Here is what I found at my site today:
Q: I have been addicted to 3form tonight and I can’t get off. I need to eat yet I am staying on. How can I pull myself away from 3form?
A: 1. Remove all interesting topics from your preferences one by one, until you recieve only the most inane and incomplete questions. Resistance should now be significally decreased. 2. Now focus on how much you need to go to the bathroom. 3. Go to the bathroom. 4. Grab something from the fridge on your way back to the computer.
Apparently, addictiveness of some websites can be a problem for their users. I know at least a couple of other websites that similar to 3form in this sense, these are StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Answers.
Peter Cashmore wrote in his blog about StumbleUpon “it’s just so darned addictive - once you Stumble, you just can’t stop.” Here you can find other comments: “StumbleUpon is too addictive. Period.”, “I’m a former addict of SU. I had to uninstall it.” The solution suggested for 3form might work for other addictive sites as well.
I am very curious what contributes to excessive addictiveness of some web services. Apparently, addictiveness is not simply a consequence of usefulness. Google is a nice example of a very useful service, which is not addictive.
I use SU last thing before I shut the computer down. In fact its how I ended up writing a comment right here, right now.
Good night
The very first site I was ever addicted to was neopets.com. (please, don’t laugh…it’s not just for kids).
What made the site addictive was that you could never get bored with it. There was always something more to do, some other type of game you have never tried, message boards in your guild where you could interact with your friends, a web page to design (html to learn), a shop to stock, auctions, trading post, exploring to do, item collecting and setting up a gallery, neomail to answer, etc….
And if you ever did run out of things to do, just create your own random contest and give away some rare valuable item to the kids on the public message boards…they will love ya for it. (having them write poems about their pets and awarding the best one a paint brush was one of my favorites)
Had I not been addicted to that site, I may never have ended up learning html. And had I never done that, I definately wouldn’t be developing software today. So my addiction paid off, it seems. I guess I was lucky.
The bottom line is most addictive sites seem to have a never ending supply of time consuming, interesting, diverse content and/or activities.