the background "working out" what is interesting? Won't bringing it down for 3 peak hours just reduce the churn of good material?

I tend to check hacker news/reddit/etc. at very specific times (like first thing in the AM, right before and after lunch, etc.). If it's down during those times, or if the content is stale (because it's spent the past 3 hours being down), I'm not going to get more work done. I'm going to just stop coming.

Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

#55

Post by jrockway »

smeade wrote: post #36

I can see it now. McDonald's new policy - you're all eating too many Big Macs. In the interest of public health, we're closing just a few hours in the middle of the day each day and we're going to do it when most of you normally come to eat. Give me a break. Dumb idea.

Yeah, think of all the ad revenue pg is going to lose. Oh, uh... there are no ads...

Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

#56

Post by LukeG »

I think it needs to be a source or a service. I also think it's a source. Don't be too parental, papa bear. Let an api happen before you start being the po-lice.

It's actually a pretty fascinating idear. I spend a pretty decent amount of time applying interwebs thinking to the "concrete" world (BA Urban Econ, what); I've never even consciously thought about going the other way.

h^n is a giant time sink, but I also feel like a big part of my job and our education is reading. It's market research. Whatever you know is barely worth shit without understanding the context.

So down thumb. That being said: if you want to run a social experiment, this seems like a sweet place. We probably should be messed with, anyway. We probably are already.

Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

#57

Post by kajecounterhack »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #33
cperciva wrote: post #4

If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently. As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all…

It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it. You're right, we should make the down hours fluctuate a little bit randomly. Like within the peak visit zone, make one or two of the hours a blackout period, and let that change every day (randomize it). The page that replaces YC News during that time could be anything. What if YC did some advertising? That way, the sill…

Whups, guess I suggested a bad idea. Figures, considering "responsibility" is winning now, ha-ha.

Yeah, on second thought, it's probably a bad idea to make a service like this spurious. Imagine if Google decided to do that to keep me from checking my email.

Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

#58

Post by aneesh »

Herring wrote: post #50
vaksel wrote: post #11

why don't you just download rescuetime and limit the access yourself? This way you don't punish people who have the self control to do it on their own

I tried hard to get it to work, but it's pretty bad on ubuntu. I can't speak for windows/mac.

I had some issues on Ubuntu as well (officially Linux isn't supported by RescueTime ... it's just something a user put together). It works great on Windows & Mac.

Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

#59

Post by sdurkin »

cperciva wrote: post #4

If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently. As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all…

Yep. And want to take bets on how long before someone grabs the source from arclanguage.org and sets up a 24/7 variant?

Re: Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?

#60

Post by olefoo »

cperciva wrote: post #4

If people want to procrastinate, they're going to procrastinate anyway. They'll just do it on other websites -- and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently. As for the notion of improving the feeling of community by having everybody turn up at once... do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all…

> and if anyone else is like me, they'll probably get sufficiently irritated by coming to a frequently-broken website that they'd end up coming here far less frequently.

Thus returning the site to it's original, smaller, more committed more elite character and hopefully raising the level of discourse, improving the signal to noise ratio, etc.

I'm not sure what pg is thinking but I could see the factors you describe as being a good argument FOR restricting access to the site.

I find the site itself and pg's experiments with attention management to be a fascinating exercise in cognitive science. Taking one of the most addictive forms of news display (look up variable reward schedules and operant conditioning if you want to see why it's so compelling) and attempting to manage it so that you get the benefits (better informed people, faster diffusion of ideas, a 'hotter' intellectual environment) while limiting the time and productivity sink.

//and by the way, thank you Paul Graham for making this possible.

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