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Poll: Turn off News.YC a few hours a day?
85 points by pg on Nov 22, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 127 comments
I worry about News.YC being a time sink, so here's a crazy idea: what if it were turned off a few hours a day? Time zones are obviously a problem, but we can tell when most users are active from the logs, so if we went black for a few hours during that time we'd help the most people.

It seems worth at least trying. Just a few hours would be enough to break most people's cycle of procrastination. And if anything it might improve the feeling of community, because users would tend to all show up together at opening time.

Status quo.
518 points
Try closing the site for a couple hours in the middle of the day (US time).
354 points



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 at once? It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.


I couldn't agree more.

Don't social news sites sort of depend on them being "up" in the background "working out" what is interesting? Won't bringing it down for 3 peak hours just reduce the churn of good material?

I tend to check hacker news/reddit/etc. at very specific times (like first thing in the AM, right before and after lunch, etc.). If it's down during those times, or if the content is stale (because it's spent the past 3 hours being down), I'm not going to get more work done. I'm going to just stop coming.


> 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.

Thus returning the site to it's original, smaller, more committed more elite character and hopefully raising the level of discourse, improving the signal to noise ratio, etc.

I'm not sure what pg is thinking but I could see the factors you describe as being a good argument FOR restricting access to the site.

I find the site itself and pg's experiments with attention management to be a fascinating exercise in cognitive science. Taking one of the most addictive forms of news display (look up variable reward schedules and operant conditioning if you want to see why it's so compelling) and attempting to manage it so that you get the benefits (better informed people, faster diffusion of ideas, a 'hotter' intellectual environment) while limiting the time and productivity sink.

//and by the way, thank you Paul Graham for making this possible.


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 down and start working.


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.


Fixing your brain is feature creep, but keeping a high signal-to-noise ratio is well within the design goal of HN. If intermittently turning off the site can help accomplish that (not saying it will, just that it might), it seems worth trying.


I think this is an interesting experiment worth trying if nothing else. You'll probably see the polls weigh against trying the change, but that's generally because people don't like change.

The way I look at it, no one loses anything by trying it... and it's not hard to put things back to normal if it doesn't work out.


Two words: Rescue. Time.


do we REALLY want to get dozens of posts all at once? It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.

Maybe there are other means to limit it - for example, only let users submit a max of (say) 2 links a day.

Not sure limiting comments would have a desirable effect - But you could limit the number of story/comment votes users get a day.

Might make people more frugal with their time - but still keep a high standard of contribution.


So, true.

In addition, one needs to fix the problem at the source; the thing that works for me is to turn on "Freedom" and dis-connect myself from the Internet for a few hours.


Yep. And want to take bets on how long before someone grabs the source from arclanguage.org and sets up a 24/7 variant?


It seems to me that having a fixed "opening time" would interfere with the site more than aid it.

You're right, we should make the down hours fluctuate a little bit randomly. Like within the peak visit zone, make one or two of the hours a blackout period, and let that change every day (randomize it).

The page that replaces YC News during that time could be anything. What if YC did some advertising? That way, the silly folks who sit there refreshing (probably me) will at least be doing something productive (generating pageviews)?


Whups, guess I suggested a bad idea. Figures, considering "responsibility" is winning now, ha-ha.

Yeah, on second thought, it's probably a bad idea to make a service like this spurious. Imagine if Google decided to do that to keep me from checking my email.


Hm... if there were time limits on posting rather then viewing, would there be less politics crap?


I think it needs to be a source or a service. I also think it's a source. Don't be too parental, papa bear. Let an api happen before you start being the po-lice.

It's actually a pretty fascinating idear. I spend a pretty decent amount of time applying interwebs thinking to the "concrete" world (BA Urban Econ, what); I've never even consciously thought about going the other way.

h^n is a giant time sink, but I also feel like a big part of my job and our education is reading. It's market research. Whatever you know is barely worth shit without understanding the context.

So down thumb. That being said: if you want to run a social experiment, this seems like a sweet place. We probably should be messed with, anyway. We probably are already.


what a great comment!


I'm surprised that personal responsibility is losing right now (37 to 29).


I like experiments.


Haha, I think there's so many yes votes because any group like this can't resist tinkering.

Its like my grandmother told me as a kid when I took apart her iron, "Don't fix what ain't broke."


"But Grandma, how am I supposed to learn about it then?"


How is voting for a binding commitment a vote against personal responsibility? As Jon Elster shows, if we take hyperbolic utility discounting seriously binding commitments like these are a key part of personal responsibility.


Being that it's Friday night, isn't every vote a vote against personal responsibility?


I personally take Friday nigh/Saturday off from work, and it's a lifesaver for me.


What about the rest of us who can manage our time just fine? We end up having to deal with the annoyance of the site being down just when we decide to take a break!


That is why I really wonder why you say you look people's News.YC accounts in the application process. Someone with a lot of karma must be spending a lot of time on the site.

How about all those people who have little karma because they're working so hard?


We don't look at the karma number so much as the quality of the comments. It would be hard not to, actually. When I see a YC application from a username I recognize for making smart comments, it would be hard not to give it extra attention.


Maybe they're looking for people whose high karma comes from scoring highly on a small number of hyper-intelligent comments.


I'm guessing so. IIRC, pg has mentioned looking at news.YC contributions, but I haven't seen him mention looking at karma specifically. (Then again, I'm not a YC applicant, so I haven't really looked into it.)


Or may be just have a div appear after 10 minutes of constant activity which says "OK, now enough is enough. Get back to work. (Signed PG)"

Signed PG is an extra effect: Many take your words religiously :)


why don't you just download rescuetime and limit the access yourself? This way you don't punish people who have the self control to do it on their own


This might have a positive impact on the community above and beyond whatever effect it has on the individual. For example, this might improve the quality of the submissions and/or comments. We don't know yet because it hasn't been tried before. That's what makes it an interesting experiment.


well HN has been going down every few days for an hour or two(you know when it only shows you the top most thread), and I haven't seen the quality of posts improve


It wasn't planned, and so not anticipated by users, so therefore no community effect.

I think the concept is a little like a departmental morning tea.


I tried hard to get it to work, but it's pretty bad on ubuntu. I can't speak for windows/mac.


I had some issues on Ubuntu as well (officially Linux isn't supported by RescueTime ... it's just something a user put together). It works great on Windows & Mac.


I can't use Rescuetime, can I? I don't use Firefox.


RescueTime is an installable app (for Mac or Windows) and plays nicely with most browsers (FF, IE, Safari, Chrome).


Huh! I didn't know that, but that's excellent. I thought it was Windows-only, too.

I'll check that out. (And, as an aside, I love the level of feedback that Hacker News gets on YCombinator's stuff. It's so cool that people like you are members here.)


What about an option to disallow override on noprocrast?

I find it a very useful feature, but sometimes I click override when I know I should probably be working.

A way to effectively ban myself by removing the override option (by choice) would be effective for those of us worried about YC being a time-sink.

You could log out of your account if it was that important, but it seems like putting another barrier in-place as an annoyance will accomplish the desired effect.

I often find noprocrast does exactly what it's supposed to do and reminds me that I should be working.


The problem with the override option is that it is a weak barrier. It takes a split second to click it and after two or three times it becomes a habit to override.

A good solution would force the user to become acutely aware of what he is about to do and give him time to regain enough discipline to stop.

Perhaps it would help if the user were forced to watch a video about procrastination or answer a series of relevant or time consuming questions before proceeding to override noprocrast.


Exactly.

I used to use noprocrast until I got in the habit of using override. Now I uncomment a line to my /etc/hosts file that points news.yc to another IP. It works a lot better because if I go to news.yc while the IP is redirected, my browser caches the IP and I can't access the site, so I have to remember to unblock it before I try to access it. This forces me to think about what I'm doing.


I like this idea. Maybe not permanently, but it would be worth trying if only because no one has ever done it before and I'm curious to see what would happen.

Also, does anyone have any interest in a news.yc book club of sorts, maybe a book of the month type thing? I'm guessing everyone else will read the new Gladwell book eventually so it would be fun to discuss.


Perhaps make every page load remove some fraction of a point of karma? :-)


I'd just use a separate account for viewing. I know I would.


I like this! Can be circumvented, of course, but anything can, and the defaults matter.


I'd say give it a try for a week or two as a social experiment, just to see what happens.


Problem is mid-day, for many, is the time for meetings and other interruptions. Rather than try to force yourself to focus during the "mid-day" hours (i.e. 10am-4:30pm) I find it easier to dedicate that time to (in addition to meetings, dealing with vendors/customers, doing paperwork) typical procrastination activities.

That leaves the morning (7:30-10am) and evening (4:30pm and later) to getting things done. I'd rather see news.y.c allow people to apply whatever means of time management they use (my "idea", RescueTime) to managing their y.c time.

One in the middle idea is to disable posting during those hours, allow only reading.


What about taking the override option off noprocrast?


Sounds good to me, although of course you'd want to either limit the noprocrast lock-out time or allow a "let me in an hour from now" override to prevent permanent lock-outs.

Or, if your concern is simply that YC-funded companies aren't getting work done, you could just lock them out for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. I wouldn't complain about that. :-)


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...


As long as they're donating time (e.g. doing some small number of data entry tasks for a fundraiser) rather than money.


Or Recaptcha...


Which problem(s) are you trying to solve? Is it simply the time sink?

If you think folks spend too much time here, then why not a daily limit? Make noprocrast a fixed limit for everyone.

If you think quality would improve during "open" hours, then why not limit submissions to certain hours? Read-access all the time, but write-access only sometimes.


Good idea! Noprocrast with override option is (for me) about as effective as hiding the ice cream beneath a bag of frozen peas would be for a kid.

You could limit the max length of minaway to prevent people from accidentally blocking the site forever. I think max is about 190 years at moment (although if a singularity occured that could become a relevant timespan for procrastinators).


Close new link submission, maybe, but don't close the site. Everyone is on different schedules, and I don't like the idea of having to adjust mine to yours if I want to read what the community submit/is talking about at the time I usually do each day. Selfish? Maybe (but that could be applied both ways).


I thought (maxvisit|rescuetime|8aweek) was supposed to keep us honest in an opt-in way?


If you really want to help with productivity, just track when each user logs on/off (or idles), and make a forced x minute window between logins. I don't want to be penalized if I visit the site every few days and it happens to be offline when I view it.


This has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas I have ever heard of.


C'mon pg. Imagine if you had polled the community before changing the name of Startup News. They'd have said no and we'd still only be reading about venture capital and where to incorporate etc. Consensus almost always favors the status quo. Lead the way, shake things up, close the site!


* Temporary user created just for this post - is anonymous post really discouraged around here, or is anonymous posting something that just happens to not be implemented?

While in principle I agree with most folks here - everyone is responsible for the way they use their time - truth is that right now YC is the biggest time sink for me.

I don't watch TV at all and I am able to avoid pretty much every other distraction you can imagine (even email!) - but I just can't resist opening News.YC 4 or 5 times a day.

From the fact that the possibility of disabling the site during some times is being discussed I would guess I am not the only one in this situation.

So, if you want to disable the site during some times I wouldn't mind. If you don't, that's fine too - one way or another I will have to stop wasting time like this...


Sure, and let's also mandate the exclusive use of Java to save us from ourselves. No, really, I mean this is going one step too far in terms of taking away responsibility from individuals.

And don't forget that for those of us who haven't yet started a startup, procrastination can be inspiration.


Terrible solution to a problem that can only be solved on the other end.


No, please don't do that. Honestly, I cannot imagine anything more non-brainy (euphemism for foolish) than that. People do what they want to do. Maybe HN gives them a creative pause or a state of subdued brain activity which boosts their post HN productivity.

Live and Let Live! :)


This is a tad paternalistic. You can't turn off nyt.com or my tv. So your chances of stopping me if I want to procrastinate are slim.


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.


That's true but what's worse is that "normal" is going to be defined not by each of us individually, but by someone higher up who knows what's best for us.


No, everyone outside of North, Central, and South America loses access at normal hours.


It should be pretty easy to set up so that instead of it going off at certain hours, it would just be blocked for some time period based on geographic location.


And the truly desperate would use proxies. :)


But under my hypothetical situation, it's just for a week - who cares? Alternate time zones, then you can be like my cofounders' sleep schedule.


"... I worry about News.YC being a time sink, so here's a crazy idea: what if it were turned off a few hours a day? ..."

Good idea.

This will also have a kick-on effect to searchyc and a few others. It seems the time-sink idea is something that should be looked into more. Different people procrastinate at different levels. I smell the beginnings of an algorythm.

"... because users would tend to all show up together at opening time. ..."

This bit's hard. I log in at GMT+11 and it seems I log in out of sync with a lot of stories. Having a break will also do funny things to submissions as news never has a break. Expect the server to be hit at opening time.


Just get LeechBlock for yourself for Firefox 3.


Seconded, link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476


You can still change the OS time.


Please please please do this. If nothing more than for the experiment itself. Personally I had just decided that I need to switch the no procrastination feature on so I was delighted to the title of this post. HN is too interesting, it's dominating my life.

How about shutting the site down for one day a week? Give us the day off!


I think it would help if there were two more links at the top of the page to give the most popular submissions, and the most popular comments of the last n days. Then one would worry less about missing something good while one unplugs for a few days to get some serious work done.


Due to time zones, I doubt there's really a clear time that would fit well.

Besides, people are going to procrastinate one way or another. More importantly, if you are spending too much time on the site, then just stop loading it. Nobody else is making you reload the page X times a day.


I'm all for it. I'll hate it, but it has to be done.


It needs to be done, there is no other way.

Or as captain kurtz said ..

"In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. "


Is this suppose to be an April fools joke in November? Is this a joke I don't get?


I like the idea (and voted as such), but doesn't that duplicate what noprocrast does?

Though, it would be an interesting experiment to do for awhile; I'd like to see if your thought about improving the community by taking it away for a bit each day would have any noticeable effect.

Also, among the sites to procrastinate on, I imagine that HN is one of the better ones - There's mostly intelligent conversations and submissions on here (as opposed to "Guide to Smoking Pot Around the World" on Digg, "Has to be the most disgusting crime ever... WTF!" on Reddit, or something similar on $insertOtherSocial"News"Site)


> I like the idea (and voted as such), but doesn't that duplicate what noprocrast does?

It's a bit different - people come back as there is always something going on. noprocrast just excludes you.

If the site is blacked-out there is no reason to visit.


For users who contribute to the discussion, I'm guessing most of the time they refresh the site it's just for a handful of seconds to see if anyone has responded to their comments. Noprocrast isn't really ideal for this use case scenario.


How about something where users could sign up to have the site 'off' for them during hours that you (pg) specify? That way we couldn't adjust the time and cheat ourselves, or lift a self-imposed block just because we have 5 free minutes before lunch. Also - it would be good if the decision to sign up to have the site down for those users was irrevocable for at least the first couple of weeks.

I understand this is scope creep to your original idea - but it might be fun. And it could be a historic precedent - the first feature added to a site which would block user's access to that site.


Seems like it would make more sense as a per-user option. If you make it mandatory, you could still make the hours configurable. Personally, I'd find some other way to procrastinate at a given moment.


Bad idea. I only check YC news when I'm commuting, or in the evenings (ie. when I want to kill a little time). I'm also in Australia, so the US timezone centric suggestions are very blinkered.


I think the "not available" page could have a lot of good uses.

A poll of "what are you going to do now?" would add to the experiment. Sure, not everyone will answer honestly but a good number probably will.

How about some kind of stats? Show a user list and "off-time" visit count next to each name, or let us enter a small string to say what we're going to do instead of HN. That might get abused but you get the idea. I think what we see while the site is unavailable is a great opportunity for quick-response community building.


What is the most active period of the day? I suppose hackers are night creatures.

I am asking this because I am in another timezone and I would like to get a snapshot of HN at the right time.


I think this idea is ridiculous. Why deny the site to people because some others may be using it as a time-sink? What about time zones? What about other people's schedules? PG you don't have to fix other people's poor habits for them.

You already have unique views on procrastination but please don't force this on others, even though you can do whatever you please with your product.

I would personally become irritated by the site not being available and I'd end up visiting here less often.


Here, just set this as your default URL: http://www.merlinmann.com/rightnow/

It actually helps a little.


Although I think the thought behind this is nice, the idea isn't.

I come to YC not to procrastinate, but to learn. You guys are smart bastards you know that? Maybe 1/10th post on here is something to fool around with, but in the end it all feeds the mind.

I go to Reddit to procrastinate. (Not hating on it, I love the site, just has different material)


Humans have a tendency to take the mental shortcut that scarcity implies value, and so I wouldn't be surprised if this were to actually increase interest in HN.

HN might also be one of the few sites able to conduct such an experiment (most other sites being worried about traffic, revenues, driving users away, etc.)


I'm in Shanghai. Most likely you would pick a black out time when I'm working during the day.

I agree with your sentiment. But online communities being a time-sink is a problem that can only be solved through individual restraint. Its a key discipline we all need to learn in this new always on society.


How about going the other way around? Hacker News: available every night from 7pm to 9pm central. Like TV!


It's already too similar to Comedy Central. :P


Analogous to the 24hr-licensing debates many countries (especially in Europe) seem to have regarding pub/bar drinking times (aimed at stopping binge-drinking and drink related crime/violence)?

Ultimately they too did not work as they failed to change the culture that creates the (unwanted) behaviour?


I can see it now. McDonald's new policy - you're all eating too many Big Macs. In the interest of public health, we're closing just a few hours in the middle of the day each day and we're going to do it when most of you normally come to eat. Give me a break. Dumb idea.


Yeah, think of all the ad revenue pg is going to lose. Oh, uh... there are no ads...


I do like the idea of everyone showing up at the same time; worth a shot, in my opinion. What is the median number of pages loads/user/day?

As an aside, my deskmate habitually edits his /etc/hosts file to keep himself under control :)


Since timezones are a problem, try 10 minutes chosen randomly each hour. 5/6 of the time we could procrastinate at will, but a new.yc binge of ~30 min or more would be interrupted.

This could be an interesting experiment.


pg,

I don't know whether this is part of a viable solution, but I will say that for me, excessive browsing has become a problem (not just of this site, but in general -- mostly tech news sites and blogs). FWIW.


Reminds me that there is a noprocrast setting already. I'll try it out.


Could it possibly be a temporary anomaly? I know the extreme bad global financial news has put me on occasion into a bit of a funk, but the novelty of it all will wear off in time.


Some of us legitimately have nothing better to do. Us college students can only spend so much time per day learning, at some point your brain needs to rest.


Grow some self-controlling balls.

Alternatively, only read articles that look interesting in a once-every-24-hour RSS grab and don't otherwise visit the site. Works for me.


I vote turn it off in the morning - that way you don't start your day with procrastination, and folk in the UK get a nice mid afternoon break.


I am currently implementing(verilog) a 32bit L2 cache for one of my projects. So yea.. my YC presence has been pretty minimal.


like links that open automatically in new tabs, i think that would take control away from the user.

ps. isn't your state nanny enough ?


This is ridiculous. YOU decide when to waste your time and not the web.

And think of Europeans (like me) who eagerly read Hacker News.


Isn't PG worried that the proposal will give a competitive advantage to those other social news sites for hackers?


Maybe he's tired of a monopoly.


This would have the added bonus of being the kind of decision that keeps the pipes from redditing up.


Time to adjust my sleep schedule I guess. I blame PG for making me sleep during day.


Accepting personal responsibility was one of the reasons I have been successful.


Perhaps the site could be in "read-only" mode indicating the last updated time.


If HN is closed,a hacker will just set up of a cache. Heck, I might do it.


The message during the blackout should say, "SHOULDN'T YOU BE WORKING?"


Poll: Turn off The Internet a few hours a day?


That's a terribly paternistic idea.


maybe we can do this for engadget, craigslist, and mansion impossible as well


Please don't do that.


I'm in China.


boo


This site is mostly populated by wanna-bes anyway. So I upvoted both options (your voting system sucks).

Also, PLEASE stop calling yourselves hackers. Real hackers use languages that allow them to exploit buffer overflows and such, not Ruby, etc.




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