Does that fact that you're here on HN suggest that it's not quite working?
I ask because HN is my biggest time sync. It's the thing I grab whenever there is a moment of free time and even when their isn't. I type it into my browser without even thinking about it.
I banned it once with /etc/hosts and that lasted about 3 months or maybe it was 6. I'd still read on my phone but that wouldn't happen except out and about or at bathroom breaks.
Then at some point I turned it back on. When it got bad again I blocked it in /etc/hosts. But, it's available in a VM. I'd hoped that would be enough to discourage me but it's not. Instead my habit now is to launch the VM. It is slightly better than unblocked because I still type it into my main browser and the block keeps me off until I eventually use the VM
I'd guess I spent 2-4 hours a day on it. I woke up a 8:30 today. Other than a shower I've been on HN. It's 10:10
Virtue ethics could be a useful framework for thinking about it.
Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue talks about the concept of a tradition as forming a narrative backbone for a person's life and actions. Conversation is also crucial, and traditions can be seen as extended conversations. I suggest that Hacker News is a place where such a tradition is constructed and maintained. It gives rise to an "imagined community" [2] of this profession of startup development (which is tied into the tradition of open source hacking in interesting ways, sometimes conflicting).
In that sense browsing HN is not merely a bad habit. Maybe the negative tendency is to become a more passive participant, or just gossiping all day. Ideally the site would feed into a larger pattern of creative action, instead of only providing some click buzz relaxation. So we could think about how to use the conversation to give wind to our sails, so to speak—or just how to be more active in the actual tradition, not just the discussion surrounding it.
That's a big discussion and I've already spent an hour writing this comment, after deleting a long and boring explanation of the MacIntyre book's thesis... So I'll just say that Cal Newport's new book Deep Work was pretty inspiring for me, and it's a quick read.
I think you could formulate a dialectic where deep work and community conversation feed into each other. It's like how books are the deep artifacts that conversations can orient themselves around, and the books themselves are like concentrated results of sometimes decades-long conversations.
I ask because HN is my biggest time sync. It's the thing I grab whenever there is a moment of free time and even when their isn't. I type it into my browser without even thinking about it.
I banned it once with /etc/hosts and that lasted about 3 months or maybe it was 6. I'd still read on my phone but that wouldn't happen except out and about or at bathroom breaks.
Then at some point I turned it back on. When it got bad again I blocked it in /etc/hosts. But, it's available in a VM. I'd hoped that would be enough to discourage me but it's not. Instead my habit now is to launch the VM. It is slightly better than unblocked because I still type it into my main browser and the block keeps me off until I eventually use the VM
I'd guess I spent 2-4 hours a day on it. I woke up a 8:30 today. Other than a shower I've been on HN. It's 10:10