Category: Computer Security

Many online web sites and services, including many that have useful information, have become highly distracting and addictive — wasting many hours of precious time and clouding our judgement leading to bad purchases and other critical decisions.  This increasing level of distraction is probably due to a combination of increasing integration of persuasive technology and advances in recommendation engines and other algorithms.

I personally have had significant problems with lost time and distractions from YouTube and Hacker News.   Both of these sites have useful information as well as large amounts of distracting dreck.  I find both addictive.  I substantially reduced the amount of time wasted on Hacker News by switching from the web site to the Hacker News RSS feed in my Thunderbird email program.

Below is the Hacker News RSS feed in Thunderbird.

Thunderbird has a feature to subscribe to and manage RSS feeds.  As can be seen, I have subscribed to Hacker News and Slashdot.  Although Slashdot is similar to Hacker News in a number of respects, I have consistently found Hacker News much more distracting and addictive.

There is also an “End of Month” folder.  I have configured message filters in Thunderbird to move important but distracting articles from Hacker News and Slashdot to the “End of Month” folder.  This includes for example articles on some political topics that tend to get my blood boiling.

Hacker News has a “social” system of user and article scores, upvotes, downvotes , comments and other decorations.  This “socialization” of the new articles seems to be a major factor in why the web site is substantially more addictive and distracting than the RSS feed.  In addition, as noted, I am able to filter out articles that tend to distract me, putting them aside for a planned time to deal with distracting topics.

Many web sites have RSS feeds including Hacker News, Slashdot, and Tech Crunch (not shown here).  This method can be applied to many distracting web sites to reduce the unwanted distractions and lost time while still keeping up with useful information.  Message Filters can be configured to delete dreck, set aside articles on important but distracting topics, and highlight articles of special interest.  With message filters, you — the reader/user — are in control instead of mysterious machine learning algorithms and recommendation engines.

How to Set Up RSS in Thunderbird

The Thunderbird web site provides detailed instruction on how to set up a Feed Account and subscribe to RSS feeds here.

Step 1: Create a Feed Account

First you must create an account in Thunderbird for your feeds.

1. In the Menu Bar, click File > New > Feed Account. The Feed Account Wizard window appears.

2. Type a name for your Feed account in the Account Name box, then click Next.

3. Click Finish. Your new account will now appear in Thunderbird’s folder pane.

I gave my account the name Blogs and News Feeds:

There is a main dashboard for Blogs and News Feeds in Thunderbird:

Click on Manage subscriptions to add an RSS feed.  You will need the URL for the feed.  The picture below shows the feed dialog in Thunderbird.

How to set up message filters

Select the Message Filters menu item from the Tools drop down menu:

This brings up a dialog for creating and managing message filters:

Click on the New button to create a new message filter.  For example:

The Distraction Economy

Smartphones and the Internet have become more and more distracting and addictive over the last several years with no signs of the trend reversing.  This translates into many hours of lost time per week, month, and year.  Even using the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, five or ten hours per week lost to cat videos on YouTube, software industry gossip on Hacker News, or a million other online distractions translates into $36 to $72 per week, which is a lot for someone earning the minimum wage.  Of course most readers of this article probably should value their time at $15 to $100 per hour.

A dollar estimate does not capture the lost real world social, personal, and professional opportunities.  Outrage inducing videos and articles are often addictive but they are certainly not pleasant entertainment either.

Many of these distracting web sites, apps, and services seek to persuade us to buy products we don’t need, vote for public policies that don’t benefit us, and have other hidden costs that are difficult to measure — unlike lost time.

Many of these distracting web sites, apps, and services are also tightly integrated with a growing system of mass surveillance which, thanks to new technologies, is unprecedented in human history even in extreme dictatorships like Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Extremely high bandwidth wireless networks, inexpensive high resolution video cameras, remarkable advances in video compression, huge disk drives, and ultra-fast computers have enabled levels of monitoring far beyond the dystopian future in George Orwell’s 1984.

Fears of terrorism and an implied Mad Max scenario of global economic collapse due to peak oil have contributed to a public acceptance of these highly questionable developments, along with shrewd marketing of social media and smartphones.

Waiting for companies obsessed with quarterly earnings and politicians beholden to wealthy campaign contributors to roll back or reform these developments is unlikely to work.  People can take effective action — both individually and acting together — to reduce the level of distraction in their lives, regain valuable free time, and think more clearly, such as switching to RSS feeds and away from distracting web sites.

Some additional resources:

Center for Humane Technology

How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris (TED Talk)

Waking Up With Sam Harris #71 – What is Technology Doing to Us? (with Tristan Harris)

About Me

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).