We (the LW team) are definitely thinking about this issue, and I at least strongly prefer that people use the site in ways that reflect decisions which they would endorse in retrospect; ie, reading things that are valuable to them, at times and in quantities that make sense, and not as a way to avoid other things that might be more important. I’m particularly thinking about this in the context of the upcoming Recommendations system, which recommends older content; that has the potential to be more of an unlimited time sink, in contrast to reading recent posts (which are limited in number) or reading sequences (which is more like reading a book, which people have existing adaptations around).
A big problem with naively implemented noprocrast/leechblock-style features at the site level, is that they can backfire by shunting people into workarounds which make things worse. For example, if someone is procrastinating on their computer, noprocrast kicking in when they don’t want to stop might make them start reading on their phone, creating bad habits around phone use. Cutting off access in the middle of reading a post (as opposed to between posts) is especially likely to do this; but enforcing a restriction only at load-time encourages opening lots of tabs, which is bad. And since people are likely to invest in setting personal rules around whatever mechanisms we build, there are switching cost if the first mechanism isn’t quite right.
So: I definitely want us to have something in this space, and for it to be good. But it may take awhile.
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.
We (the LW team) are definitely thinking about this issue, and I at least strongly prefer that people use the site in ways that reflect decisions which they would endorse in retrospect; ie, reading things that are valuable to them, at times and in quantities that make sense, and not as a way to avoid other things that might be more important. I’m particularly thinking about this in the context of the upcoming Recommendations system, which recommends older content; that has the potential to be more of an unlimited time sink, in contrast to reading recent posts (which are limited in number) or reading sequences (which is more like reading a book, which people have existing adaptations around).
A big problem with naively implemented noprocrast/leechblock-style features at the site level, is that they can backfire by shunting people into workarounds which make things worse. For example, if someone is procrastinating on their computer, noprocrast kicking in when they don’t want to stop might make them start reading on their phone, creating bad habits around phone use. Cutting off access in the middle of reading a post (as opposed to between posts) is especially likely to do this; but enforcing a restriction only at load-time encourages opening lots of tabs, which is bad. And since people are likely to invest in setting personal rules around whatever mechanisms we build, there are switching cost if the first mechanism isn’t quite right.
So: I definitely want us to have something in this space, and for it to be good. But it may take awhile.
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.