# Coping with the Web of Information overload **URL:** \ **Category:** Hedonic peer production\ **Tags:** sx\ **Created:** [November 22, 2025, 2:42pm UTC](https://discuss.coding.social/t/coping-with-the-web-of-information-overload/788 "2025-11-22T14:42:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 6
**Author:** ![aschrijver](https://discuss.coding.social/user_avatar/discuss.coding.social/aschrijver/32/3_2.png) [@aschrijver](https://discuss.coding.social/u/aschrijver)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2025, 9:25am UTC](https://discuss.coding.social/t/coping-with-the-web-of-information-overload/788/6 "2025-12-05T09:25:49Z")
> [@serious\_fun](#): > > I would have expected some sort of rough quantification: we can juggle so many bits per hour/day etc., some sort of “budget” of mental energy is that is exhausted and then needs rest, sleep to replenish. [So that] you can sort of identify how the budget gets exhausted, which causes the overload. I think this is certainly kind of possible. The current [Center for Humane Technology](https://humanetech.com) started as [Time Well Spent](https://web.archive.org/web/20170131143157/http://www.timewellspent.io/) movement, focused more on our own healthy habits around the use of digital technologies, and how software could be designed for that. This was also at a time where there was a lot of focus on tools to help avoid repetitive strain injuries (RSI), by collecting various metrics about computer use. The thing with info overload is how personal it is. One person thrives in a flood of information, while another needs deep focus on singular tasks. Different kinds of activities have different needs for such focus. So any software support should facilitate a large extent of personal tweaking. Create something akin to an “Attention profile”. As a community facilitator and [weaver in public](https://discuss.coding.social/t/weaving-in-public-connecting-people-and-interests/85) (and now [“weaving in commons”](https://coding.social/introduction/#about-this-commons)), I willingly accepted a big info overload flooding in from countless different channels. Dealing with that to an extent is essential part of the tasks of any community facilitator / commons janitor. Even knowing that it comes with detrimental effects, like losing an ability to focus (unless carefully planning time for this). Coding is social. Different stakeholder roles in the software development process require different levels of information density and attention. This recognition exists insufficiently, esp. in FOSS movement, and where big gains can be made by better supporting these individual roles. > [@serious\_fun](#): > > Reducing the number of distinct channels one tracks is a fairly obvious strategy and you hear that all the time: people want their devices to be “synced”. Given the breadth and scope of the FSDL, there is no prescriptive way to move in the good direction, but everything depends on preference and circumstances. Every initiative favors their own tailored approach. That is the level where SX should accommodate, and then the strategy you propose becomes more of a _tactical pattern_ in a crowdsourced library of good practices. Social coding commons by means of [hedonic peer production](https://coding.social/introduction/#hedonic-peer-production) offers a solution for facilitating the crowdsourcing process. By ensuring that contribution is intricate part of people’s own improvement process, thus providing the necessary _intrinsic motivation_ to contribute. These contributions over time aggregate more and more value to the FSDL and SX methodology, creating a feedback loop. Since probably numerous best-practices exist, Social experience design has the concept of _SX Instrument sets_, which are categories of best practices to be filled with _SX Instruments_, the good practices themselves, packaged for direct application and use. > [@serious\_fun](#): > > So there are many layers on which to work on, both in terms of self-diagnozing and changing behavior, but also by better software that nudges in the healthy direction by default. Today, in a different context, I wrote the following in the Social experience design chatroom, that relates to this: > What a Social coding commons and any movement for change should do, is facilitate incremental improvements and value being added all the time to _ **evolving solutions** _ across the full holistic scope. And be able to breakdown the many intricate solution aspects and delegate to the appropriate motivated interest groups who can deal with them. One of the things that SX brings along is the notion of “growing software” through a timeless evolutionary process (bottom-up), where a solution gradually matures, boosted by spikes of (top-down) active software development that occur during its lifecycle. --- _[View the full topic](https://discuss.coding.social/t/coping-with-the-web-of-information-overload/788)._