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New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

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Re: New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

#43
This is will do great things for news.yc, temporarily.

People here to procrastinate have a lower average quality contribution than people here out of genuine interest. The average submission/comment quality will go up as they temporarily leave.

What will happen is that they will find some other way of procrastinating. The problem isn't that news.yc draws them too strongly; it's that what they should be doing doesn't draw them strongly enough.

Re: New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

#44
lazynews.yc: If it restricts by your username, then all you have to do is clear your cookies and you can look at the site, right? You won't be able to comment, but you can read everything.

I guess we are going to have to exercise some self-control. That's fine.

PS. It is a great feature though!

Re: New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

#46
post #43

This is will do great things for news.yc, temporarily. People here to procrastinate have a lower average quality contribution than people here out of genuine interest. The average submission/comment quality will go up as they temporarily leave. What will happen is that they will find some other way of procrastinating. The problem isn't that news.yc draws them too strongly; it's that what they should be doing doesn't…

Most (maybe all) of the most ambitious people I know waste more time than they'd like checking email and visiting news sites. Including me. I added noprocrast partly because I wanted it myself.

Re: New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

#47
FWIW,

When I find something is distracting me from work really bad, I overindulge until it wears off, rather than trying to limit it. But even if I was trying to limit my news.yc intake, this wouldn't work for me.

Normally, I open all links I'm interested in in new tabs, and then I proceed to read them, closing them as I go. I sometimes follow links from interesting articles, but links within news.yc are rare.

So given my current habits, maxvisit would be actually limiting the time I get to skim the frontpages opening tabs. A couple minutes of that could spawn hours of time wasting, if I wasn't otherwise careful.

Re: New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

#48

My psych major friend is working on a theory that procrastinators have naturally low levels of endorphins, so they subconsciously use the stress of procrastination to raise those levels. I thought that was a pretty fascinating theory.

I'd heard that procrastinators were perfectionists, and so all of their tasks loom like enormous projects because they envision all the thousands of tiny details they'd have to get just right, while normal people just have this rough idea of the task that doesn't look so hard. So then the procrastinators put it off because they just don't feel like taking on an enormous project. Which is funny, because in saying this I'm reminded of pg's essay that talked about starting with easy small projects rather than big earthshattering ones, because you'll never actually finish those.

Re: New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand

#49

My psych major friend is working on a theory that procrastinators have naturally low levels of endorphins, so they subconsciously use the stress of procrastination to raise those levels. I thought that was a pretty fascinating theory.

I'd heard that procrastinators were perfectionists, and so all of their tasks loom like enormous projects because they envision all the thousands of tiny details they'd have to get just right, while normal people just have this rough idea of the task that doesn't look so hard. So then the procrastinators put it off because they just don't feel like taking on an enormous project. Which is funny, because in saying this…

I generally procrastinate because I simply don't want to do the task, not sure if that's the case for anyone else...
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