I feel like I could say the same about infinite news which I'd define as a site I can check several times a day and see new "top stories". This would include Reddit and HN. I find it super addicting to check too many times and then get sucked into spending too much time reading comments and sometimes articles. Rarely am I actually better off for it .
Contrast to 20-30yrs ago where at best you got a newspaper once a day or if you were like me you got a few magazine subscriptions and once you browsed each one, that was it for your monthly article consumption.
1. It's yesterday's news. You've probably got some contextualisation for the story as you've likely already caught wind of it from some other channel. Much of the compulsion of HN comes from the too-brief and decontextualised subject lines. They are, ultimately, a Dark Pattern.
2. The Machine Stops^W^WScroll Ends. Typically there are ~60--100 or so items. That's ... more than you can comfortably read, but it is finite.
3. Skip the comments. I'm increasingly finding they're less worthwhile than the post(s) themselves, usually. With some exceptions.
3.0 Those exceptions are rarely in more-active discussions. Or political ones. Or business-oriented ones.
3.1 Definitely skip comments dominated by drama or cheap shots. Utterly not worth it.
3.2 If you must read comments, do so logged out, and collapse as you go.
4. The front page has had a day to sort out its rankings. Typically, the top few items are reasonably significant or interesting, and that likelihood falls as you go down the list. HN ranking is arbitrary enough that there can be quite good content far down the queue, but be discerning.
5. Browsing day-olds seems to help ease the urge to scroll and check often.
6. If you're feeling adventurous, go back a year or five or ten and see what's being discussed. You may discover a ... sameness. Which might make you question the value of aggressively pursuing the latest all that much more.
As soon as I registered my account, the comment sections seemed to hold less importance/meaningful content. Perhaps because I started paying more attention to them?
It's a small thing, but I'm working on making myself read less of them now. The further past the left 1/3rd of my 21:9 monitor a comment starts, the less value I'm going to get from reading it, generally.
If I find my screen filled with comments at that depth, and can't quickly scroll past them, ctrl-W is usually the best remedy.
I recently decided to take a month of reddit for the sake of my crippled attention span. Over the past year, I've already narrowed down my subreddits to what I'd consider useful information, but that only helped a little. There's just too much stuff on there.
Reddit rewards people who know how to repost or start flame wars, with their karma points. This can also optimize for low-effort content.
I wouldn't be surprised if certain subreddits could be entirely replaced with bots, automatically generating memes and image macros in response to things happening on the web. The biggest subreddits already look like this, imo.
Maybe sticking to a newspaper, print or digital version, or a single news program on tv is what everyone should be doing. It might even cut down on consuming fake news.
There's a big difference between watching the national news on ABC/NBC/CBS before dinner and then the local 10/11pm news, and keeping Fox News (or MSNBC or even CNN) on all day long, even as "background noise".
For a long time I loved reading comments to news stories or other discussions on reddit, for example.
But I have found that most comments are actually at the very least misinformed, often wrong and clearly not very educated and I have started asking myself why I am exposing myself to this low quality messages. (There are of course notable exceptions found aplenty)
Realizing this, I have stopped reading most comments and generally just stick to a few main newspaper sites that still have decent journalism.
Contrast to 20-30yrs ago where at best you got a newspaper once a day or if you were like me you got a few magazine subscriptions and once you browsed each one, that was it for your monthly article consumption.