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  • Hacker News
  • "There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts." ---

    This should be said more often. In my psychological counseling sessions, I have many victims of porn state that all they think about is you-know-what.

    by jan_m_savage
  • I discovered this post not through luck or because of prior (prescient) bookmarking but because a VC decided to build a links aggregator so that techies would hang out on their porch (web property) rather than elsewhere and therefore, would give said VC a chance to invest in their next rocketship.
    by saimiam
  • "But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain."

    This is also a great line. We all know the previous sentences but the 'sth will click' is not well-known. I experienced it when reading long novels from Trollope (and I have ADHD).

    Upon my third 800-page novel, my reading speed quadrupled, and my concentration came back to me.

    by jan_m_savage
  • I noticed that i often spend lots of hours on my computer without doing anything useful but instead doomscrolling on hacker news and watching countless Youtube videos i hardly understand and give little attention. I think i could solve this by making a list of things i want to do on my computer before turning it on, but i haven't tried yet
    by Muhammad523
  • No internet use is inherently intentional. Old-style internet made you choose where to go, but that doesn't make the use intentional. We make choices all the time on auto-pilot. Choosing isn't the same as being intentional.

    It's true that it's harder to stay present on addictively designed feeds. But I find it difficult to stay present even visiting traditional websites / classic style forums. We also constantly get distracted reading books. Our minds are estimated to be wandering between 30 and 50% of the time during pretty much any task, even without phones or social media [1].

    Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained. Don't expect significant benefits if you switch out addictive internet for classic without also training your attention. This applies for anything of this nature. A few weeks ago I took a weekend without any devices as well as a lot of awareness practicing just during everyday tasks, and one interesting benefit was how it allowed me to take enjoyment from mundane tasks–I stopped thinking of them as things to get done as soon as possible to get back to the computer and started just being.

    If you meditate just a few minutes each day, you will start actually noticing yourself getting distracted and then shift to awareness. It feels annoying that you got distracted, but that just means it's working.

    The reason to do this is we are much happier when we are present–a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. I will admit I was not present writing this–but now that I've written this and acknowledged it, it's cued me to notice my distraction and come back to awareness.

    I highly recommend Born to Flourish [2] for an introduction to meditation and the science behind it (it's still easy to read).

    [1] https://neurosciencenews.com/mind-wandering-focus-25745/

    [2] https://annas-archive.gd/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7...

    by Cider9986
  • I cut out Social Media earlier this year, and it's been one of the best decisions I've made. Part of why I started was remembering that we didn't have doom-scrolling apps before smartphones. The change has been tremendous since I've been trying to go back to more "intentional" media. When I find myself distracted and wanting to pick up my phone, I realize there isn't really anything on it for me to do and am forced to just put it away. So I've started getting into the habit of keeping a book on me wherever I go. I've read 4 books this year!
    by rvshchwl
  • I heard the term "Gruen Transfer"[1] to describe the successful hijacking of attention in a store. I think it's useful to describe digital platforms, too - you go to YouTube to watch a video recommended by a friend, and then when you're done, The Feed attempts to pull a Gruen on you.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer

    by throw10920
  • The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.

    We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.

    It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.

    I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?

    A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.

    by econ

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