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mathnerd314 comments on Thoughts on designing policies for oneself - Less Wrong
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I look at it in terms of efficiency; sites like reddit are simply inefficient ways to communicate. They are good at making random connections and exploring new subject areas, and that is what I use them for: if I have heard of a subject, but don't know about it, I find a subreddit on the topic and subscribe.
As a tool for discourse, however, there is much to be desired; communication is lossy (many posts are simply not upvoted enough to be seen) and interspersed with noise (unrelated but "viral" posts). Google Reader is almost lossless; it maintains a buffer of all messages for 30 days and then archives them so that they are available in search results but not as unread items. If one reads every feed to its end at least once a month, then no data is lost.
Google Reader thus has the odd effect of making one commit; either you are subscribed to a feed, and read every post of it, or you are not, and never see it anywhere. I have not used Reader for more than a few years, and furthermore haven't conducted a survey of its users, but I would theorize that Reader users as a whole are more productive/active than non-users as a result. Perhaps it could be a question on the next LessWrong survey.
Assuming of course you use reddit for communication, for me it would be more about finding interesting pieces of information and seeing the analysis of other people, by the time I get to it most of the discussion has already occurred. For me personally Google Reader does not make more more productive, it is just another way to waste time.
Thanks to this, I'm now officially using Feedly (since Google Reader is dead).
So more recently I've been using a big 6000-line text file, it has all of my TODO's as well as some URL's. I randomized the order a while ago and now I just go through them. I've stalled on that (actually doing things is hard, particularly when they're vague things like "post story"), so I might go back to feed reading; I experimented a bit with TinyTinyRSS but Feedly is probably a better choice.
Re-shuffle!
It's already random; replacing randomness with more randomness doesn't help except for mixing in new tasks. I went through ~50 tasks today, so it's not really that bad; just that I feel like some tasks should have more time dedicated. "Is putting animals in captivity an improvement?" is not the sort of question you want to dash off in 2 minutes. (Final answer: list of various animal rights groups).
The real problem is the list keeps growing longer; I'm starting to run into O(n^2) behavior in my text editor. It's not really designed for handling a FIFO queue. I've been staring at TaskWarrior, which might be adapted for doing the things I want.
One of the important features about Google Reader is that it's generally one-way; yes, I could comment on the original items for many of them, but I have way less desire to than LW posts.
A related massive productivity gain from Google Reader is that it is very easy to make it only interfere with your day once at a scheduled time, and you can just forget about the sites for the rest of the time. There's no routinely checking to see if something new has shown up, with the associated variable reinforcement, but that means it's not as appropriate for media where two-way communication is frequent and opportunities are transient.