Paul Graham's Hacker News is an interesting forum. Perhaps too interesting. Paul Graham (aka pg) wrote the Yahoo Store back in the day, and rolled some of his earnings into a venture capital business. Hacker News is an experiment in maintaining an online community's culture. The target audience is the same entrepreneural set that his VC fund, Y combinator, targets. Hacker News provides hackers a place to exchange ideas and attract other smart, like-minded folks.
Hacker News has recently started attracting a *lot* more folks and there have been some growing pains, both in terms of site performance, but also in culture: the older denizens couldn't indoctrinate the newbies fast enough. To give you a sense of the Hacker News community values, one of the things Paul did a while back was to introduce a "no procrastination" feature, such that a user could tell the server "only let me visit 10 minutes out of every hour". However, there was an override, and I suspect a *lot* of were hitting the override switch, because, hey, there are smart, interesting, like-minded people on the other side of that switch. And we're not talking kinda smart. Another Paul, Paul Buchheit, the inventor of gmail, is one of the top contributors on Hacker News. It's really amazing.
Now, most HN folks probably use Firefox as their primary browser. But there's so much interestingness on the web, that a lot of folks also use Leechblock to restrict their own web surfing behavior. (free tip: I also tell leechblock to send me to http://nowdothis.com). But, since we're all hacking the web, we all have oodles of browsers laying around, and when you just really want to scratch that itch, you can fire up Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, SeaMonkey, Flock, Camino, whatever, to sneak a peak at HN. Then pg's server-side noprocrast function kicks in and you have to click "override" if you want your next fix. And if you get bored of HN, you can go check out your favorite reddit.com subreddits (which is completely unrestrained), or the New York Times, or see what's coming out on video this week, . . . you get the idea. HN is the gateway drug that can, at its worst, lead you straight back to the old-school TV crackhouse.
But with this most recent uptick in traffic, pg also removed the override button. Hallelujah. See, Reddit et al just aren't interesting enough on their own to get me to open a browser. But Hacker News, that's different. Now I feel comfortable removing Hacker News from my leechblock blacklist. I can play by pg's rules. And I feel confident that like-minded souls will realize the same thing, and stick with HN. You're not going to see the same group of people reconverge on a different site. So I removed Hacker News from my list of leechblock sites, and now I just visit a couple of times a day. Without exerting any willpower. I just forget to visit.
The upswing is that I don't open another browser, so I don't forget what is I was working on, go wander into the hinterlands of Reddit, the New England Journal of Medicine image of the week quiz, xkcd.com, ted.com, etc.
Thus pg, by preventing me from accessing his site, prevents me from opening a browser, prevents me from spending more time surfing the intertubes, and, even though he's decreasing the total amount of time I spend on his site, he's decreasing the amount of time I spend on all other sites *more*, and so he's increasing his market share (my mindshare), by decreasing everyone else's more.
So, thanks pg.
