Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS?
I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly. I can only imagine it's full of modals, infinite scroll and other features that makes my skin go green and pants purple.
So I only end up getting addicted to websites that are simple and old fashioned enough like HN and wikipedia (as long as I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident). Btw, on youtube each time I click subscriptions it defaults back to the grid view. I want a list. Monkey wants list! YOUTUBE AAAAAAARHGFHGHGHFFG-
> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it.
I thought I was the only one with this habit hah!
IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you need to be careful with in general, because it's easy to "miss" a click and accidentally close something, even without this habit. It's okay for some things that are truly temporary (i.e. delete confirmation dialogs and the like), but clearly not everything.
But hey, old.reddit.com still works, and is mostly okay.
> I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident
I got this extension to automatically redirect them: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ – also useful for some other things like redirecting Reddit to old.reddit.com, and PostgreSQL documentation links to /current/ rather than /9.4/ and such which still frequently show up in search results.
> I thought I was the only one with this habit hah!
Nope. I think I would gladly institute capital punishment for people who institute pop-ups on highlighted text. "Oooh, you highlighted a passage of text, would you like to tweet it (with a link to source and user tracked)?"
No. I was reading that. ** off.
Outlook.com is particularly as depending on my random clicks I can end up with "new email + quote" or "new Note" or some other thing.
Some things I've managed to murder with adblock rules but really I'd just like my browser to not show the relevant triggers.
GitLab's diff or Code Review has an extremely annoying feature for people who fidget with text, especially when dragging text.
In addition to highlighting and "painting" the text, I often click and drag the highlighted text around. If some text is dragged onto the code view in Firefox, the dropped text seems to be treated like URLs, and opened either in new tabs or in the current tab.
If gitlab allows uploads by dropping files outside of the textarea, it might be a bug related to that (either in the browser or more likely in gitlab). This is standard for dragging urls or files into the browser from outside when the website isn't a drop target, afaik. You might be able to write a user script to disable it.
Alternatively, if you feel like rebuilding Firefox yourself, it looks like nsBaseDragService.cpp _might_ help you with preventing stuff from being dropped anywhere; I haven't read the whole file, but going by the name, overriding aCanDrop and mCanDrop to false might help. See lines 62, 84, 92. This _might_ allow you to continue dragging stuff around but disable dropping stuff.
I also thought I was the only one. To be fair, my text-painting is half readability enhancement and half fidgeting. I am kind of annoying in pair programming sessions.
I find it really hard to read large sections of text on a screen without the highlighted text play that somehow anchors my view (this is a largely subconscious process I think).
But yeah, my wife will go batshit when trying to read the same thing over my shoulder. "Just stop, I can't read when you do that"
The "New Email + Quote" thing gets me frequently, the quoted text below will just be some random section of text and I have to go back, deselect the text, and start a new email.
The old.reddit redirect and RES are really the only reason I've continued to use the site at all.
With a well curated selection of subreddits (and removal of a lot of the "default" ones) it's actually really good. My brain naturally starts going "these links aren't really interesting anymore" after 100-200 links, and I task switch as a result.
Because a) they randomly toggle your setting back, and don’t respect it at all on mobile, and b) features are slowly breaking on the old UI as well: gallery links not working, the “report” button taking seconds to load and then having a modal that breaks interoperability and hijacks Esc.
I hate squarespace with a passion for this. I'll be loading a forum or other page and hit esc to stop the page from loading. It works--but a few seconds later, it prompts me to log into the CMS/management.
As far as modals go, I actively want modals to respond to esc. I don't want to have to reach for my mouse to close a pop-up. Modal popups are the only thing that should hijack esc.
This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate people who don't even know what a browser is, for whom a smart phone is nothing less than black magic. The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.
> The manager tells his devs to just "make it work" for the most challenged user, to abstract away all these nuances of how a browser works. They use test groups to find out how my grandma expects a website to work and they basically make a smart phone converge towards one of those gizmos you saw on Star Trek, and then you get something like the Twitter interface.
Nooooo they do not do this. If they did, modern UIs wouldn't confuse my elderly parents much worse than old ones did.
Dear all tech companies (but looking at you, Google, since they won't stop buying cheap Android phones): every time you decide to have some full-screen horseshit notification pop up on an action, instead of doing the usual thing (say, a "hey, update this for new stuff!" thing) I get a fucking phone call to help "fix it". Goddamn stop it, the rest of us hate that too (my intent was to open the app to do something, so don't get in my way) but it's usability poison for the olds.
That includes those new tabs in Firefox every time there's an update. It's confusing. Stop it. Oh, and FF, bring back normal-ass menus, because my parents (unfortunately) use Windows. Browsers have proven Apple right all along with forcing the top-of-screen "file, edit, view..." menu, since apparently even major vendors can't be trusted to do the sane thing with those instead of cramming it all in some mysterious kitchen-sink button-opened dropdown.
Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.
I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.
> Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.
It doesn't work like that. Stratechery explains why. Aggregators aggregate users and even power users like to talk to/be listened to by a lot of people.
So Twitter and Youtube and the like don't even need to target power users, in general. They need to target the greater population, and once that population is captive, if you want to have any kind of audience as a publisher, you're wrangled to where the users are, you're captive, too.
Apple does the same thing with devs. They primarily target not super sophisticated middle to upper class users with decent disposable incomes. Since they "own" a huge amount of these users, developers have to build applications for them if they want to make money. And then developers are second class citizens on Apple platforms. Apple removes an API overnight? Better get cracking to fix your app ASAP. Apple doesn't support modern CI/CD platforms? Have Amazon stack up consumer desktops in a warehouse to kind of work around that.
I have experienced it myself, and anyone else can theorize all they want, but they can't invalidate my experience.
As an example, I can no longer use YouTube for tutorials, because they have no dislike signal visible to me, and as such, I can't judge whether they are worth watching.
I can not stand Reddit's new UI. But even with the old UI, the massive amount of users attract a lot of heavy-handed moderation, which also turn me off. I use it for "entertainment" and not "research" or "speech".
Even though HN has much fewer users, it is among the few platforms where I can use it for real speech, like deep insight.
Many platforms have such a low signal-to-noise ratio that I am wasting my time on them, and don't find them useful for neither entertainment nor speech. I don't care what Stratechery says I like, when clearly I know myself better.
So true, 100% on the tutorial videos. I found myself watching this super basic tutorial video the other day that had a lot of polish and shine but lacked a huge amount of substance. I wondered how such videos would operate if the downvotes were still visible. Yes downvotes played a strong role in signaling tutorial quality.
> I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.
Hopefully this doesn't make me some kind of elitist or something, but I specifically never link to Hacker News or mention it on my social media accounts because I don't want HN to become "watered down" like so many previously high-value content sites/forums have been over the decades. I'll just share the linked article if I want to share something I found here.
> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it
I'm not one of those people who paints but this has got me so many times. Honestly I'm not even one of the people that hates the redesign (Admittedly because I spend less time there now) but that has dinged me so many times. Why is everything a modal?
The "This page looks better in the app" message on mobile is a well earned diss aimed at their web designers
quora used to ask for login only when you followed a link while already on quora (so opening from google search wouldn't prompt a login). you could just copypaste url and look at the thread. but not anymore, they closed this off since recently. fuck them, community-driven websites shouldn't become fenced off like that because some lizard brain correlated compulsory login with registration count.
+1 on reddit "modal" bs, i don't paint, but simply like to click shit from time to time. it's horrible.
+1 on rage quitting bullshit sites out of disgust.
The old Reddit design was just so much better. As a long time front end dev I know this can be an annoying take. But product teams push out so much redesigning that's just unnecessary and this happened with Reddit. The official app has less functionality and is less intuitive and the new website is a garbage fire of pushing you "related content". I guess I'm glad that kept old.reddit.com at least.
The original seems to have been designed with different goals in mind. I have no doubt that the new ux better optimized their new goals, I just don’t agree that the new goals were as useful to me personally.
"Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly."
Quora used to be good. A place where you can ask any question and if it was interesting enough, interesting people answer. Like a good question about wikipedia, made Jimmy Wales answer directly.
But over time it all became very generic and force login to read anything, made me not visit at all anymore.
Re twitter and reddit and YouTube: old.reddit.com and nitter.eu and newpipe/invidious respectively.
All these projects show we're patently far from the only ones who get driven up the fucking wall by absolutely brain-dead design being pushed over the user's wishes.
> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use.
My old mentor used to do this too, and I really never understood why. Since then, I have seen others do it too, occasionally. It looked more like a fidget than anything helpful. I once tried it just to see if this was some hidden technique I was missing out on, but I didn't notice anything particularly helpful - it didn't help me keep focused on the text or anything, and it distracted me personally.
I'm very curious what the benefit is, or at least the reason? From an apparent lizard brain :)
I do it when I'm reading something, but my attention isn't fully (or is difficult and requires back and forth with references) on it to mark either the paragraph I'm on or the sentence I just finished reading.
Yeah this happens to me on Reddit as well. Twitter used to be like this too where a tweet opened like a "lightbox" but a couple years ago they changed it so that clicking a tweet goes to a page with the individual tweet. Generally in UX I like to avoid this concept of dialog boxes, modals etc but everyone ends up re-learning that after naively implementing things in this "A screen pops up over another screen" manner
> On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it.
The whole point of modals is to enable the user to close them by clicking outside of them. So this way if you want to show new users something like an onboarding tutorial, they can just click outside of the modal if they are like "WTF is this??", rather than needing to look for the close button. The fact that many people abuse them doesn't negate the fact that they are, if used correctly, actually a better experience for the user.
The only insane thing is to have an algorithm guess whether I want to watch the video or not, instead of just letting me decide with a single damn click.
Autoplaying videos that stop playing after scrolling is one of the worst UX crimes in history of UX. At the same time in 2022 I still cannot prevent "autoplay" of animated gifs that bombard my senses in every feed unless I outright block literally everything other than text.
And the sad thing is that software quality in general is most likely just as bad, only not as visible.
For example, I doubt most people watching a video on YouTube would like the video to stop playing when they scroll down. If they wanted to pause it, they'd pause it. They also probably don't want the video to transition to the next, whilst they're reading threads.
If you're in an infinite loop stream however, you do probably want it to pause or stop, without intervention, as you've scrolled away and dismissed the video.
However - you may not want that to happen whilst you're still in-thread with the video. If you're looking at comments on the video, you probably still want it to continue. But if you reach the bottom of the thread, you probably don't want to have it pause and have to find the start of the thread to continue playing it, just because you scrolled an inch too far.
That's fair, as always context matters. But I feel it was implied the context of our discussion was infinite scroll pages like twitter (he specifically mentioned that), tiktok, instagram etc.
That's true - which is why I spent the majority of the comment speaking about a situation in an infinite scroll where you do not want the video to automatically pause.
I'm still young so maybe my mind hasn't matured enough to where I can combat this well. So I went heavy-handed - I have a button on my desk that when I press it, my server's DNS server (through which all my devices and router resolve) begins rejecting requests to reddit, instagram, twitter, hackernews, news.google.com, etc.
For the next two hours, there is nothing I can do outside of SSH'ing through my mobile device (purposefully don't have an app for it) and resetting the countdown on the DNS server and restarting the server, to allow these DNS requests. It denies all SSH connections from my home network, and doesn't even resolve its own subdomain (dns.my-domain.com for the DNS dashboard) for me to reset it.
My (crude) version of the same thing requires that I go 1000 meters from my house to press the button to enable the DNS for another 30 min of browsing (button is on a custom phone app, distance measured using phone GPS).
One feature that I want to implement is to have the system randomly enable for 10 minutes - and to signal this by changing the color of light from a desk lamp (Phillips Hue). The idea is that when this happens, I would drop what I was doing and leap for my phone to get some bonus browsing in. Me being controlled by the system like this might be fun?, or at least illustrate something?
Before I read "custom phone app", I was imagining a mysterious physical red button somewhere up a telephone pole you had to climb, which through some abuse-of-job-privileges-or-connections you had wired directly into the telephony wires leading into your house. Or perhaps a comically large high-voltage pull switch labelled "reddit" which sparks a bit for no reason. Maybe a series of such pull switches, one for every major distracting website.
Just coming here down to note that despite, or because the lizard part, our brains are wonderful creation machines. All the comments up to this parent, including the mysterious physical red button, are great.
On my part, I think the trick is being selective with the addictions we indulge in. Exercise, reading, having sex, cooking, going on walks, writing, 3D modelling. A good mix of addictions is great in life!
People who still build magical red buttons and DNS blockers aren't that far gone, they can still build stuff. Most of us are completely paralized on our couches, drooling at the telescreen while a steady dose of soma is administered. Writing a comment is a chore and building a custom app is a distant dream project. We have plenty of daydreams, but are no longer capable of executing them.
Seems like it would be ineffective while traveling. Unless you could configure it to be 1000 meters from current location! I'm interested in doing something like this. I've been playing way too much Elden Ring this week and I'd like to cut back in general on consumption of anything.
Related to this but somewhat tangentially, I’ve been trying to figure out how I could programmatically determine if I look “busy” and engage Do Not Disturb for a period of time (roughly pomodoro interval) so that emails and alerts can’t distract me. The problem is that when I’m doing rudimentary code my interactions can be rather intense and obvious, but the more technical the problem the more I slow down, mulling things over in my head or wondering why we wrote code this bad and why it hasn’t broken before. I can be pretty deep in thought at this point and not showing my tools much to go off of.
In the end I think just making a pomodoro tool that automatically disables alerts until break is by far a simpler and more accurate prospect.
My method is super simple but does require a wee bit of self discipline. I "HALT!". I even have "HALT!" written on a post-it on my monitor. Whenever I notice that my (valuable) attention is wandering, I yell "HALT!" in my head or out loud (depending who is nearby). This makes me snap out of it, to break the pattern. Ideally, I return to what I should be doing but very often I can only do the minimum. The minimum being sitting there doing nothing, thinking of nothing (except the thing I should be doing), until I get bored and want to do something ... but only allowing myself to do what I should be doing otherwise I must continue to sit doing nothing (being halted). It's often too hard to halt AND switch do what I should be doing, so this method breaks it into two steps. Halting alone is much easier to force myself to do since doing nothing is easy. Once in halt-state, the only possible exit is to the proper do-state.
Interestingly I find that while you can doom scroll on a laptop for me it doesn’t “work”.
Perhaps because my laptop is work territory (both actual work and hobby) so I automatically don’t doom scroll there or maybe it’s just that lots of content is optimised for mobile and the experience is “better”.
Also, I always carry my phone, I don't carry my laptop most of the time. Pulling out your non-work laptop in a boring meeting is also something you don't do.
I got the new iPhone SE (small screen) in 2020 so I limit my screen time. It has worked but not as well as I'd hoped for.. maybe I need to go back to my razr.
most tools are multi-use. A smart phone is currently the best "convenient world remote control" you can have. It is also the best "distraction toy" you can have...
...self-discipline does not come easy, especially if supply and demand are strongly in favor of distraction...
I don't _need_ it but using a smartphone instead of navigating via a physical map and taking photos of memorable events throughout the day sure is nice.
The car has a map + navigation already, and I care very little about documenting events... although I do use the phone during tear downs for the purpose. Still the prime use of the (my) phone is actual phone calls.
I’ve tried it and even closed all my social media accounts. It sort of worked. For social medias… But it changed nothing, I found other addictions on the internet. It’s just … the smartphone. I blocked a little portion of the infinity that is the internet, but my lizard brain is smart enough to know that infinite content is still there, more easily accessible than letting my mind wandering.
I think I should speak about it to a psychiatrist but I’m not even sure it’s a topic they can handle nowadays.
Infinite scrolling feels just like eating only pure sugar.
It’s not quality food but really addictive. To fight this addiction physical blocking is one part of the solution. The other part is psychological and thus personal. What works for me and make me change might not me the same for you.
That is why reading a book like Atomic Habits might help, but maybe you’ll need a few others to understand what needs to be changed to fight this.
For me, one day I tried to remember what content I saw and what I got from spending tens of ours scrolling. The answer was nothing. I learned nothing and got nothing from it. Just like eating pure sugar all evening vs going out a bit walking and feeling refreshed or biking or whatever.
I don’t want to be filled with empty stuff anymore. I don’t want socials to steal hours of sleep anymore.
I don’t want to have the feeling that I’m giving McDonald’s every day to my brain. I found the ratio to feel satisfied is more like 10-5% rather than 80% of my free time on it. I deleted every single social app and I never ever missed it. Because they provide really nothing for my life and I have so much better to do around me or with other sources of content.
That’s just me
> The answer was nothing. I learned nothing and got nothing from it.
I actually now have the inverse issue : now that I blocked "pure sugar content", I consume a lot of more interesting content. Like, HN is interesting to read, I have only subscriptions I like on YT and I feel like they make me learn. I still watch/read a lot of shit but I've also found a lot of gems I'm glad I found.
I'll read Atomics Habits since a lot of people recommended it to me.
Then it’s a matter of equilibrium I guess. Even if you love biking it’s harder to do it safely at night. So we « naturally » wait for sunlight.
When things we love are accessible at all times and this barrier is removed the equilibrium have to be imposed maybe by introducing other thing like, maybe, more social interactions, talking to people etc. Whatever fits in the cycle to maintain an equilibrium.
I've not managed it completely yet but something that decimated (oo, literal usage) my social usage was to get rid of all the apps
The mobile web interface equivalents are usually decent enough to sate the addiction but the quirks and oddnesses that try to push you to the apps will stop you falling into doom scrolling
Also of course when you're up against an algorithm, get rid of the data. All the page likes, groups, friend-of-a-friends, etc you don't need - unlike. Or go nuclear and create a new account
Facebook for example has no content that keeps me coming back on my new account -- it even says that I need to add more friends to get more content, nothing at all on the home feed. I gave it up by accident :)
Thats a good point, up until now I've assumed this is an issue of willpower. But the app is a consumer too, if I can cutoff its food supply, it'll be much weaker.
My /etc/hosts file on the machine I work on all day blocks 68k hosts 24/7. No social media sites at all except Twitter. No ads.
Meanwhile, the Leechblock browser add-on stops me from using the few things I do otherwise (bits of Reddit, HN) allow between 09:00 and 17:00 which is not perfect but it's a start. Except ... I disable it a lot :(
Not sure if you know, but there are advanced options to put various roadblocks in your way, such as disabling access to the options menu, or disabling access to the add-ons menu entirely.
I’m all for tangible, tactical solutions to problems that are currently enabled by software. For example, a phone tells the time, but it’s not always as straight forward as looking at a clock.
While it's not exactly the same, there's an app called "Self Control" on macOS that blocks selected websites for chosen amount of time, and after it is engaged it is virtually impossible for you to disable the block until the timer runs out. I use it a lot.
This exists as a commercial product (e.g. Freedom App), but you can just as easily add buttons and switches to a Home Assistant setup that does the same thing.
The Freedom app has similar options where you can disable turning it off during a session or even disable Task Manager / Activity Monitor while it's active too.
I eventually found the pricing section...the green bit at the bottom, after 'try for free', behind 'freedom premium'.
Thanks to my off button (and several comments herein), i now so much more appreciate how my off button is free.
As in cost to use, and availability.
The DNS server is set in my phone as well (still works over data). But even if it wasn't, I live in a third-world country that still has crude data caps (the United States) so consuming video would probably quickly approach it.
Typical DNS-level blocking software like pihole also functions as a DHCP server, allowing all devices on the network to share the DNS settings with no additional configuration necessary.
Nothing to do with age, I'm afraid - I'm over 40, and far more scattered and subject to the lure of the endless internet than when I was 20. In my personal situation, my best hope is that it is mommy brain, and that I'll outgrow it as my kid gets further from infancy.
I'm a couple of years short of 40 and feel the same. But these infinite feeds simply didn't exist, or at least weren't nearly as prevalent and well tuned to hijack human psychology, when we were 20.
I remember downloading and picking over the content of newsgroups in my mid-late teens and before that endlessly rolling through different TV stations.
My mind has always craved the distraction of the infinite scroll, it's just modern social media has perfected it.
The DNS server is set in my phone as well. But even if it wasn't, I live in a third-world country that still has crude data caps (the United States) so consuming video would probably quickly approach it.
I keep setting things like this up (Current: Pi-hole) but my problem is I break through it virtually instantly because I'm the one that set it up (Current bypass: Log in to pihole, disable)
Anyone know of a way that could thwart someone who's ~20 years in to computing? Doesn't have to be clever, just needs to be enough of a road block to not be worth the effort bypassing. If there's an exploit past the roadblock I'll find it haha
"Just be more disciplined", etc: I know but it turns out we're fighting ADHD here, working on that front separately
Otherwise, the block is sometimes just enough to make you second-guess your browsing habit. There's only a uBlock rule between me and reddit, and no limits on my iPad, but the extra effort is a reminder that I don't want to visit that website.
I had a scheduled task to turn of my desk top at 21:50. then multiple tasks but they were subject to the whim of just disablin them. Turns out if it's a random moment between 21:30~22:30, I dont get the urge to disable it. but then it has to non nullable when it happens.
I used to scoff at things like Windscribe's ROBERT which does similar things for social sites, clickbait, gambling sites, porn etc...
Thinking it's more like a child blocker. But I've had battles with addiction and issues myself with keeping focused. Being able to have some kind of actual switch for what I can access often acts as a mental toggle. It changes my mode so to speak and I end up getting more done.
There's tons of cool free filters or blockers etc but I love your method. A physical button could be great for that mental switch aspect I was talking about.
Sorry mate. Missed this. My ability to get distracted with physical things have a limit. I'll tidy up, do some chores, then once I've expended that I'll get on with whatever I need to focus on.
It isn't the push-button setup that you've built, but PiHole is a decent option for this purpose as well.
Occasionally I add social media sites (including HN) to the block list.
It's very easy to bypass when I really want/need to, but it does cut down the more unconscious "CMD + T - news/redd/face - enter" moments that happen when I'm bored.
Prevents the occasional unnecessary mindless scroll by creating a couple extra steps.
That's exactly right - It's always good to put roadblocks and increase resistance to bad habits, and take away roadblocks and decrease resistance to good habits. It works better for me than cold turkey.
I'm 40, so when I was a teenager the internet did not have so much different distractions. My mind was great at focusing. I'd read books, cover to cover, and tune out everything else. I'd sit hours and hours straight and make websites for IE4.
today I struggle to read a chapter in a book without getting distracted.
It's pretty disheartening to notice.
I'm much better at other things, but I wish I could still read like I used to.
I think the worst ones for me right now are YouTube and hacker news. I'll have a look at the procrastination settings here, but for some &£@£# reason my phone won't uninstall YouTube.
> I think the worst ones for me right now are YouTube and hacker news.
Same thing.
If anything, any strategy I tried just made me replace awful content with more quality content.
But you can still be addicted to "good" content. And it’s harder to block because the FOMO is harder with sites like HN and interesting YouTube content.
I have something similar except that it's permanent and only in software (although I love the idea of a red button). I use NextDNS with a huge list of blocked websites. I set NextDNS as my dns server on windows and android so they're blocked on my laptop and phone.
To use one, I have to go to next dns and enable it, then when I'm finished I disable it again. I find this is mostly enough to make my usage mindful.
My guess is that changing the DNS server is work - enough work that your brain can say "oh wait I kinda didn't actually want to go to that time-wasting site, did I?" and find something less soul-sucking to do. Maybe some kind of work you're glad to do, maybe some kind of amusement that leaves you feeling better than getting lost in an infinite scroll of Content.
A small push button attached to a Raspberry Pi. It runs a bash script that sends the network request to my AdGuard Home server, adding a list of domains to the blocklist. After two hours, it undoes the changes.
I usually review the DNS requests in the two hours after, to look for other time-suckers, and have since added every single non-productivity-related website to the blocklist. Apparently I compulsively check the weather dozens of times whenever I can't access my normal procrastination sites.
Do you have more info about the button and how that works? I’d love to read about it.
I’ve built a simple slot machine and loaded it with a raspberry pi. Now I’m building some rudimentary slot software for it, but I also need to wire up the buttons to the GPIO pins.
I've seen some people have actually repurposed those useless things to something actually useful. I never did stop to read up on how/what they did to repurpose, just filed it away as one of those things that could/might be interesting to look into when my long list of other interesting things gets low.
What would be cool is to flip it. Press the button to get a few minutes of browsing allowed. Then, make the button deliver an electric shock upon being pressed. I bet you'd soon stop pressing it
It's essentially just an AdGuard Home installation on my VPS, which is a DNS server that all of my devices use as the DNS server. I then added all the blocked URLs and blocked them all in the web interface, and viewed the network request that it made in the browser console. Then, I unblocked them. For each one of these saved network requests, I saved the corresponding "copy as CURL" command. When the button is pressed, the "blocked" command is called; after waiting 7200 seconds, the "unblock" command is called. This just calls the server to not resolve those URLs.
Essentially just an AdGuard Home installation on my VPS. I then added all the URLs and blocked them all in the web interface, and sniffed the network request in the browser console. Then, I unblocked them. For each one of these, I saved the corresponding "copy as CURL" command. When the button is pressed, the "blocked" command is called; after waiting 7200 seconds, the "unblock" command is called.
This is like saying "I cured my alcoholism by throwing all the liquor out of my house". The problem isn't the availability of the stimulus, it's the lack of control over your desire for it.
You can't cure a need for distraction by blocking domains. There isn't a cure. You have to learn to live with it, like alcoholism.
The good news is that major life events tend to be great for breaking the distraction seeking pattern. At some point you'll get married or have kids or change careers, etc. And then your life will be so different that looking back on a dns kill switch button will seem silly.
Until then, just keep pushing the button I guess. We all have to make it through somehow
This is colossally bad advice when literally a fundamental part of the playbook to defeating alcoholism is getting it out of the house... Getting it out of the house and blocking domains are extremely valid tactics for getting over an addiction.
The “alcoholism is an incurable disease” trope came from a religious organization peddling snake oil. Not the best foundation to build your argument on. Studies indicate that many people are cured of their alcoholism and addiction. Generally through “aging out”. Additionally, just like alcoholism, the problem is the result not the cause. Alcoholics who don’t drink also don’t run over kids. People who don’t endlessly scroll don’t waste 5 hours a day. It doesn’t matter how it’s achieved
> The problem isn't the availability of the stimulus, it's the lack of control over your desire for it
…
> pushing the button
It’s possible you just didn’t recognize the way they’re exercising control over their desire for it. If you’re framing it in terms of alcoholism—speaking from experience here—you don’t come up with convenient ways to get away with not drinking, just convenient ways to go right on drinking even when you know you shouldn’t and wish you wouldn’t.
Having a kid made my internet addiction 100% worse. When your free time only comes in brief, unpredictable snatches, and your smartphone is right there in your pocket and can be held while rocking a baby who can't quite sleep, guess what happens...
I’m curious what the generational divide is for this. I’m 57, love tech and enjoy the positive side of the internet in limited doses. But I find most social media boring.
There is incredible and AMAZING art, accidental moments, serious discussion and fascinating analysis of the world to be found online. But without grounding myself in genuine experience in the stinky, cruel real world of human interaction, nature, and emotions it’s hollow. It only has meaning with this grounding reality.
Infinite scroll has never captured my attention beyond a few seconds. I can’t determine if I’m an anomaly? Normal for my age group?
I’m distressed about how much time my 24 year-old daughter spends on instagram. She lives at home, works as a dance instructor, and spends most of her time staring at her phone screen.
As a child I loved television. The six million dollar man was a highlight of the week (unless a spaghetti western was on). But it quickly became stultifying garbage when I spent more than a couple hours on the screen.
Am I just not normal? I love the grittiness and dangerous unpredictability of the real world. Yet love movies. I’m not sure what to think
> But without grounding myself in genuine experience in the stinky, cruel real world of human interaction, nature, and emotions it’s hollow.
The ability for younger people to actually experience life is fading. Having to work multiple jobs to keep a roof over your head, massive inflation, burnout from everything, covid spikes recently, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Instagram/other social media is free and doesn't require any commitment or planning that real life experiences often require.
I wish, but no. My biggest take away from watching economies and governments get borked by people who don't know what they're doing is that anything I could suggest will probably make matters worse. I'm a software developer, not a specialist in societies.
And in many cases, those votes don’t have a direct impact one way or the other on those broken systems.
In the US, it’s pretty clear now that both parties will keep the private health insurance racket intact (and tied to an employer), education costs will increase and student debt won’t be forgiven, retirement age will increase and social security will remain underfunded, climate change will at most be paid only lip service, military+police funding will increase over any meaningful social programs, the minimum wage will not keep up with cost of living, we will continue to incarcerate rather than rehabilitate, national debt will continue to increase even though none of the above is being meaningfully addressed…
Yes, I’m painting with a very broad brush, but you can probably see why a very large contingent of younger people would be discontent with the state of the world — even if you personally believe these aren’t the government’s issues to fix (or even if you think they’re not issues at all).
Sure, we have two different parties to choose from (once in a blue moon, sometimes a viable third). There’s still a large contingent of 18+ millennials today, even among those who do vote, who are asking: what are we even voting for?
And in many cases, there wasn't a choice but to vote for it.
If you are struggling because your 40 hour workweek won't let you rent apartment and you live in the US, who are you going to vote for to fix it? Probably no one, since you realistically only have a bianary choice and neither side seems to have the will to fix this. (Both major parties in the US have had majorities, yet haven't helped folks. This has been a growing issue for years). Sure, you can run for office, but it'll take years before you are in a position to hopefully help - and even that is going to depend on you having other progressive folks in office to vote with you. Otherwise, you are simply "raising awareness", which does little to help folks pay for their food.
I think it's a fallacy to presume this is generational. Thirty years ago, the previous generation of grumpy old farts had basically the same class of remarks to make about us, and our preferences, since a great many of one's peers were practically glued to that TV screen. Social media is designed to weaponise our dopamine/reward pathways; if you're a holdout against that, fine, but so are a ton of twentysomethings. My assessment is that responses to attention capture stimuli are individual, not generational, and the observable variations have more to do with technological change, than cultural or anthropological change.
More generally, making value judgements on the basis of media consumption is something to let go of, in my experience.
That’s odd, because your own reply explains why this is different (the weaponisation / manipulation). The technology is qualitatively different or “generational.” Growing up with it has given this generation a different experience and different behaviours.
I never said it was different. Quite the opposite. I said that the behaviour is the same. The technology it attaches to is different, that’s all. Making a dispositional inference at all is the error.
Or more bluntly, every generation complains about the next one, but most old farts don’t realise they’ve sleepwalked into the cliché.
I can recall pretty much every episode of the first 10 seasons of the Simpsons in ridiculous detail because I watched hours of TV after school in the 90s, and my parents lamented that I didn't go outside enough. This isn't new.
Lizards brain conditioned to infinite scroll crave it more. If you grew up without it and have avoided training that part of the mind, then it's easier to avoid getting hooked.
Humans seem to forget that we are always in the process of making ourselves. By choosing how we spend our time and effort today we are choosing the kinds of things we find more rewarding tomorrow.
I very much worry about people who spend all their time tuned to social media, which seems to have become an arms race to figure out how to become the most addictive form. TikTok is currently winning - somehow sucking hours and hours of people's lives away, be constantly fed a steady stream of just the right kinds of videos to make the lizard brain happy.
It's cruel really. To take our human desire to connect and socialize and monetize it in such a shallow and empty way.
TikTok was so instantly compelling that I was scared away from further interaction with it, but Twitter is my weakness that I sometimes feel like I've conquered, but as soon as I allow myself back in to check my DMs...
A scary possibility is that it has to do with how much of the alternative you've experienced in your life, i.e. infinite scroll grabs you less if you've experienced the joy of a hobby, a good book, being outside a lot, etc. - things that take more effort but that can give deeper satisfaction. If this is true, then the more damaging it is to encounter infinite scroll at a younger age.
Similar to me. I’m 26, but only got on the social train in 2015 or so. I scroll for a few minutes, but I’m just seeking for something interesting to learn about. To distract me, a video or article need to trigger that thirst of knowledge. And it’s not something you find on most social platforms - which is why I check HN more than anything else these days.
That is me as well in 40s. Infinite scroll doesn't capture me. So I dont understand how people could mindlessly scroll through instagram. My brain is constantly looking for new signals, not noise. And signals are very very rare. Especially once you know enough about a subject, it seems the only thing left are discussions in professional settings or you dig yourself into books.
I think most people dont scroll through social media to seek knowledge at all. They do it for leisure. Which is really switching much of their brain off, and that is normal. Unfortunately my brain is constantly thinking about many things. How? Why?
And as far as my life has gone, I am really abnormal.
I wonder if growing up with it changes things? I've been more or less addicted to the screen since I was in elementary school. It started with web forums, then other social media. I was concerned about it then and now. I distinctly remember abstaining from screens for a week when I was 11 to see what it was like.
In many ways social media is a reality these days. It's the main way you interact with your peers, form romantic relationships and so on.
I’m mid thirties and have no social media, but I’m still hooked on the internet (HN and reddit, mostly), so friends online isn’t necessarily the difference.
i don't scroll but i do find my self refreshing to see if anything is new a lot. like being bored and checking the fridge over and over. i seem to have lots of 30min breaks here or there that i fill up with bs time wasters
I found myself doing that a lot (especially with being at home now), but recently, I've started using that "dead" time to play the guitar like practice a scale or something straightforward. That allows me to feel less guilty for getting bored while still getting a bit better at a skill that I value.
If you were looking for a generational segmentation you would have to compare different generational cohorts at similar ages (meaning a long-term study) to have any hope of controlling for people's having different levels of maturity, discipline, social needs, and for lack of a better term, being-fed-up-with-things-that-are-bullshit. I suspect it's not generational per se, but heavily age-dependent. If you no longer crave the Twinkies or McDonald's meals you did as a kid, you kind of know what I'm talking about.
I'm (almost) 24 and I can relate so much with your feelings. Except that I don't like movies. Or more exactly, I am not super down to watch movies alone. It has to be in a social setup. Most of my friends (mostly girls though) are addicted to their Instagram feed. It's a bit the norm, but there are some outliers. Maybe it's a generational thing, maybe not. But I guess in your days there was something to replace social media (TV maybe?).
I’m only 36, but it’s the same for me with infinite scrolling (not for TV, I love TV shows and hate movies). I rarely even scroll far enough for a load to trigger.
But then I also am still using Facebook as a place to connect with people I know, which the vast majority, with prodding by FB, has abandoned, it seems.
edit: I should also mention that I rarely use my phone for anything.
Lately I've become convinced that video games and social media are in the same class as drugs and alcohol. They're a pretty fun way to kill time, but some people are predisposed to doing too much, and too much is dangerous.
Also similar to drugs/alcohol: it seems to affect some people more than others. I know people who can check FB/TikTok for a couple minutes and then they're done, and I also know people who continue to scroll Instagram while cooking. It's very similar to how some people can knock down some beers a couple times a month socially, but some people end up in a vicious spiral of drinking every single night.
I don't see anything wrong with talking about a video game or social media addiction. Of course it's nowhere near the same level of danger as a heroin addiction, but if it's counter-productive and there's the same kinds of behaviors involved, it can be a useful model.
Just the same, you can be addicted to coffee. Caffeine is a drug. It's not expensive, and it's not known for tearing families apart, but it builds a tolerance, it produces a withdrawal, and people will change their behavior to get access to more coffee, may become aggressive when they can't get access to it, etc.
If you think that you waste too much time on social media, then just like with drug addiction, there's a question of first realizing/accepting that this is even a problem at all. Then, once you've realized that there's a problem, you might want to think about coping strategies, replacing social media with other activities, developing healthier habits, etc. And just like with a drug addiction, you might find quitting cold turkey difficult.
You are conflating two terms here. Addiction (which is what the video is talking about here) is a set of behavioral patterns. I agree that the line between psychological and physiological in addiction is blurry. But addiction is not the same as dependence, which is about tolerance and withdrawal and is purely a physical phenomenon.
To give some examples, when a person misses work because they are drunk or when they spend their rent money on heroin, that is addiction. When a person has seizures because they haven't had a drink in two days, that's dependence.
I agree with GP, video games may be addictive but there is no physical dependence like there is with alcohol or, as you pointed out, even caffeine.
What about the way that people who scroll a lot lose their attention span, can't sit still without stimulation etc? Maybe dependence isn't exactly the same thing, but there is some kind of physical change happening in the brain, no?
> physical vs psychological dependence is kind of outdated
I wouldn't say outdated, but I do agree it is 100% up for debate.
Kurzgesagt did a really similar video[0] on addiction, but the basically walked it back from such a hard line stance in a correction/update video[1]. It's not so easy to tease apart the social vs the physical vs the pure mental.
> Just the same, you can be addicted to coffee. Caffeine is a drug.
Right, I think you're agreeing with me. That they have similar aspects, but to treat them the same - like putting caffine on Class 1 - would be insane.
I'm assuming you mean schedule 1. Nobody is suggesting that coffee should be placed in that category.
I don't think there's a problem in society with people equating coffee or videogames with highly addictive drugs. It's more the opposite. People don't realize that addiction is something that could happen to them, or that they have an addiction to something. Alcoholics and drug addicts often live in denial, even when it has really damaging consequences in their life. So, if someone is addicted to something that's not widely considered addictive, it's even easier to deny that this is even a problem.
When the idea of an addiction to porn or videogames is brought up in an online discussion thread, people are quick to dismiss that this even is a real problem. Consider though that gambling addiction is very much real, and a lot of gambling takes places with machines that are effectively simple videogames. Addiction to video games isn't as devastating, because you're not losing huge sums of money, just time, but presumably, the addictive mechanism is more or less the same.
Are you kidding me? Have you not seen people die from selfies?
Anyone can become addicted to anything and suffer the same consequences peddled by religion for "drugs". There is no argument against this, humans can programme themselves just as opiates, pathways are pathways.
My ex-wife was a Doctor with PTSD from being raped (she was raped by a doctor who was drunk, then raped by a physcologist who treated her, got her pregnant, then forced her to give up her kid) (med school, what a cesspool!)
She was addicted to gaming AND social media. They were the only way she could stop thinking about her PTSD which haunted her everyday. She is a functioning Senior ER doctor. She had all the same symptoms as my mate who was raped by an uncle when he was a child and consequently took up drugs in adolencence. he gave up drugs. She hasnt given up gaming, or scoail media, and she is only a trigger away from killing someone on the ER table due to it.
FYI i found out we were getting a divorce because she unfriended me from FB. Are u kidding me? What an ADDICT! Threatened to kill herself unless i had a baby with her. That was my last straw. She couldnt do a sh*t in the morning without scrolling. Somehow FB status was more real to her then life. Least she have a moment to recollect her trauma.
Very few drugs have life threatening withdrawal symptoms.
Alcohol does but you have to abuse it to an extreme degree to reach that level. Most people with issues around alcohol are a huge distance away from getting dangerous withdrawal symptoms.
I mean things can be addictive. I used to smoke hella weed and was dependent on it to function. Basically I was addicted to wake and bake and just be high all day. I was still “functional” to others but to myself I was miserable and a husk. I was going to the dispensary every couple days and spending forty bucks. I’m not saying weed is bad, but like anything else moderation and control are required. Now I just smoke on very special occasions like my bday or getting a promotion/raise. But let’s be real while accepting that some people (like me) can get addicted to some things.
I never got hooked on nicotine or alcohol. Nor on video games. But I’m sure some people do get sucked in and feel like crap.
I will never understand how people moralize behaviours rather than outcomes. Drinking every night is fine if you don't do it to excess. A beer or two, or a glass of wine with dinner, or a nightcap, doesn't hurt anyone. Drinking every night to the level where you're damaging your health is a problem.
Having a few beers a couple of times a month is great. Binge drinking a couple of times a month to the point where you harm yourself or others is a problem.
It doesn't matter how often you do it. It matters what happens when you do. The time frame is essentially unrelated.
First of all, drinking alcohol every day is too much if you count your alcohol units.
Second, first you start with a drink every week, then every day, then every hour,... that is how you develop your addiction.
Third, what you suggest is moderation drinking. People who are addicted to alcohol argue that it does not work and complete abstinence is the way to go.
first you start with a drink every week, then every day, then every hour,...
Unless you don't. I've had a glass of wine with dinner several nights a week for the past 20 years, and I haven't progressed to drinking during the day.
People use alcohol as a form of self-medication when they have other problems. If you don't have the other problems then limited regular alcohol consumption is probably fine (I'm not a doctor so I can't say it actually is.)
I agree with you. I do not have that problem either. But it is well known that some people are more prone to addiction than others. So general arguments like "one or two beers every day" is fine, are a bit dangerous.
> Third, what you suggest is moderation drinking. People who are addicted to alcohol argue that it does not work and complete abstinence is the way to go.
And people who are not addicted to alcohol argue that this approach does work for us with no effort, and that blanket advocacy for complete abstinence is moralising based on behaviours rather than outcomes.
Some people have an innate risk of alcohol addiction and should absolutely practice complete abstinence. Some people are at a risk of alcohol addiction due to their personal circumstances and the culture they live in and, while abstinence is not the only solution, it's probably the only feasible one. Some people have a tendency overdrink on occasion due to their personalities and social lifestyles, but they do not need complete abstinence to keep this under control and can do with intentional moderation. Some people enjoy social drinking and even getting a bit tipsy sometimes, but outright drunkenness feels so terrible for us that we are at no risk of alcohol addiction and see no point in practising complete abstinence ourselves.
All I can say is that mindset is more important than amount consumed. Just look at depressed people drinking, a single beer already makes the person more likely to become an alcoholic. yet two or thee beers every evening wouldn't suddenly create an alcoholic out of me.
Two drinks each night versus one is quite a difference. It's double the amount of alcohol!
Current recommendation from the Netherlands Nutrition Centre:
> It is advisable to refrain from drinking alcohol, or to consume at most one glass a day. This advice applies equally to men and women.
> Moderate consumption of alcohol at one glass a day may reduce the chance of getting certain chronic diseases, but also raises the chances of getting breast cancer for women. Drinking more than one glass a day, is not beneficial at all, and has negative effects on health. It increases the risks of having a stroke; and getting breast, intestinal, or long cancer.
> The potential benefits of alcohol do not outweigh the negative effects on your health.¹
(Personally, I drink only in the weekends; usually one glass, occasionally two. It prevents making a habit out of it.)
How are you calculating that? One standard 330ml bottle of beer at 5% has a little less alcohol than a standard pour (150ml) of 13% wine. As soon as you move to a pint or 500ml can of beer you go over it. This is why a glass of wine and a bottle of beer are taken as roughly equal in terms of alcohol content.
That would get you exactly three glasses from a bottle. That's… not a normal pour of wine in any country.
A standard size bottle of wine (750ml) serves five or six glasses, but the hospitality industry usually goes for five out of a bottle. 150ml (or 5oz) is what you can reasonably expect in restaurants and bars for the average glass of wine.
Do you honestly pour a third of a bottle at a time for wine?
In the UK that is a 'large' glass of wine. The NHS¹ calls 175ml 'standard' (slightly more than usual) and 125ml 'small'.
For the UK this is all not that relevant, because there the concept of the 'alcohol unit' is much more ingrained and used in public health campaigns, so you would work with those. E.g., with the recommended upper limit of 14 alcohol units, you could drink a standard glass of wine (175ml) six days of the week (12.6 units), or have a bottle of lager six days of the week and a pint of Guinness on Saturday (13.2 units).
Unless I've made an arithmetic error, those two American-sized beers (12oz each, 700ml of beer total) contain 35g of alcohol, and the American glass of wine (6oz, or 175ml) has 22.75g. Less alcohol than the two beers, but still more than most people should have on a daily basis.
The problem with that is that, different to drugs, social media is not regulated (in terms of UX and manipulation of behavior/emotions).
Social media is allowed to make their platform as addictive as they possibly can. You’re not allowed to create and sell a drug that is perfected for addiction.
Social media and video games are sort of a Wild West in terms of regulation, and I think we’ll have to see some in the next years to combat this.
The question is if these vectors of addiction are compounding or if it always affects people who were prone towards addiction anyway. My hope is the latter. Not that having a population of 10%(?) addictions isn't tragic, but it's better than eventually having a population of 90% addicts because we eventually offer personally tailored addictive products at scale.
Every single thing you do involves dopamine. The difference with drugs (of which alcohol is one) is that they directly manipulate your brains neurochemistry. Nothing you perceive with your normal senses does that. Even sex doesn't have the same addictive effects as direct chemical manipulation of the dopaminergic neuronal populations. The idea that they are the same is very dangerous for society and will lead to the use of violence to control people where it is definitely not warranted.
Offline video games are healthier than social media IMO. They need focus. They leave you feeling rewarded after playing; the ones that don’t aren’t addictive (for me, at least). Either they have some finite (and usually short) content, or they become boring after playing many hours in a short period of time. (I guess this isn’t true for some people, and they should stay away from such infinitely playable games.) They leave you with fond, distinct memories. They don’t influence your worldview and politics overmuch. They can inspire your creativity and imagination. …
I feel like I could say the same about infinite news which I'd define as a site I can check several times a day and see new "top stories". This would include Reddit and HN. I find it super addicting to check too many times and then get sucked into spending too much time reading comments and sometimes articles. Rarely am I actually better off for it .
Contrast to 20-30yrs ago where at best you got a newspaper once a day or if you were like me you got a few magazine subscriptions and once you browsed each one, that was it for your monthly article consumption.
1. It's yesterday's news. You've probably got some contextualisation for the story as you've likely already caught wind of it from some other channel. Much of the compulsion of HN comes from the too-brief and decontextualised subject lines. They are, ultimately, a Dark Pattern.
2. The Machine Stops^W^WScroll Ends. Typically there are ~60--100 or so items. That's ... more than you can comfortably read, but it is finite.
3. Skip the comments. I'm increasingly finding they're less worthwhile than the post(s) themselves, usually. With some exceptions.
3.0 Those exceptions are rarely in more-active discussions. Or political ones. Or business-oriented ones.
3.1 Definitely skip comments dominated by drama or cheap shots. Utterly not worth it.
3.2 If you must read comments, do so logged out, and collapse as you go.
4. The front page has had a day to sort out its rankings. Typically, the top few items are reasonably significant or interesting, and that likelihood falls as you go down the list. HN ranking is arbitrary enough that there can be quite good content far down the queue, but be discerning.
5. Browsing day-olds seems to help ease the urge to scroll and check often.
6. If you're feeling adventurous, go back a year or five or ten and see what's being discussed. You may discover a ... sameness. Which might make you question the value of aggressively pursuing the latest all that much more.
As soon as I registered my account, the comment sections seemed to hold less importance/meaningful content. Perhaps because I started paying more attention to them?
It's a small thing, but I'm working on making myself read less of them now. The further past the left 1/3rd of my 21:9 monitor a comment starts, the less value I'm going to get from reading it, generally.
If I find my screen filled with comments at that depth, and can't quickly scroll past them, ctrl-W is usually the best remedy.
I recently decided to take a month of reddit for the sake of my crippled attention span. Over the past year, I've already narrowed down my subreddits to what I'd consider useful information, but that only helped a little. There's just too much stuff on there.
Reddit rewards people who know how to repost or start flame wars, with their karma points. This can also optimize for low-effort content.
I wouldn't be surprised if certain subreddits could be entirely replaced with bots, automatically generating memes and image macros in response to things happening on the web. The biggest subreddits already look like this, imo.
Maybe sticking to a newspaper, print or digital version, or a single news program on tv is what everyone should be doing. It might even cut down on consuming fake news.
There's a big difference between watching the national news on ABC/NBC/CBS before dinner and then the local 10/11pm news, and keeping Fox News (or MSNBC or even CNN) on all day long, even as "background noise".
For a long time I loved reading comments to news stories or other discussions on reddit, for example.
But I have found that most comments are actually at the very least misinformed, often wrong and clearly not very educated and I have started asking myself why I am exposing myself to this low quality messages. (There are of course notable exceptions found aplenty)
Realizing this, I have stopped reading most comments and generally just stick to a few main newspaper sites that still have decent journalism.
A very hacky solution that I've found to combat TikTok's infinite feed is to scroll up instead. I skip to the 20-th video in the feed, watch each video, and then exit once I'm done with the 20. Hitting the top gives you an off-ramp to get out of the app.
For other things I make use of the "work offline" mode, to see what's loaded in and then leave. I'd like it if browser devs stopped pushing that future further away and maybe gave it a hotkey.
If you enjoy the product, this risks skewing the input to the recommendation algorithm. Presumably they use time spent to determine what content you enjoy.
Not sure I follow, it doesn’t sound like any particular post would be on screen any longer than normal, unless you’re suggesting that time since load is what is measured instead of time on screen (or time since last scroll), or that they use overall duration of the app session to infer things about all the posts that were loaded.
I still mostly use the web browser on my mobile phone.
Many apps are just too damn invasive now as well, they cross the line way too far for metrics they don't even really pay attention to; this is why I only install apps that don't use dark patterns and I've deleted many that go that route. I also schedule my important daily tasks on my calendar with silent (vibration alerts) so that I know when things need to get done. Ringers and notifications are always off on my phone...
I do get pulled in to TikTok at times, but I frequently recognize when the content gets "preachy" and/or boring, and I quickly quit the app and take a break when that happens. Sometimes, it's just simple fun to take a mental break from being serious too, so we shouldn't always ruin all the good aspects of social platforms.
Product owners and companies now often think their role is to manipulate people into staying on apps, and that's a very toxic attitude that discourages trust in corporations behind the apps.
In truth, these platforms are accountable for the suicides, societal depression, crimes, and negative effects their platforms encourage in real life, and eventually they will be held accountable for it.
For us, there are careful choices to make; we need to identify dark patterns and encourage public awareness about them. We need to refuse to do development work that supports negative outcomes and dark profit.
If any of us collect a check for creating bad algos and just think it's just "doing our job" we're just as accountable as the greedy and morally corrupt execs that push for profit goals without any sense of societal responsibility and moral accountability.
It’s honestly so bad. No matter how hard I try, I find myself re-downloading TikTok or Reddit (Apollo) every month and then wasting away all my free time for a week or two before re-deleting them out of disgust. I truly don’t know what the solution is. I would just get rid of my smartphone if life wasn’t quite inconvenient without it.
I'm not joking, it's the best antidote to the thought-theft of "social media". Pick a subject in which you're interested, find a representively excellent text, and read. And then re-read, because unless you're a genius you won't absorb everything first time.
Also it's wonderful to just curl up with a book and a cup of tea and let time pass you by as you ... learn the considered thought of others! This is civilised!
Normally I'd recommend history but around these parts Category Theory in Context by Emily Riehl is probably acceptable :)
About re-reading, especially textbooks: it takes time and trouble to appreciate the difficult and often esoteric ideas represented in a text and understand the underlying deep thought. The author(s) wrote and re-wrote every damn phrase in terms of their imagined audience. The first pass yields a basic familiarity, but try every chapter again in light of the later insights.
I remember the first time I read Introduction to Metamathematics by Kleene, and I remember the fourth time so much better. I can feel the cloth binding, I can hear his voice clearly.
I would love to do this, but years of mindlessly browsing social media has seriously shortened my attention span. I used to read books all the time. I remember staying up late as a kid just to read the new Harry Potter book.
Nowadays I pick up a book, read a few pages, then immediately lose interest and go do something else. Anybody know how to get back into reading?
I've had some luck by going back to "simpler" books for a while - page-turner scifi, bestsellers, YA literature. For a while I only read things that really grabbed my attention, and I think that is gradually re-training my brain.
I'm not back to being as avid of a reader yet, but I'm optimistic I'll get there. I'm reading more now than I have in a few years.
I first kicked myself into it by starting the Discworld series of books. Pratchett is a great author (imo), the text has a certain kind of easy charm, I don't need to go in sequential order, the books are cheap to buy, and none are terribly long or dense.
I've also added some longer, more serious stuff to my reading list and bookshelf, but those are things I'll get to in time. I try to make myself read 100 pages per week, and if I don't like doing that with a certain book, I'll pick up another one. I can manage that at a leisurely pace in 2 to 3 hours on a weekend, or grab 20 pages a few times per week.
I can empathise with you. Warning : some armchair psychology ahead :
I think it's the age old "less dopamine kick" syndrome. Your brain is used to getting a steady stream of dopamine when you watch/react/post on social media. A book simply doesn't give it (yet). From personal experience, I experience "Aha!" moments when I read once in about 15 days. What I'd recommend is to re-read some of your old favourites and pick up adjacent ones (example : re-read Harry Potter - Prisoner of Azkaban (my favorite ;) and pick up some Greek mythology . ) Finding unexpected connections is one source of joy I experience. Good luck!
To me, nothing on the popular subreddits or in TikTok has satisfied my desire for depth and nuance. There are smaller subreddits that I like, but there's no way to specify what you want on TikTok, so I no longer use it. By shaping your philosophy of pleasure explicitly around stuff that only longform content can satisfy, I've been able to easily discard parts of social media that don't align with my personal actualization. I think it does take some deliberate and repeated introspection to harden this impulse.
I found it helpful to put myself in situations where the book is the best alternative. Leave your phone, get the book, walk to a park, sit down with a beer. Every time you get bored and restless, you'll put the book down, remember you have no phone and pick it up again.
As much as I want to say this advice is terrible and useless… yeah. Move the things that aren't books far away, and read a book. When it's boring, put it down, but don't let go of it. Wait a few minutes, then move it back in front of your face and keep reading.
It's possible you picked a bad book, but it's more likely that it isn't engaging enough. It normally takes me a few days (after half a year book-free) to get back into reading, but it's worth it.
I'm sorry but I have to ask this every time I see it. I have yet to receive an answer.
What is the point of censoring 1 letter in an otherwise extremely obvious word?
You are not redacting the word. People reading the word don't bleep it out in their head. You know you are saying 'fucking', we know you are saying 'fucking'. HN doesn't block posts with "naughty" words in them.
So what are you trying to achieve? Please tell me.
I suppose it's a nod of the head in the direction of "civilised discourse" without actually being so. It's lighthearted, not to be taken seriously, my apologies if it irritates you.
If you're looking for a book I wrote one specifically about this
problem. Some of you may like it. It's short and has short chapters
you can read in one "boredom chunk" of about 10 mins.
One reason for making it an old fashioned paper book is that some of
the ideas it presents would simply be censored on what the internet is
becoming.
It's not really written as "self-help", more as philosophical musings
for intellectual self-defence. Many people who have read it tell me
they successfully quit their smartphone.
As ongoing research in modern critical technology studies I'm trying
to keep a list of ones I read and at least found interesting (below).
Good luck finding the courage to take back control of your technology.
Jenny Oddell How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Paul Kingsnorth Life versus the machine
Roger McNamee Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
Siva Vaidhyanathan Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us
Virginia Eubanks Automating Inequality
Sophie Brickman Baby Unplugged
Mike Monteiro Ruined by Design
Thomas Kersting Disconnected: Protect Your Kids Against Device Dependency
Nicholas Kardaras Glow Kids
Jaron Lanier Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media
Douglas Rushkoff Team Human
Carissa Véliz Privacy is Power: Why You Should Take Back Control
Also, write. I find it easier to remember things if I’ve written them down, so when I mix writing in with reading, I feel like I better retain the things I read.
Start with a quote you liked when you were reading and just let your thoughts flow into the paper, you might go for many pages and an hour or more before coming up for air.
I like to call the activity of reading and writing “conversing with the universe.”
Conversely, I find that I can dump hours into social media and not remember anything when I finally snap out of it. It’s junk food for the mind.
I'm a huge book reader and I usually read very gripping novels. For me, TikTok is much healthier, because 1. it's easy to put down when I need to do other things 2. it's easy to refrain from opening it. Books however are very hard to put down, and very hard to refrain from picking up again. For me, starting a book = no life for a week.
Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" is easier going than I thought it would be, and I'm doing even better than a chapter at a sitting, and sometimes have to make myself put it down. I think he wrote it for people with diminished attention spans - and that's a compliment.
Ooh yes anecdotally im with both of u on this. Found it very hard to quit but category theory by emily riehl was a great offramp to begin "thinking more seriously"
I think the first step is admitting that, even with any incidental value you get out of these services, it is an addiction and you are addicted. I don’t say this with negative connotation to your character. Digital media has made me realize how powerless addiction makes one feel, even if one is well adjusted otherwise. The reality is you binge, much like a binge drinker, and wake up a week later with the app hangover.
The same thing happens to me and I think the OP provides one good solution: stick to mobile UI in a browser. Generally, increase friction wherever you can. This only really works if you can stick to the worsened experience and not crack/redownload the app. One way to tackle that is to perhaps set a daily or weekly reminder to purge the apps you have a problem with (or all apps you don’t need) from your phone. Maybe you will redownload them again, but giving yourself that extra moment where you can go to the App Store will surely make you quit halfway once or twice, then consistently, before you fall for the trap.
I have an inadvertent example. I frequented a website on my phone for a while that relied heavily on a certain file format for videos. I switched phones and (by accident) got a new phone that doesn’t support the format and would require me to download external apps to watch it. That friction of needing a third party app, paired with a decision to only use mobile websites when possible, meant by browsing time on that site dropped precipitously and I’ve now almost entirely cut the bad habit.
Another habit is screen time. It is easy to go overboard and delete limits but you’re setting friction points where you need to think about what you’re doing.
> cocaine although a Selective Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitor (SDRI) is illegal
I know you were discussing recreational cocaine, but fun fact: cocaine can be prescribed legally in most countries including the US. For relatively obvious reasons it's an uncommon prescriber choice, and it's generally applied topically (including to the nose) rather than snorted.
Legal methamphetamine pills are also available by prescription, and of course also an uncommon prescriber choice when alternatives work well, although its chemical relatives in the amphetamine family are very much among the commonly prescribed ADHD drugs.
Nothing would surprise me, but clues are given out like the cocaine & morphine mix given to one the British Royals on the throne at the time.
This is where education, schools are used to monitor behaviours because if someone later expresses an interest to become a GP or Dentist, their behaviour will be used as part of an evaluation to see if they can be trusted. The educational system is just part of the state's intelligence estate.
If you must use Reddit, set up an account that's unsubscribed from all subreddits. Then only add small, niche subreddits and never any of the default or popular subreddits. At worst, you'll get a homepage that updates with new content maybe once or twice a day, drastically reducing the chance of scrolling your free time away. It's preferable to just not use it at all if you can, though.
You can do that in Apollo (iOS) paid version, the client I use the most. Although, I will have to check again, but I am sure you can set the same on Sync and/or Boost (Android) on the free version, as I have a multireddit set as default on launch. On the browser, you can use RES + old reddit and change default behaviour. I find it easier to keep a very small number of frequently used subs for the home feed, and stick the rest in multi, as it helps to make them portable and easily shared. You can also find lists in r/multihub -- compiled and shared by others e.g. cars.
I use the Reddit website. It's slow and horrible enough that even though I visit every day, but don't get sucked into spending hours on it.
I also watch YouTube instead of TikTok. YouTube is slower paced and hasn't (yet) fallen into the trap of continual submersion in content without a break. You have to consciously choose to watch another video. I can also tell myself that I'm watching content that is pseudo-educational in nature (like Jay Foreman, Stuff Built Here, Jazza or Mark Rober).
I've started using TikTok a couple of times and it just seems like the perfect engagement machine. It's like a machine that drip-feeds dopamine. Pure evil, in my opinion.
I had the same issue with the Reddit app so now I just use the neutered web app and consider the frustration stemming from its brokenness to be feature that keeps me from spending too much time on it.
Thought I'm not much on social media but I figured out that if I can restrict myself to browse between 11am and 4pm, work will certainly automatically force me off the 'scroll treadmill'. I wrote about that in this post[1] recently.
Life isn't that inconvenient without a smartphone, it's only been something people have had for a couple of generations at the most.
You just have to plan things in advance a bit more. It's liberating in a way. You plan dinner with someone on Thursday at 6:00 and it's set. You don't have to think about it, tweet about it, post it on Facebook, or anything else. Just show up.
It doesn't help that they now won't even let you read many subreddits without the app on mobile.
Once you're logged in, just to read that one thing, it can't hurt to engage on that one issue, can it?
Before you know it, you're 23 increasingly angry comments into a thread about sand, people are still wrong on the internet, it's 3am and you hate everyone, everything and yourself.
The reason why I don't have TikTok installed. Facebook is manageable, TikTok is a 2 hour rabbit hole of "oh crap, it's 2am and I've got work in the morning".
FB has recently added Instagram reels to the app. Not quite TikTok but it's getting to a point where I work out how to disable them or I uninstall FB for the first time in a decade.
Like Twitter, the concept of TikTok doesn't make any sense to me so I've never tried it. But YouTube suggestions I do not find very compelling. I'll sometimes scroll for a few minutes but it's mostly stuff I've either already watched or exactly like stuff I've already watched. It doesn't do very well at surfacing stuff that might catch a related interest but isn't really the same thing.
Twitter recently made a change on mobile where if you are not logged in, you can only scroll through a handful of tweets before being prompted to login.
This has dramatically cut back the amount of time I’d spend browsing twitter (don’t have an account, and not interested in creating one).
I see it as our minds being impressioned into a) needing new information and b) fearing a lack of information. This fear manifests as a habit of continuously craving novelty, to the point where we are used by technology.
A step towards overcoming it is to realise this fear and begin using technology as tools, like they were originally intended. This is, of course, easier said than done; however, with time, we can overcome this habit by using our technology with intent.
The biggest obstacle is not the technology, but ourselves. We often find reasons and justifications to continue this habit. Fundamentally, it's a case of self-victimisation and illusion of necessity. "It's too hard to quit", "I will learn new things", "I need to catch up with people", and so on.
I'm still exploring this topic and there's a lot to learn! What I've written above is likely just a (possibly misguided!) part of the whole equation. I'm happy to discuss this with anyone and understand the nuances of this problem, and hopefully a more effective solution.
I even have this problem when just sitting in front of my laptop to look something up - I end up on completely different websites procrastinating a lot . Another behavioral hack was told to me by someone els: write down on a piece of paper what you want to look up/do on the computer before you sit down in front of it and check if you have done it as much as possible.
I use a sort of inverse tactic. While working, I often find that trivial questions pop into my head, and I get tempted to look up the answers and distract myself for a while. Stuff like "what does the word 'ducky' mean" or "what are the lyrics to the verse of that Blur song" or "what is the capital of Albania". I keep a text file open on my computer called "later", and when one of these questions comes up, I write it in the file, promising myself that I can look it up later. The truth is that I hardly ever do. The questions seem so burning when I want to be distracted. When I have the free time to look them up, I realize how silly they actually were.
Switch to using chrome without ublock origin, and you’ll find the web experience to be so intolerable that you’ll only use it for what’s absolutely necessary.
There are people who can resist this naturally. It’s like people who won’t eat the sugary stuff without having to put any effort. My theory is that this habit relates to available mental energy. When you are in low energy state, you can’t read dense article or do intellectually taxing work and you gravitate towards infinite scroll because it’s the best reward you can get for your available energy. People with high energy seem to be automatically resistant at infinite scroll because reward from other taxing activities is much higher, although delayed. If this view is correct then perhaps the solution is to engage in forced mental excercise just like body excercise to increase strength and endurance at more taxing activities.
Aza Raskin, who improved and popularized infinite scroll, has repeatedly apologized for it. He co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, and has a podcast about perverse incentives that drive tech companies to make users' lives worse. https://www.humanetech.com/podcast
I think he can sleep easy that it wasn't entirely his fault. We already had infinite scroll before social media, it was probably just a matter of time before it made it's way over there.
I believe that in 100 years people will look back at our consumption of anti-social media the same way, we're looking back at doctors refusing to wash their hands before delivering.
Your body can deal with many things on it's own, but once there are cities with a million people in them, and railroads and steamboats zig-zagging between them, hygiene has to be a conscious effort.
Much same way, it's not your fault, if your mind can't handle all the shit the internet landscape throws at it.
One easy way I found is to have an older smartphone (S4 mini), without any cheap mobile internet access. (This works very well in Germany, as we have almost no free wifi). This way I only allow myself podcasts, which I chose to download before leaving the house.
I feel exactly as the author feels, and it's heartening to see so many comments here talking about this problem. What baffles me is outside of HN and the occasional news story or opinion piece, people seem to be just unbothered. People (or at least my friend and acquaintance circle) seem to keep using these platforms, posting on and what the infinite scroll feeds them as if there's nothing out of the ordinary about it all.
I've tried sharing on my social media how I feel about it all in the past, but I stopped after I started feeling like most people don't have a problem with it. No one wants to be the person that demands the state of affairs should change just because it inconveniences them.
I imagine a lot of people feel helpless if they think that using these apps is part of the mix of being socially relevant, but there are limited ways they can change how those apps work. Or they feel it replaces their idle TV watching and so aren't bothered that it's endless and passive.
Instagram is important in my industry and I detest the infinite scroll, but multiple times a day I carry past the "caught up" point and get partway into suggestions and ads before I realise. I'd love a feature to switch it back to how it used to work, but that's very unlikely!
Since we are sharing our getting out of doom scrolling stories, I’ll share how I got off Reddit.
I realized that most of what I was reading on Reddit was fabricated outrage (since then they’ve added subs like “makes your blood boil” and “idiots in cars” - check them out if you feel like you are not outraged regularly enough)
I was the type of person who would sit on Reddit, be bored and type Reddit in the url bar.
So I decided to quit Reddit and used habitica for the task. It’s a gamification for to-do lists and forming habits. I added “visiting Reddit” as a minus 1, and every time I realized I was on Reddit I opened habitica and gave myself a minus 1.
Fictive internet points are quite powerful. I also started flossing this way (flossing at night, +1)
Small request. If you are a developer and you are forced to implement infinite scroll and you can't quit your job, at least make sure the back button works.
Without this it's so frustrating to infinite scroll down to the equivalent of 12 pages, leave the page and want to go back to roughly where page 12 is another time. Instead you have to start from the top and scroll down.
You'd likely save a good amount of server compute power just using push state to update the page in the URL as you go so folks can copy / paste it and jump right back to that page later.
That's kind of tricky. I assume the list is allgorithmically generated. So simply having the back button go back to the list, and down to item 50, might give you a list that looks completely different.
Even HN might have this problem a bit. If you visit the homepage you click an article, spend some time reading it, then click back, the homepage might have changed, and even post you were reading might not even be on the homepage anymore. HN is much less bad than infinite scroll sites, because HN's homepage is the same for everyone, and doesn't change nearly as often.
One way to to solve this might be to store a session ID as a query parameter that gets automatically added when you visit the homepage, and store the complete state of each session either serverside or locally in the browser. Then when you navigate back to that session ID, you get the same page. There are a number of downsides to this though. The session ID in the URL is ugly, there's a lot of storage needed for all these session, sessions likely need to be pruned at some point (so the back button will stop working at some point), and it's very difficult to figure out what to do when multiple tabs open the same session ID.
For those who don't want to completely give up on this kind of content but want to limit their intake, I can highly recommend the Intention add-on for FF/Chrome: https://www.getintention.com/
For me, it worked really well for a while, until I started instinctively hitting the "one more minute" button. But they recently added the option for a 30 second timeout after each "unlock" period, which curbs that very effectively. It gives the non-lizard part of your brain the perfect opportunity to take the reigns again :)
Infinite scrolls and other features are classified as dark patterns, meaning it is a feature that is designed to engage the user as much as possible. The common denominator of all dark patterns are that they benefit the service provider or business at the detriment of the consumer. It helps being able to define what infinite scrolling does, because once you can recognize what a dark pattern entails, it will be much easier to spot and accordingly adjust your behaviors. Moderating your own behaviors when dealing with dark patterns is key.
Mobile games are notorious for this; the market for mobile games are flooded with "Log in everyday to get your dailies!" Initially I was enthralled by mobile gaming as a middle schooler. I got to play Clash of Clans in my classroom and away from my home computer. I am now in sophomore year of college. The novelty of mobile games wear off as soon as you realize that mobile games back then and still today are designed to monopolize your time. I like to think that mobile game developers do it because they are passionate about it, but their passion gets bogged down at their first gamedev job because of company politics and the fact that dark patterns make money.
Come to think of it, I really resonate with this author because dark patterns are everywhere. It is as if every single service provider is trying to monopolize your time. It happens with YouTube, computer games (notably Path of Exile), Discord, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and so much more. Dark patterns are definitively not conducive to a healthy populace. Thinking of my own time as a finite resource really helps. Is this dark pattern worth my time? It is ridiculously easy to sink 8 hours of your time watching reality TV on YouTube. I would even go as far as to say that they are designed to keep the working and lower class poor. If anyone wants to inquire further about that statement, please reply.
I played way to much Clash Royale, a really good tower defence game, for two three months.
But I realized the grinding element in that game was insidious. "This chest opens in three hours". It wasted your time for no fun added, rather than being a game mechanic. I just deleted it.
I.e. the game rate limited your grind and made you pay to remove the grind cap.
At some point it got impossible to increase your ELO ranking without having better card levels, so you had to pay up or grind, or you would lose to bad players with high level decks. Really boring ...
It is a shame that the gaming industry got to this. Becouse Clash Royale is a really good game underneath the leveling of cards grind and pay-2-win.
I have actually won against doomscroll. I used to spend 5-6 hours per day, and it peaked at 10 hours per day for some days of the year.
I realized that doomscrolling is not only clever algorithms trying to get me hooked, but also a symptom of deeper problems that I had.
And I realized that I was unhappy because I spent most of my doing things that I didn't like. I was deep frustrated. I did not want to spend my brain's precious energy on doing things that I didn't want to do.
I changed my path. Stopped caring about outside forces. Became happier. This was the hard part.
The easy part is what I learned from Cal Newport's book "Deep Work". It asks you to implement timeblocks. I implemented a 20 minute timeblock for browsing social media. I would not touch social media outside that timeblock. It really worked. I implemented timeblocks for studying, coding, personal time, and the resistance towards doing these things weathered away once I started. So, the urge to doomscroll went down, too.
I read some books, and consumed other resources that talk about our mind and our brain. Also some books on Theraveda Buddhist teachings. When you see your "self" as a bunch of neurons contextualised by your environment, outer stimuli, and as these are bound by biological laws, you stop being hard on yourself. You forgive yourself, gently. Then managing emotions, urges, etc. become easier.
Reducing the number of apps that you use also reduces time spend in doomscroll. I gave up Facebook 4 years ago because the content was too low quality, and gave up Quora some months ago for the same reason. Now all I have is Reddit. I keep Facebook as a non-professional networking too. I open it if I have something to say to particular someone, and spend maybe 10 minutes per month on it.
I also started meditating. That also helped big time. I will highly recommend it. Books that helped-
- What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula
- Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
I've had some success with time blocking (which I usually do by Google searching for "30 min timer"). But I'm curious what you do about asynchronous interrupts? e.g. you block out your morning carefully, then 1h into things a guy you called three weeks ago to ask if he would estimate for painting your fence shows up and wants to spend 30min looking at the job asking questions. Now your time blocks are scattered to the wind. I find in my life that interrupts of this nature are quite frequent. Almost every day. (and: no you can't ask the painter dude to schedule a time next week. He'll never show up).
I suggest that you read the related chapter from Cal Newport's book. That would be helpful in understanding more about timeblocking.
Daytime is the worst time for focused work- in my personal experience.
Either go deep into the night or wake up really early.
Or any time when you cannot expect interruption.
Focused work also works best when you have someone looking out for you- could be a partner or parents when you are young.
I take those responsibilities in the house that have clear, regular timings. Even if they are harder.
I combine timeblocking + pomodoro, so I get breaks. I walk, drink water. I never read or pick up my smartphone.
Whether you are at work or at home, you have to be vigilant about 2-3 hours of focused, isolated work. You have to carve the time out. You know better about your situation. So I will leave that to you.
Don't do meetings, or open emails, or browse social media in this time.
I was never able to go beyond 6 hours of very productive, innovative time. That was the peak. The usual looks like 1.5-2 hours per day.
It also does not have to be a big chunk. The time can be divided into two. But don't do more.
And, I will also state the obvious- no matter how much time is gone from your block, do the rest honestly. Be vigilant about it. Do not be a time-use purist. That harmed me a lot when I was in HS. I would plan to spend 4 hours on something, and if one hour were gone, I would do none of the rest 4. Don't be like that.
Check out the app Sorted on iOS (not sure if on Android). You can set all your tasks for the day and all their lengths (great for timeblocking), a default buffer between each task, and then autoschedule all the tasks throughout the day. If one gets interrupted, you can re-schedule them for the rest of the day after a certain time.
There's a kind of vicious cycle here where people feel disconnected from their surroundings and communities, and attention-stealing apps make a business of providing a surrogate through parasocial relationships and infinite access to the spectacle and new ways to interact with it.
Parasocial relationships aren't real relationships, and the spectacle replaces doing anything directly, there is no fulfilment and the cycle continues. There's an epidemic of people who can't have hold a conversation or relate to anyone without mediating the conversation through a common topic that they've experienced on mass or social media. They're addicted to watching a simulation of having a life, and not actually living the one life they have.
This is the big one for me, even though I do 0 social broadcast apps (only 1:1 chats, news, reddit and hacker news). Huge improvement, yet still I use it in the same parasocial way, using your terms. It sucks!
Oh but there are - and if we're being honest with ourselves we already know it. If you can't defeat it head on (and you can't) you have to take extreme actions - ditch your smartphone for something dumber, block the sites using something like nextdns. Maybe you could go even further, see Popey's brilliant blog entry on his command line only laptop - https://popey.com/blog/2021/02/command-line-only-laptop/
I love the focus the terminal brings, besides the solid benefit of scriptability/automation that’s not possible with most GUI apps.
I’ve recently rediscovered emacs and now use it as my primary tool for development. I already loved working in the terminal for git and xcodebuild so it’s felt natural.
Moving editing and workflow into emacs has been great so far. I’m already customizing things. Even using eshell! Excited to look into other things like a music player or email app. Or even slack like the author: https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack
The only way I’ve defeated infinite scroll is with the sword of purpose, and the shield of time-boxing. All other load outs aren’t that effective at this boss.
The whole world is captured by dark UX.
The pandemic situation forced people to stay home glued to the screens and rewired their brains to accept more intrusive media consumption. We don't know the negative effects of this process yet. I have lost communication with a lot of people, the information shock has made them completely strange to me.
On a personal level, I got lucky. Due to my interest in photography, in early 2015 I developed the habit to leave my phone home and go for a walk only with a camera in my hand. It felt refreshing.
The next step for me was to delete all unnecessary apps from my phone and stop the usage of texting apps. If I wanted to communicate with someone - I called. Somewhere in 2017, I realized that my brain needs a constant hit of fresh information and I have to combat this urge.
Now I have offline data collection of carefully curated books, videos, and music. I have limited my "news" consumption to 20 minutes a day through RSS feeds, Twitter, and Hackernews are limited to 15 minutes a day.
Internet is used only for work.
This may not be a contribution to the discussion, but I've recently read a few books that made me aware of how most of my preferences are just arbitrary and a product of feedback loops and after finding this post on HN this morning I just have to say:
Thank you hacker news for being an anomaly on the web.
Even if opening HN maybe a habit that I'm not in control of, I don't regret wasting my time on this website as much.
An exception: I find Duck Duck Go's infinite scroll quite pleasant, and find paginated results quite cumbersome.
Elsewhere it's just annoying. Especially when a misclick makes you lose the position. Dilbert's website is a good example of this. For Reddit or Twitter I don't know, I read them using libreddit and nitter when I occasionally land on them from a link or a search result. TikTok and Facebook I have never tried.
Point. I should qualify that to "non-terminating infinite scroll." E.g. DDG is likely neither hoping nor expecting their users to infinitely scroll through search results all day, without clicking anything.
Also, where does DDG have infinite scroll? I just checked (it's my default) and Firefox on Android shows a "More Results" footer button.
The key to curb bad habits is to create friction, and doing so well in advance. When you're exhausted and you're out of will, you're not gonna take much action to avoid quick pleasures. As it pertains to websites and app, here are a bunch of techniques for creating friction:
- iOS and Android both have screen time features to show you a banner when you've used an app for longer than a set time. This is a good soft block to start with.
- Auto logout after a set time. Having to login is one extra step that may deter you from accessing a website. This can be done with browser extensions.
- Auto delete apps after a set time (this is possible with MDMs). Again, having to install an app would be a big hurdle next time you want to sit back and scroll through clips.
- Throttle speed of a website - this one's a little brittle as you can quickly switch to a faster network, usually your mobile connection.
I noticed I was doing this with Facebook. Decided never to install it on a phone. I did install Instagram on a phone. Noticed I was doing this. Uninstalled Instagram. I installed Reddit on a phone. Noticed I was doing this. Uninstalled Reddit.
My biggest problem then is that I can't uninstall the stupid Google news feed, so that still gets me pretty often. They've made the scroll longer, but at least it is currently finite.
Only slightly related is the way I use my phone for other things. I notice that I'll compulsively unlock my phone and check certain apps that might have something for me (Slack message in a channel that doesn't notify, Chess move to make). And the problem with that is I know I don't need to, and that nothing has likely changed since I last checked. And it's still darn difficult to avoid.
On the other hand, why does every shopping, manufacturer, parts supplier, etc. Have to paginate everything?
That only makes sense if you are trying to increase page views with ads. It is frustrating to have to click next, re load all the background clutter, sometimes every ten items.
It is most likely just a relic from slower internet connections. Anyone who was browsing in the early 2000s didn't want an unknown number of images downloading all at once, especially on a mobile device. It does have little value these days but keep in mind some people are still on slow connections, and some categories of search results can be quite large.
You might as well ask why Google results paginate but you probably answered it (ads).
I much prefer pagination, because I can get back to where I was. There are technical ways to make infinite scroll deep-linkable but I almost never see it in practice.
Oftentimes it is so that you have to interact with the website which subsequently allows the webpage to autoplay media with audio or track engagement with a particular piece of content.
I just want to give a quick shout out to the Apollo Reddit reader on iOS for two specific features:
1. You can disable infinite scroll. When I’ve been scrolling Reddit for 20 or so posts, it’s a sobering reminder that I’ve gained nothing of value on Page 1, and Page 2 likely won’t be any better.
2. You can disable r/all. If it’s there, odds are I will look at it. Without it, I don’t feel tempted to wander outside of my curated feed of programming languages and such.
Two really excellent features to combat the addictive noise I have trouble filtering.
I have exactly the opposite issue. The fact that Apollo fixes all my reddit annoyances means that I use it way more than I should. If I was forced to use the official reddit app with it's ads and nonsense or the atrocious web page, my reddit usage would drop exponentially.
A less popular opinion: when you're in the danger zone regarding mindless scrolling, say several hours per day, another way to look at it is that you simply have too much time on your hands.
When you add friction to using these apps as some type of self-control, the problem is that the time surplus is still there. Which leaves infinite excuses to get back into the habit.
You need to replace that time with something better. Preferably fun social obligations, because those you won't easily opt-out of. Agree with a friend to go walk to the park every Wednesday. Do volunteer work. Group sports. Cook an extra nice meal for your partner on a particular day. Stuff like that. Fill up your surplus of time with things that are fun and have meaning.
I know, for some the above is too steep. For the ultra lazy, there's still options. Pick a movie/documentary that you expect to enjoy. Now put your smartphone in another room and fully engage with the movie. Use your own laziness as a tool as you can't bother to get it.
Further, uninstall Facebook, Twitter, the like from your phone. Only check them on desktop.
Finally, minimize chat on your phone. I limit chat to practical matters only. Needing to pick up something from the store, input on a party that is being organized, things like that.
Anything else...I don't engage. I'm not going to have a long winded social conversation on chat just for the sake of it. To signal this, just respond a day later, and only with "yes", "no" or "OK".
I've reached the stage where I no longer even enjoy social media consumption, I'm just doing it out of habit. I feel like a heroin user who no longer gets high and just uses it to feel normal.
And I'm not even talking about the usual social media ratholes. I pretty much bounce between HN and NYT at this point. And I feel close to dropping even those two entirely, out of sheer boredom. Because on the bright side, it's probably a lot easier to quit than heroin.
For me, the important part is to actively commit your time. IE I am actively deciding to spend X minutes doing Y. If that is doomscrolling/TV/games, that's fine.
The problem only comes when that time limit is breached. And THEN you can review and figure out whether that time got you what you wanted. IE usually doomscrolling is to zoneout/relax/catch up with friends news, etc.
But this requires dedication to think in this way.
A while back there was an article here from someone who moderated their social media use by throttling the connection speed for facebook - with the site getting slower the more time you spent browsing.
At the time I read that article, my achilles heel was Instagram. The Instagram mobile site has most of the content I care about but a pretty poor experience on a mobile browser. I can still get messages and see the things I care about. I can't use it for more than a few minutes without getting frustrated. Stories barely work, you can only watch 4 or 5 before the video player hangs up. Honestly it's perfect, and the discussion here on HN helped me realize that a degraded experience was a better experience for social media. Using the mobile site helped me turn a bad habit into a healthy one.
I use the same strategy for Twitter but their mobile browser experience is better. Twitter can still be habit-forming without the app.
I find these apps much healthier than games, because they're easy to put down, because there's no continuity between two items when you scroll. Some games are impossible to put down once you get hooked, and even when you're not playing them you still constantly think about "I'll do this and this next time".
Yes when I get addicted. The problem is it's hard to refrain even if you try. Social media on the other hand are totally easy to refrain from opening if you know you have more important things to do.
I've been using Screen Time this year so far and it's been working pretty well. For me Twitter, FB, and Reddit were the go to dopamine hits.
I have separate 5 min daily limits for Twitter and Facebook. And a 15 min daily limit for Reddit. Reddit is much easier to curate topics that I'm actually interested in, so I give myself a little more time there since the comments add to the conversation more commonly than the other platforms.
This helps make it feel like I'm "checking-in" and leaving it behind, rather than letting it consume my time. It also makes me think twice about logging in as a habit since my limit will be up without recollecting at all what I just scrolled through. I find myself more often thinking, "Am I going to pay attention to what I'm looking at now?". If not, I'll save the session for later when I have the attention to give.
Infinite scroll is probably the worst thing about modern tech aside from curation algorithms.
It's truly horid. It makes devices harder to use for anything except mindless scrolling like as if your eyeballs are trash cans for the whole world to crap into.
Trying to cut down on phone time/doom scrolling has been a focus of mine the past few weeks. I've been able to help mitigate but not get rid of it with the following:
1. Apollo for Reddit on iOS has a toggle for infinite scrolling, I have infinite scrolling off
2. Most of my time on my phone is spent either in bed, or in transit. Transit has a definite end, so being in bed was my main target. I now leave my phone so far away from my bed at night that I need to get up to get it. Instead of using it before bed, I read.
I do #2 in moderation, for example weekends, I just run free but my sleep is way better the nights I read and keep the phone away! I hope this helps some folks.
This is also my struggle. I've come up with a million ways to cope, but it makes me sad to think of the wasted potential: all the projects I never started, hobbies I never picked up, courses I never finished, books I never read
Overindulgence to the point of disgust worked relatively well for me. Imgur: fun for a while, then it's a handful of themes-of-the-day and rapid-fire stock comments. Reddit: teenagers and kidults either desperately trying to sound smart while peddling left or right wing of the same US bubble, or again just polluting the site with current stock responses.
YouTube: a few good recommendations, and lots of clickbait junk. Oh my god the clickbait. I whipped up a uBlock filter to get rid of ‘insane’ and ‘you won't believe’. Also 99% of videos are 10:01 in length. However I kinda managed to do the ‘deliberate’ thing by collecting promising videos into ‘watch later’ playlists—hundreds of vids are in there now.
I may be hitting this point with HN, as the low-effort sentiment on many topics is easily predicted. Thankfully there are still plenty of articles too involved, technical and boring to just spit out a readymade opinion.
I heard that WoW players kick the habit by moving to a new server: when you have to grind again (afaiu), the game becomes tedious.
For the case of using Instagram on iOS, I recently posted something on reddit about how to disable the explore feed on iOS when browsing Instagram in Safari. Maybe it's of use to someone; I myself feel like I have a much healthier experience like this without missing out on what my friends are up to. https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/t780bt/remove_the_expl...
I ended up using ublock origin to block the "recommendation" sidebars on twitter and youtube. So glad for that. Is there a way to stop the infinite scroll?
The stuff on the sidebar is related, sort-of, but you're not expecting it and you are not necessarily in a critical state of mind when you notice it and instinctively click. Meanwhile, I imagine, giant inscrutable algorithms are tweaking knobs in our heads that we don't even know about, always making incremental progress towards taking away all our attention without us even being aware of it.
Thankfully my brain was programmed/imprinted during the "pull to refresh" era. I rarely scroll past a page length before I move on to something else or scroll to the top and refresh. On a more serious note I've had problems with TikTok.
The most helpful thing I've done to manage this is to make it incredibly difficult/annoying to access your stuff. I don't have the Instagram app on my phone and all though I have several twitter accounts I only keep 1 signed in to my twitter app.
News Feed Eradicator is a great chrome extension that lets you unblock websites for a set period of time. I check my twitter and hackernews for 5 minutes in the morning everyday. Otherwise if I move to those websites they are blocked.
I removed social media from my phone and mobile browser social media use without being logged in is so painful or restrictive that I'm rarely temped to do much other than check the top few posts on the reddit homepage.
Those two things helped a ton with my social media usage.
45 minutes? I’m a VP of Product and work 12 hour days, yet someone I spent 9 hours a day ( as per my iPhone ) on my iPhone… most of it in an endless scroll k-hole
Same with food. If I have unhealthy food in the house, I will eventually eat it in a moment of weakness when I experience a dip in fortitude. So the solution has been to not allow bad food in the house, by never shopping on an empty stomach. And ensure I always have a whole lamb in the freezer.
Another trick is to go shopping on my bicycle, so I can only buy what fits in a backpack - and usually that's high-nutrition items.
At various times in my life, I've spent way too much time on Twitter. I've been using Twitterrific for a couple months, which does not have the Explore tab and does not include things in your TL that you don't explicitly follow. The UI also makes it a bit less easy to read replies than the official Twitter app does. I find myself spending almost no time on Twitter now, and it's great.
I also struggle with this. As such I've tried doing little things to stop the infinite scroll. I don't use reddit anymore unless it is something I am actively looking into (e.g. a tech subreddit or something). I went through and unfollowed every friend and product on facebook. Luckily, I think that's all I use that has infinite scroll.
I just set a limit (only access them on my iphone) of 1 hour per day (total) on my social media apps. I know that is still a lot but it is what it is, I use it to catch up on news and family "what's going on" so please don't hate on me, there are worse things that I could be doing. I was spending more than that for sure before.
Maybe addictive platforms could do some good and make more money if they limited the amount of content a user can see in one day, like some F2P mobile games:
* Say you can only view 50 videos or 2 hours on TikTok per day.
* If you need more, pay 50 cents.
* The free limit resets every day.
This could also lead to better payout systems for content creators.
(the exact numbers would be tweaked as appropriate of course)
You've described an existing approach actually, and unfortunately there is a big caveat. Duolingo and many other applications use gated or timed content windows in order to increase retention and form stronger long term habits.
The TL;DR of that loop, is that in order to achieve your goals within the app you'll have to come back later to do so, which sets up a daily usage habit.
The Sims mobile for example, you can't just keep playing the game, you have to constantly check back in to see how your timed tasks are going. For DuoLingo, you run out of hearts as you get questions wrong, so you have to keep checking back to see if your hearts have replenished in order to finish the lesson you were on.
It might genuinely be healthier, I think that would need to be studied, but it's not out of the kindest of their hearts that they do it, it's just another way to keep you on the app, albeit over a longer period of time.
Sadly I don't have this problem. I say sadly because the same mechanism that prevents infinite scroll from working on me, also prevents me from enjoying video games.
It's very simple, my brain keeps asking me what's the point of increasing in integer in some database far far away.
I have noticed that infinite scroll is becoming bad for my health. I dealt with RSI issues 20 years ago and got that under control, but now it seems like scrolling on my phone is giving me different RSI pain in my thumb and shoulder.
I really should stop reading stuff on my phone that requires scrolling.
Absolutely. I know this is unrelated to the psychological side of things but for the company I'm with I often have to reach out to charities or NGOs. I absolutely hate badly designed sites with infinite scroll when I'm simply trying to get to the contact in the footer.
I’m on day 1 of 30 days of no social media, and I’ve kept all my apps on my phone and haven’t made any restrictions to me being able to access it. I feel like it’s helping me build up resiliency to saying “no” longer term with a reset period as the buffer for change. Wish me luck!
We are in a state of war. Don't be lulled by a sense of ease - the stakes have never been higher. If you are not directing your attention, it is being directed for you. Infinite scroll is much more dangerous on phones than on computers. Your breath is den. Good luck.
Reddit in the other hand has enough content and subs that there is always one more thing to check out. And by the time you’ve looked at all your subs you can basically start at the front again since so much time has passed
Use a trick they teach you to manage anger: Count to 10. 10 posts, 10 seconds, whatever. And if the first 10 didn't stop you, restart and count to 10 again. These artificial "pages" are low-effort but always do the trick for me.
The answer is obvious - legislate pagination options for all social media.
We can't handle it the way we can't handle added sugar in our diets. China is already taking the lead by banning AI from setting prices dynamically.
I once had a nightmare about infinite scroll where I was in a room and the floor fell out from below me, and then right before I was about to hit the floor of the room below, THAT floor collapsed too, and so on!
I've turned the socials into a pull medium, not a push one. This is why Twitter lists are so good. I open a list and browse topics I'm interested in, not what Twitter 'thinks' I like.
If you are on iOS you can, and should, use the App Limits functionality within Screen Time in settings. It won’t solve your problems, but it will help nudge you away from doom scrolling.
A technique I use to realize how bad it is for my brain, is to try to remember everything I saw after a session of browsing. It's often hard to remember at least half of the stuff.
the Apollo app for reddit on iOS recently added the ability to disable infinite scrolling and go back to pages. having to specifically click 'Load Page 4' helps a lot
I tend to call this idling and it has been something that has been known to consume hours and hours of the day, to an extreme example where it just goes ahead and consume the day.
At first I tried many methods to fight, including and alarm set when I start idling, or having a dedicated time to idle usually 15mins.
But then I noticed that I just kind of slip into idling so the next idea was to keep a sort of a log that I fil up before i tend to do something or a series of actions and the approx time it took.
This had worked much better than the previos ideas so I kept at it trying to form a habit out of it in the same light of whats is my next action step from GTD.
But it would still occur from time to time and sometimes it would be an outbreak of idleness.
So instead of trying to fix it I start to do two things, one is to try and be as conscious as I can while idling and the other is to just observr my self and my patterns of idling to try and see the why I wanted to do it over something like play a video game or you know, have some fun.
What I found out ( and this is still a work in progres) is that my idlenes is a mix of an eacape, being overwhelmed, a habit comforting reflex, dopamine fix need and being tired.
It is rarely one reason for it so I understood that I am unable to fix it just by doing one thing.
So I started to adress the problems one by one depending on the current strongerst reason for. If tired go nap for 9m30s, if overwhelmed clean up gtd and add new stuff to inbox etc.
I still idle but it is not as long as it was. Also not having the apps helps allot. Strangely enough this place is not what I use for idle, but that is because I've been treating it differently from the get go, as most of the time each topic here that interests me is packed with information and has a buch of really high quality comments so much so that I usuallly just add a topic in my gtd for further processing.
One observation for idling is that you should not combine idling with something you enjoy as idling is a habit loop and everything you add to it feeds it, now this can be used for good as well but idling while you drink coffe or are having fun will chain that strongly.
If you are able to be counscious enough to catch yourself as you begin to idle that is the most difficult but most useful step as for me most of the time idling is an semi-conscious act.
Guided meditation helps here, also having coinscious triggers either formed ( everytime you sit a moment of consciousness) or randomly activated ( set a random gentle alarm trough out the day) the more you have those the bigger the chance that it will trigger when you start to idle.
Also as said before, observe your idle patterns, your body position when you start doing it, your place in the room or wherever while it is hard to build consciousness triggers on idling itself you may be able to build it around the movement or positional patterns that you take when idling.
The reason I am motivated to write this is that I noticed just how much of the time that I will never going to get back is taken by it with no visible when done in the quantity that I have been doing it.
There is obviously some benefit though, but same can be said for many other addicting substances.
Also calling it idling is kind of not fair because true idling ( just doing nothing) is actually very useful as it help you rest and kind of process things and resting or true idling before I go to bed has improved my sleep quality.
And that is all on that from me, maybe it might be useful to someone.
> Everyone knows how bad it is now, there's no excuse.
I disagree. Ask any 20-30 year old and I don't think many will say that TikTok, Instagram, etc is "harmful to your health". Maybe a "bit addictive", maybe a few people who say "I have a problem with it". But never "I know this is very harmful for my attention span, my mental health, etc".
By "everyone" I really meant people building things. IE: If someone builds something with infinite scrolling that's like putting caffeine/alcohol/cocaine in a drink.
Ah okay, I agree. Unfortunately it's really easy for PMs to hide that behind flowery language like "to increase retention rates", "improve user experience", etc.
Sounds like the same mentality which lead to "cause cancer in California". All of the hysterical bullcrap with no sense of proportion leads to being ignored completely. It seems like even with the rise of drug legalization support they learned nothing from the failures of DARE and "scare them straight".
I have a friend early 40s who says I have to download tiktok its so good he spends his evenings in bed with his wife texting links to each other. Not doing a good job marketing it to me
> But never "I know this is very harmful for my attention span, my mental health, etc".
Early 20's here, and avoid TikTok, Instagram, etc and know Reddit and the like are all of those things listed - though the worst affected for me personally is attention span.
I usually just like to chime in when people mention stuff like "no one young <does|knows|cares about> $THING", because I've noticed a trend where the fact that there are young people who care is ignored which I think hurts the case more.
Most of my peers don't care however, at least, not as much as I do though I've made some inroads.
You removed all of it from your life with no negative impact.
On the other side there's all the people who live with it with no negative impact either.
The existence of these two groups seem to me a reasonable enough argument to keep it as it is and find alternative solutions for the people who can't remove it from their lives yet are harmed by that. At least, removing it for everyone doesn't seem to be the right call.
I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. Oh and once I tried to use Quora. It asked me to log in before I even knew what kind of a website it is. Now I hate Quora with a passion even though I'm not even sure what kind of a website it is exactly. I can only imagine it's full of modals, infinite scroll and other features that makes my skin go green and pants purple.
So I only end up getting addicted to websites that are simple and old fashioned enough like HN and wikipedia (as long as I don't click a cursed en.m.wikipedia link by accident). Btw, on youtube each time I click subscriptions it defaults back to the grid view. I want a list. Monkey wants list! YOUTUBE AAAAAAARHGFHGHGHFFG-