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Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

news.ycombinator.com

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21–30 of 36 posts

Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

#21

Post by risotto »

I've been feeling that the Internet hurts my mental health.

Filling my brain with HN, Reddit, DrudgeReport, Twitter, Facebook, email, chat, etc., is exhausting.

And this is on top of the massive amounts of code I digest when I am being productive. New libraries to learn, more of my teammates code to decipher, new specs to write, new architectures to understand.

It's really exhausting, and my short term memory for things like names and social events is shot to shit. If I can't get a brunch appointment in my email inbox, I will forget it.

I'm not complaining too loudly -- I'm never bored, and I'm happy and successful in my career. But I'm just feeling more and more like my brain is full and every new piece of information pushes out something else, but there's still endless more information to absorb.

It's giving me more and more pause these days.

Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

#22

Post by ahuibers »

pg wrote: post #13

I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?

Make it so that comments don't need to be made right away (to get upvote exposure) to be in the top 10 or 20. Maybe you could normalize each upvote by the number of views per unit time (view rate). You could measure success by trying to increase the average age of the top 10 comments (age = time since article was posted).

Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

#24

Post by harry »

I need breaks from what I'm working on - and this site fills that need. There's only so much I will get done in a day and this unquenched optimism & productivity that is common here is simply not something I do. I end up thinking back to something I read here months & years later, thus cementing it's leisure value above reddit, fukung and twitter.

Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

#25

Post by solipsist »

pg wrote: post #13

I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?

As a few people have already pointed out, a lot of our time is spent consuming the content and not necessarily creating it. Reading the comments is probably the biggest productivity hit for me. The reason for that is that you can quickly get stuck reading long threads of discussions - especially on the more popular articles. While this is great, maybe try making only the top 5 or 10 comments visible by default, and then giving the user a 'See More' button that would show the rest of the comments. You could also only show the first and second level comments in the default mode, which would add to the simplicity and make it less of a productivity hit. It would be interesting to see people's reaction to this feature if you ever decided to implement it.

Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

#26

Post by mike_esspe »

pg wrote: post #13

I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?

1) Can you make a customized "Highest voted recent links" list based only on votes of users, who vote on the same links as i?

Or alternatively publish votes history (anonymized), so we can try with algorithms ourself.

2) Can you add TL;DR section editable by users for every link?

Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

#27

Post by Zev »

solipsist wrote: post #25
pg wrote: post #13

I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?

As a few people have already pointed out, a lot of our time is spent consuming the content and not necessarily creating it. Reading the comments is probably the biggest productivity hit for me. The reason for that is that you can quickly get stuck reading long threads of discussions - especially on the more popular articles. While this is great, maybe try making only the top 5 or 10 comments visible by default, and t…

Personally, I dislike the "more" way of viewing comments. I like to scroll with the arrow keys or page up/down (well, fn + arrow). If I have to move the mouse over to "show more," I'm just as likely to hit cmd + w. Especially if its "more" for different levels of comments and to get more comments. The button won't even be in the same place!

Re: Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?

#28

Post by davi »

pg wrote: post #13

I know I've asked this before, but is there anything I can do to make HN less of a productivity hit? Slow it down in some way perhaps?

The only time it's a productivity hit to me is when I'm procrastinating anyway. I wouldn't worry about that. Focus on making the conversation as interesting as you can.
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