Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening

Great effort.

But I will make the obvious point that does not seem very fashionable these days. What if we chose instead to cultivate self-discipline? This project is a technical fix to a human problem, but human problems can also be addressed with human solutions. Is there no value in doing things the time-honored way?

Personally, I'm not addicted to social media but I do have a sweet tooth. The classic hack here is not to have sugary things in the home, or only in such small quantities as to neutralize the problem. But these technical fixes are expensive. Restaurant desserts are poor value compared to an industrial-sized pot of Nutella, consumed slowly.

Well, I've discovered that, with practice and determination, and of course some rules about quantities and time windows, it is in fact possible to resist temptation, even when it's sitting right in front of me all day. Personally, I find this human solution to be liberating and empowering.

> What if we chose instead to cultivate self-discipline?

I think that it can not be understated just how much self disciplin moderne people living in moderne societies are possessing.

Try to compare how moderne adult people react to sweets, social media, etc. compared to kids and children.

Continuing pushing this on the individual does not work. This is like saying that you can become multi billionaire by not getting star bucks.

I agree with you. People using this kind of service likely already have some self-awareness about their social media habits. In the end, self-discipline and personal boundaries might be a better solution than relying on external tools. But I think we can also consider this as another approach to finding a better solution.

If you have sweets in front of you and some cognitive dissonance in your head about how you both want and don't want them at the same time, this CPU time could be spent on more interesting things.

If you understand you don't want them given a broader context, then it requires no self-dispcipline - you just don't want them.

But if you can't untangle your contradiction, i.e. if self-discipline is required, why would you want to spare any thought on that?

I understand your point about this resisting temptation being a skill, a muscle that you train, that you want to master and that feels empowering. I'm just pointing out that when truly mastered it is 100% effortless - and when it is 100% effortless it means you either can't have it or understand that you don't want to (which is the same as simply not wanting to).

Otherwise it's a cognitive dissonance, a distraction.

This makes me feel even more self-satisfied! But yes, very fair point that I had not fully considered.

> But these technical fixes are expensive

Maybe if you measure it solely by monetary value, but if you consider will power to be a finite resource as well then the calculation changes.

What about the site led to the assumption that the time limit is related to discipline and social media overuse? The tag-line is "Because social media is better when we're all online together" not "because social media is hard to stay off of and we need boundaries forced on us."

You're making a great point, and one I think most people agree with, but I'm not sure it's relevant. At least, based on what I see of the website in its "offline" status.