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

Post by dood » Sat, Nov 22, 2008, 11:40 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #108

pg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think if people came to the site at certain hours and there was a page saying "get back to work, we'll reopen in 1 hour and 14 minutes" it might interrupt their procrastination in a useful way, and make them think, "Ok, I'll work for a couple hours, then read the news?" I find when I've been procrastinating and there's some kind of reward coming in an hour or two (e.g. dinner) that often makes me buckle dow…

If people saw that hypothetical page once, I think they might respond to it the way you describe. But once people subconsciously know what that page looks like, I doubt they'll actually read the text -- they'll just come here, see "oh, news.yc is broken right now" and bounce off somewhere else.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Nov 23, 2008, 2:26 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #106

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…

Don't you think if people came to the site at certain hours and there was a page saying "get back to work, we'll reopen in 1 hour and 14 minutes" it might interrupt their procrastination in a useful way, and make them think, "Ok, I'll work for a couple hours, then read the news?" I find when I've been procrastinating and there's some kind of reward coming in an hour or two (e.g. dinner) that often makes me buckle dow…

Post by chris11 » Sun, Nov 23, 2008, 2:33 AM UTC

nailer wrote: post #62

fallentimes wrote: post #22

Couldn't hurt to try it for a week or two. What's there to lose?

Everyone outside the US loses access at normal hours.

Post by epe » Sun, Nov 23, 2008, 2:50 AM UTC

dood wrote: post #121

cperciva wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people saw that hypothetical page once, I think they might respond to it the way you describe. But once people subconsciously know what that page looks like, I doubt they'll actually read the text -- they'll just come here, see "oh, news.yc is broken right now" and bounce off somewhere else.

I'm pretty sure this would just subconsciously train me to procrastinate elsewhere. At least when procrastinating on HN there's a chance I'll learn something about programming or business. I find this idea and noprocrast a tad bizarre. HN has a simple goal (sharing info of interest to hackers), which thanks to focused design it does pretty well. Fixing my brain is feature creep, and should be well outside it's scope.

Post by byrneseyeview » Sun, Nov 23, 2008, 4:04 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #120

aaronsw wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if instead of an override link it made you answer a Mechanical Turk question? Then at least you'd be accomplishing something useful with your procrastination.

Hmm. Or I could make people donate to a charity...