Some further thoughts: I think there are some areas where it makes sense for the LessWrong site to make proactive efforts. (I particularly raised concerns about the upcoming Recommendations section feeling a bit time-sinky)
But I also think, for features like the one described in the OP, it usually makes sense to solve that at a higher level up than “site-specific.” i.e. if LessWrong lets you limit your time, but Facebook doesn’t, you just end up using Facebook instead of LessWrong. If you want to limit time on LW it makes more sense to use tools like Freedom or SelfControl.
The place where it makes sense to me for the LW team to work on features like this would be “areas that require higher granularity”, where you don’t necessarily want to block all of LessWrong (because Freedom does a better job), but you do want to block or add trivial inconveniences to parts of LW that are particularly distracting (which Freedom can’t do)
Since this seems to be an akrasia/executive-related problem, I suspect just having links to possible addons to use (and ideally, example configurations) easily accessible could be disproportionately ameliorative compared to its implementation cost, both via the reminder that compulsive browsing and mitigations for it both exist, and via the social signaling that this is an approved way of browsing that won’t make you weird. Though I’m not sure about the possible noise it creates, depending on what easy options you have for placement/hiding.
Some further thoughts: I think there are some areas where it makes sense for the LessWrong site to make proactive efforts. (I particularly raised concerns about the upcoming Recommendations section feeling a bit time-sinky)
But I also think, for features like the one described in the OP, it usually makes sense to solve that at a higher level up than “site-specific.” i.e. if LessWrong lets you limit your time, but Facebook doesn’t, you just end up using Facebook instead of LessWrong. If you want to limit time on LW it makes more sense to use tools like Freedom or SelfControl.
The place where it makes sense to me for the LW team to work on features like this would be “areas that require higher granularity”, where you don’t necessarily want to block all of LessWrong (because Freedom does a better job), but you do want to block or add trivial inconveniences to parts of LW that are particularly distracting (which Freedom can’t do)
Since this seems to be an akrasia/executive-related problem, I suspect just having links to possible addons to use (and ideally, example configurations) easily accessible could be disproportionately ameliorative compared to its implementation cost, both via the reminder that compulsive browsing and mitigations for it both exist, and via the social signaling that this is an approved way of browsing that won’t make you weird. Though I’m not sure about the possible noise it creates, depending on what easy options you have for placement/hiding.
Nod. I could see that. Agree with the “depends on whether we can find a reasonable place to put the link without adding noise” clause.