I'd also recommend checking out The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu and Addiction by Design by Natasha Schull for background on the history of the commodification of attention and of the
It's really noticeable that Hacker News provides exactly this feature, and absolutely no other site that I've seen does.
For years I resorted to hacking /etc/hosts to block HN. Mentally, I just assumed that no website would have such settings so I never bothered to learn what noprocrast meant.
The idea of a hard block on tech is intuitive, but it doesn't do anything to undermine the habitual learning in tech addiction; it just frustrates it for a fixed amount of time.
Space focuses on slowly undermining the compulsions behind tech addiction. So that, over time, you don't have the impulse to open the app anymore.
If you try it out, let me know what you think!
I believe the tech world has a huge problem on its hands here, and that problem doesn't get anywhere near the attention it deserves. Large swaths of the population are turning into zombies and tech is the facilitator. Try looking at the drivers turning through a busy intersection some time. It's obscene how many are staring down at their phones rather than at whatever might be in the road around the corner.
That said, I don't believe the problem is simply that certain products remind or encourage people to use them at times. Rather, it's that there is a class of truly addictive products that don't do much (if anything) to help people manage the resulting dependency. And that approach is celebrated far more than it's scrutinized.
Coincidentally, I wrote the following on Twitter yesterday:
"Any potentially addictive software/service should offer a way for users to lock themselves out of their own account for a predetermined set of hours." [0]
It was meant in my usual tongue-in-cheek style, but I do think that a solution for breaking tech product dependency is sorely needed and hope this discussion gains some steam.
[0] https://twitter.com/ncantelmo/status/930876372620374017