People talk about the attention economy and how Facebook is optimized for mindless scrolling but HN is by far the worst drug for me. I get serious FOMO from potentially missing out on a good thread so not sure this would actually help but I like the idea nonetheless.
I have HN Alerts set-up for a few keywords of interest, I get like 50 daily emails and usually go through all of them just because sometimes there is that one relevant post that I'm interested in.
Not to mention that the threads shift up and down due to votes in-between clicking on Page 2 and further, so really the only way not to lose sight of the threads you want to read is to open them all as tabs at once, and then be left with 20-30 items that are of marginal interest.
HN to me feels like being nerd sniped[0] in perpetuity. I've only myself to blame for this, ofc, but that doesn't change how strong the draw is.
LeechBlock NG has helped me somewhat. I still waste time on HN, though not as greatly as before. That override button makes me think: am I willing to burn another 10 minute block of productive time this day on doom-scrolling Reddit and HN?
I combat this problem with a combination of LeechBlock NG (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng/) and hckrnews.com. The former prevents me from visiting Hacker News before 8 o'clock. The latter records every link that made it to the front page so that the possibility of FOMO is properly addressed.
