I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.
When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".
But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.
Not much to add other than I switched to this exact model in 2020 and have had the same pleasant outcome for 5 years now. I’m much more productive and can execute deep work for weeks on end. I remained in the zone on my current project for 4 consecutive weeks. I attribute this to having no distractions. The outcomes produced from remaining in the zone for so long are objectively measurable and high level.
> When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go.
From my social circle, the only such annoying links I get are from Instagram.
I have a deep, almost visceral hatred for the current incarnation of social media, so I go out of my way to not create accounts on those things.
For Instagram and similar shit, I could find some nice downloader bots on Telegram. They typically require you to join some spam channels, but you can join and archive those so you never see that they exist.
> The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or *visit them in-browser.*
Tiktok having a borderline unusable web app has done wonders for me. I'll end up on it because someone sent me a link, I can watch that ONE video, a single time, before normally I get a spot-the-boat style captcha or an "install the app" modal. Even trying to get past that point, it feels like the site is somehow falling apart at the seams as you navigate around. I know the concept is "well people will install the app then" but that's also annoyingly frictionful.
They unintentionally made the most literal social media experience: some one sends me media, I watch it once, I leave before the site crumbles to pieces like an ancient tomb that was only held together by a load-bearing dog video.
I like Reddit, I pay for an app on iOS to have a reasonable experience. The mobile web experience otherwise is terrible.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
I'm firmly convinced we will, eventually, look back at algorithmic social media with the same revulsion as we now look at leaded gasoline or ubiquitous cigarretes. No less harmful.
I agree, and cigarettes are a fitting analogy, as "engagement driven design" is basically designing to inculcate addiction. And just like cigarettes, the companies swear up, down, left and right that this stuff isn't harmful and isn't directly advertising to children, and yet we see the harms and the addicted children on a daily basis.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
The arc of social media is truly breathtakingly awful. At this point it’s hard for me to see any value in it at all.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
Instagram has had broken web notifications for a month or so. You click the notifications and nothing happens; the post doesn’t open. The first days I thought someone had messed something up but after a month I’m not so sure. And there obviously is no way of telling them (and have a human read the report).
I believe that short form video coupled with infinite scroll mesmerizes humans. It keeps them in a trance by using suspense. The brain absolutely must know how the video plays out whether that be waiting for the punchline, a fight to break our or a fact to be delivered. Once the brain has locked eyes on the video the user must put significant energy into making a conscious decision to look away.
Even OpenAI's latest Sora app leans into this format and the videos there are literally the poorest quality on the Internet. 99.999% of them are eight seconds of unintelligent, unintelligible, low grade digitally created excrement.
There should be a law against it.
Big Tech knows this. They have teams of people with doctorates making apps engaging.
dopamine reward feedback loop. Video scrolling is an insidious form of it because the feedback time is so short that you end up hooked on it for hours, feeling bad afterwards; seriously potent stuff.
I'm really glad that for whatever reason my brain has completely rejected short-form content. It seems to be a serious problem for a lot of people. I don't understand it the same way I don't understand heroin addictions. My mind is just screaming "STOP DOING IT" and cannot get passed that concept very far.
You're on HN, though. In some sense, reeling in people like you has been a solved problem for decades, since forums were invented.
I apologize for what is doubtless egregious projection on my part.
I am like you in the sense that I seem "immune" to TikTok/Reels, especially relative to my wife, who can definitely get sucked into it for 30-60 minutes. However, I'm easily-snared by things like "the last year of drama in the NixOS community". I can easily spend an hour I don't have reading forum threads in which people are accusing moderators of abusing their position in a forum about a piece of technology I don't use.
So in some sense the tech industry didn't need to "innovate" in order to suck me in. I was getting sucked into reading about web forum drama 20 years ago.
The trick of short form video isn’t the content itself but the channel flipping, hunting hook action. Changing the channel is fun when you actually land on something-good in the sea of garbage. And sometimes that something-good is a an endless handkerchief. One that you can keep pulling out good somethings with. Now you feel extra special like you’ve found something novel as you’ve completed the hunt and are satiated. And you keep that endless handkerchief you found. Soon you will have found many novel endless handkerchiefs. You mount them on your profile page like boar heads on a hunters wall. This pride is tied to happiness and you know how to hunt for more.
I highly recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal[0]. It is the book that effortlessly detailed how to build short form video networks (as well as other addicting software over the last 10+ years). The people who built this stuff read it and the people who want to stop the addictions should read it.
I heavily use android's focus mode to keep myself from being too distracted. Originally I tried using app timers, but I found myself just constantly bumping them to the point where I wasn't getting a benefit. Whenever I notice an app being noisy with notifications (even if I appreciate them when I'm not busy), I add it into the list of distracting apps. I have a daily focus timer that enabled when I get to work and ends when I (generally) leave work. This keeps me focused during the day, but I also occasionally enable this when I want to focus on other things, or if I find myself spending too much time on random apps. Because of the way that the breaks work, I have to keep asking for 5/15/30min and I'm very aware of how much time I'm wasting. I also enable flip-to-shh mode, which disables all notifications when my phone is face down on a surface. I realize that focus mode and flip-to-shh can seem extreme, but I noticed this works well worked for me.
I wanted to develop an alternative to App Timer on Android. I need something more like "App Timeouts". App Timers are per 24 hours, so as soon I hit X amount of minutes, I'm blocked from using it until midnight and then it resets.
What do I mean about App Timeout?
I want to say "Once I reach 20min on this app, block me from using it for 2 hours". Then it resets after 2 hours from that point. Both of those times being configurable of course.
The problem with the built-in Android App Timers now is I end up setting it to something large, like 1 hour or more because I'm thinking about how much time I want for a full day, but then I just sit there in 1 sitting swiping for that whole amount of time. And this usually happens after midnight so I know that I'm going to be blocked for my next day until after midnight again and the cycle continues.
I'd rather something force me to use it in shorter bits of time. So at midnight I can allow myself to get into an Instagram hole for 10 or 20min, but at least I know when I wake up it's been reset. I think doing this will train me to use the app for shorter amounts of time in general (or at least I think so and I want to test that theory).
I don't even know if this is possible in Android. How can one app block another. Maybe by allowing it to overlay over other apps or something?
+1 to focus mode; at least on Samsung-flavored Android, you can set a recurring schedule so that focus mode (or any mode) automatically kicks in on certain days/times, which I use to block notifications from and access to certain apps during peak working hours.
Another feature I really like that also might be unique to Samsung-flavored Android--it's been a decade since I've had a device running Vanilla android, lol--is the overall daily screentime tracker. It's purely observational, so there's no penalty for going over, but unlike the app time limits that you can snooze there isn't a way to subtract time that you actually spent, which helps keep me accountable. Mainly I like having a widget that tracks the day's stats on my home screen, because being able to go "oof, did I really spend 45 minutes on <app> today already?" is a strong motivator for me to shape up.
As a bonus, you can also _exclude_ certain apps from the time limit tracker, which I like because it nudges me towards more constructive habits. Stuff like my notes app and Waze don't count towards the timer, nor does my e-reader of choice, which means I'm more likely to read a few pages of a book if I have time to kill since it's "free" against my daily screen goal.
It's amazing how much a couple small changes can make on your browsing experience. The companies that own these products have a huge incentive to make every element purposefully addictive. I've also patched the iOS Instagram app to remove all Reels (using FLEXtool & Sideloadly), so I can keep up with my friends without falling into the traps. As developers, we have the ability to target these manipulative tactics and remove them, and I encourage you to do this as much as possible.
I have a similar great+simple system for curbing consumptive screen-time, i.e. I don't keep any of those apps on the phone, I block all of those websites on phone/laptop web-browser using an extension like Leech-Block and Un-Hook (YT). Some things that I allow are - YT long-form videos from subscriptions only, Hacker-News, and Linked-In.
THE biggest impediment for me has been stuff like getting sick. When I am sick, I just cannot lie there and do nothing. And it is TOO difficult to do stuff like read books or go out and talk to people or whatnot, it's too much effort. I HAVE to get back on consumptive screen-time. And then it devolves into something uglier - an ugly spiral, of gluttony & consumption, and I keep at it even beyond getting better.
Then it takes days or weeks of laziness and excuses to get back on track. And not just sickness but anything of that level. Anything that just kinda derails my life for a bit. I really need to find a middle-ground solution for the worst-case scenarios. I'm still working on it. I think I should be able to figure it out. It took me a while to figure out my best-case system as well.
> While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing
For those looking to drop a(ny) habit: this seems to be the key
I had a side gig that involved me driving every day for at least one hour, but usually more. I listened to all kinds of podcasts and audio books. But at some point, I realised I cannot process that much of information. That’s how I stopped, perhaps we humans aren’t designed to process that much daily.
It feels validating that other people have a similar experience. I simply can't take in that much information. It eventually starts making me feel terrible.
The big issue is that I'm not very good at moderating my intake. I'm a crack addict for information and one small dose will turn into a bender.
I researched this phone, and while being cool (I like the idea), it’s not practical for me to hunt it, it’s not trivial to buy in my area. However, I have a similar idea to others: an old tiny iPhone (4S or 5S if you can survive with the obsolete system, FaceTime and iMessage works there last time I checked, a year or two ago), or SE 1st gen (I use it as my second phone to my 12 mini), which is perfectly usable (Safari is stuck at whatever version it has from iOS 15). It’s not very practical everyday phone, but it works for most tasks, including navigation with maps. So if you’re hunting a small distraction free phone, an obsolete iPhone is a pretty decent thing to buy, and is usually cheap. I bet getting a new battery might be more expensive than the phone itself, unless you’re up to the task (it’s not complicated, if you have the basic instruments). I know it’s the opposite of an open phone with an easily swappable battery, but it’s a decent step into the direction. And I found an old iPhone being very usable for very basic tasks. If I had a Pro Max, I’d surely wasted much more time on it. I know because I had one before.
For YouTube addicts I recommend uninstalling the app, using the website, and installing the Unhook browser extension for Chrome/Firefox/Edge. It can remove recommendations, shorts and a bunch of other stuff.
I second this. I had a tendency to get stuck watching YouTube videos before I hid all algorithmic recommendations and the Home page with Unhook. I can finally use YouTube without getting distracted, and there's no way I'm going back.
I just wish I had an addon like this for, well, everything. The browser is such a great platform because you can have this much control over your experience--no such luck with mobile apps.
You don't treat the symptoms; you treat the cause. dumbphones, minimalist phones, and crippled smartphones are as effective as a smoker throwing away a full pack, only to buy a new one when stressed or drunk. If you use doomscrolling as an escape, you will inevitably fall back to it when life hits. While a few may manage to change their habits with a restricted device if the stars align for long enough, it won't work for most. You need to first figure out why you do it.
This isn't universal but will tremendously help quitting. There will still be the nicotine issue, but it will help clear the other factors that can be as powerful as the physical addiction.
The cause why you started smoking might have gone away but you are still addicted to the substance. We don't have the same chemical addiction with doom scrolling.
Very occidental perspective. There are places where you need your phone practically 24/7, no affordance of escape. I can give an example of my day, which is basically completely phone centered, the only words I utter in a day is some digits to the taxi driver to verify my identity (when i can afford a ride that is).
Edit: mute button is essential and don't allow any notifications outside important messages/apps
Is this out of convenience or necessity? Do you have redundant devices so that if your primary glass slab is unusable for some reason, you're still able to make it home at the end of the day? Are you in some new role and lifestyle that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, or suffering from a disability for which the cell phone is your only means of achieving independence?
The human race has survived for about 2 million years without a 24/7 tether. Our environment is the safest and most human-shaped it's ever been, you don't need to have constant anxiety about true emergency situations resolved by cell phone connections, those are unimaginably rare.
It's totally feasible to go without a cell phone once in a while, just try it! Check your emails once a day, 5 days a week. Set up an auto-responder saying you're unavailable and can check messages at [time]. Navigate with your memory and the many signs that are posted, or with a paper map for aid. Write down things you need to remember with a pen and a piece of paper. Leave the phone behind and just go for a walk in a park with nothing but your surroundings and your thoughts. The world will keep turning for 30 minutes regardless of whether you're keeping tabs on it through the phone.
I think they're referring to (the especially common in Asia) scenario where all payments/ authentication/ local services are handled via smartphone applications? You can definitely go for a walk without it but you might not be able to get on transit, buy from shops, read a menu at a restaurant or so on.
Which is fucked, and it pisses me off when halfwits imply that the US is "behind" because we haven't funnelled our whole society into a fucking phone app (yet).
A big problem I find is that if you are a family and have kids you basically have to keep up and that means turning on notifications for messages and emails and then of course that leads to opening the phone, reading email, checking HN (obviously) and then posting a comment on it! urghh
My high schooler is in theatre and they post critical updates via Instagram. It drives me crazy.
And don't get me started on all the custom apps cluttering my phone that these schools and sports leagues get sold on for sharing flyers and other info (Parent Square, Peach Jar, Playmetrics, Mojo, etc.) I guess it's a feature that most of those apps are not well designed and they don't suck you into addictive engagement loops like the big social media platforms.
I don't have kids, so I can't 100% relate, but have you dug into the notifications settings on your phone? They're extremely flexible. I've set mine up so any non-chat notification gets batched into a group that shows at 5 AM and 5 PM. This lets me check on whatever happened the previous evening while I'm having breakfast, and whatever happened during the day after I get home from work. Once I've flipped through all the notifications and done whatever other time wasting things, it goes back in my pocket and largely does not disturb me for another 12 hours.
Maybe something like that could work. If you find there are notifications that are disturbing you, but they really could have waited until the evening, toss 'em in the batch bucket. Eventually you'll tune out all the low-importance stuff and get your life back. Or find some other cadence that works for you. It takes some effort to tune these systems, but I think it's worth it.
I followed the instructions here to cripple my phone using Apple Configurator: https://stopa.io/post/297
Now the browser doesn't work and I can't install new apps. I also turn on "Do Not Disturb" almost all the time, which allows through notifications from exactly 3 people.
ooh deleting and pausing off youtube's watch history is nice, no more getting sucked into videos of someone beating dark souls by only pressing the Z button or whatever other bullshit Google has realized I will waste hours on.
I think the most surprising thing about it, at least in the US - is that mobile bandwidth is THE most expensive. I imagine that's inverted or opposite elsewhere
For perspective, I pay USD $17.33 a month for unlimited 5G data - in the UK, in GBP, so really £13. Low quality home broadband costs more than that, and is slower, but with better latency.
I've tested the unlimited claim, and they really do let you download terabytes. All my local LLMs are downloaded over mobile data.
So yes, in my experience it's inverted over here. Mobile bandwidth is the cheapest if you can get a good deal and you're in an uncongested area with a good signal. Unfortunately that's not a combination I've found to be reliable anywhere I go, especially over the last 6 months. But the price is good!
I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.
When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".
But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.
Most browser apps have an option for this, no? Chrome and Vivaldi have it for sure.
The phone vendors want you downloading and using apps.
Not much to add other than I switched to this exact model in 2020 and have had the same pleasant outcome for 5 years now. I’m much more productive and can execute deep work for weeks on end. I remained in the zone on my current project for 4 consecutive weeks. I attribute this to having no distractions. The outcomes produced from remaining in the zone for so long are objectively measurable and high level.
> When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go.
From my social circle, the only such annoying links I get are from Instagram.
I have a deep, almost visceral hatred for the current incarnation of social media, so I go out of my way to not create accounts on those things.
For Instagram and similar shit, I could find some nice downloader bots on Telegram. They typically require you to join some spam channels, but you can join and archive those so you never see that they exist.
> And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
Usually I can work around this by toggling "desktop mode" in firefox on android...
> The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or *visit them in-browser.*
Tiktok having a borderline unusable web app has done wonders for me. I'll end up on it because someone sent me a link, I can watch that ONE video, a single time, before normally I get a spot-the-boat style captcha or an "install the app" modal. Even trying to get past that point, it feels like the site is somehow falling apart at the seams as you navigate around. I know the concept is "well people will install the app then" but that's also annoyingly frictionful.
They unintentionally made the most literal social media experience: some one sends me media, I watch it once, I leave before the site crumbles to pieces like an ancient tomb that was only held together by a load-bearing dog video.
I like Reddit, I pay for an app on iOS to have a reasonable experience. The mobile web experience otherwise is terrible.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
I'm firmly convinced we will, eventually, look back at algorithmic social media with the same revulsion as we now look at leaded gasoline or ubiquitous cigarretes. No less harmful.
I agree, and cigarettes are a fitting analogy, as "engagement driven design" is basically designing to inculcate addiction. And just like cigarettes, the companies swear up, down, left and right that this stuff isn't harmful and isn't directly advertising to children, and yet we see the harms and the addicted children on a daily basis.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
The arc of social media is truly breathtakingly awful. At this point it’s hard for me to see any value in it at all.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
Instagram has had broken web notifications for a month or so. You click the notifications and nothing happens; the post doesn’t open. The first days I thought someone had messed something up but after a month I’m not so sure. And there obviously is no way of telling them (and have a human read the report).
This is exactly my experience as well, and partially why I only use tiktok and facebook from a browser.
Instagram works just a bit better but roughly the same. And that helps keep me off.
I am putting the load bearing dog video on the example shelf right next to the load bearing (disproven) TF2_coconut.jpg
I believe that short form video coupled with infinite scroll mesmerizes humans. It keeps them in a trance by using suspense. The brain absolutely must know how the video plays out whether that be waiting for the punchline, a fight to break our or a fact to be delivered. Once the brain has locked eyes on the video the user must put significant energy into making a conscious decision to look away.
Even OpenAI's latest Sora app leans into this format and the videos there are literally the poorest quality on the Internet. 99.999% of them are eight seconds of unintelligent, unintelligible, low grade digitally created excrement.
There should be a law against it.
Big Tech knows this. They have teams of people with doctorates making apps engaging.
dopamine reward feedback loop. Video scrolling is an insidious form of it because the feedback time is so short that you end up hooked on it for hours, feeling bad afterwards; seriously potent stuff.
aka a drug
I'm really glad that for whatever reason my brain has completely rejected short-form content. It seems to be a serious problem for a lot of people. I don't understand it the same way I don't understand heroin addictions. My mind is just screaming "STOP DOING IT" and cannot get passed that concept very far.
You're on HN, though. In some sense, reeling in people like you has been a solved problem for decades, since forums were invented.
I apologize for what is doubtless egregious projection on my part.
I am like you in the sense that I seem "immune" to TikTok/Reels, especially relative to my wife, who can definitely get sucked into it for 30-60 minutes. However, I'm easily-snared by things like "the last year of drama in the NixOS community". I can easily spend an hour I don't have reading forum threads in which people are accusing moderators of abusing their position in a forum about a piece of technology I don't use.
So in some sense the tech industry didn't need to "innovate" in order to suck me in. I was getting sucked into reading about web forum drama 20 years ago.
for me its because i browse hn and the overwhelming cynicism "tastes" much worse than the entertainment provided
The trick of short form video isn’t the content itself but the channel flipping, hunting hook action. Changing the channel is fun when you actually land on something-good in the sea of garbage. And sometimes that something-good is a an endless handkerchief. One that you can keep pulling out good somethings with. Now you feel extra special like you’ve found something novel as you’ve completed the hunt and are satiated. And you keep that endless handkerchief you found. Soon you will have found many novel endless handkerchiefs. You mount them on your profile page like boar heads on a hunters wall. This pride is tied to happiness and you know how to hunt for more.
I highly recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal[0]. It is the book that effortlessly detailed how to build short form video networks (as well as other addicting software over the last 10+ years). The people who built this stuff read it and the people who want to stop the addictions should read it.
[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/881418283
I heavily use android's focus mode to keep myself from being too distracted. Originally I tried using app timers, but I found myself just constantly bumping them to the point where I wasn't getting a benefit. Whenever I notice an app being noisy with notifications (even if I appreciate them when I'm not busy), I add it into the list of distracting apps. I have a daily focus timer that enabled when I get to work and ends when I (generally) leave work. This keeps me focused during the day, but I also occasionally enable this when I want to focus on other things, or if I find myself spending too much time on random apps. Because of the way that the breaks work, I have to keep asking for 5/15/30min and I'm very aware of how much time I'm wasting. I also enable flip-to-shh mode, which disables all notifications when my phone is face down on a surface. I realize that focus mode and flip-to-shh can seem extreme, but I noticed this works well worked for me.
https://blog.google/products/android/android-focus-mode/
I wanted to develop an alternative to App Timer on Android. I need something more like "App Timeouts". App Timers are per 24 hours, so as soon I hit X amount of minutes, I'm blocked from using it until midnight and then it resets.
What do I mean about App Timeout?
I want to say "Once I reach 20min on this app, block me from using it for 2 hours". Then it resets after 2 hours from that point. Both of those times being configurable of course.
The problem with the built-in Android App Timers now is I end up setting it to something large, like 1 hour or more because I'm thinking about how much time I want for a full day, but then I just sit there in 1 sitting swiping for that whole amount of time. And this usually happens after midnight so I know that I'm going to be blocked for my next day until after midnight again and the cycle continues.
I'd rather something force me to use it in shorter bits of time. So at midnight I can allow myself to get into an Instagram hole for 10 or 20min, but at least I know when I wake up it's been reset. I think doing this will train me to use the app for shorter amounts of time in general (or at least I think so and I want to test that theory).
I don't even know if this is possible in Android. How can one app block another. Maybe by allowing it to overlay over other apps or something?
+1 to focus mode; at least on Samsung-flavored Android, you can set a recurring schedule so that focus mode (or any mode) automatically kicks in on certain days/times, which I use to block notifications from and access to certain apps during peak working hours.
Another feature I really like that also might be unique to Samsung-flavored Android--it's been a decade since I've had a device running Vanilla android, lol--is the overall daily screentime tracker. It's purely observational, so there's no penalty for going over, but unlike the app time limits that you can snooze there isn't a way to subtract time that you actually spent, which helps keep me accountable. Mainly I like having a widget that tracks the day's stats on my home screen, because being able to go "oof, did I really spend 45 minutes on <app> today already?" is a strong motivator for me to shape up.
As a bonus, you can also _exclude_ certain apps from the time limit tracker, which I like because it nudges me towards more constructive habits. Stuff like my notes app and Waze don't count towards the timer, nor does my e-reader of choice, which means I'm more likely to read a few pages of a book if I have time to kill since it's "free" against my daily screen goal.
same for iphone, i always have it in a focus mode that hides almost all notifications. so much better
Speaking of using custom CSS with YouTube, I do the following for my experience:
- Completely hide the recommended tab
- Make every thumbnail grayscale (to mitigate eye-catching thumbnails)
- Make every video title lowercase (to mitigate eye-catching titles)
Here's my code, although I have to update it every once and a while when YouTube changes:
It's amazing how much a couple small changes can make on your browsing experience. The companies that own these products have a huge incentive to make every element purposefully addictive. I've also patched the iOS Instagram app to remove all Reels (using FLEXtool & Sideloadly), so I can keep up with my friends without falling into the traps. As developers, we have the ability to target these manipulative tactics and remove them, and I encourage you to do this as much as possible.I have a similar great+simple system for curbing consumptive screen-time, i.e. I don't keep any of those apps on the phone, I block all of those websites on phone/laptop web-browser using an extension like Leech-Block and Un-Hook (YT). Some things that I allow are - YT long-form videos from subscriptions only, Hacker-News, and Linked-In.
THE biggest impediment for me has been stuff like getting sick. When I am sick, I just cannot lie there and do nothing. And it is TOO difficult to do stuff like read books or go out and talk to people or whatnot, it's too much effort. I HAVE to get back on consumptive screen-time. And then it devolves into something uglier - an ugly spiral, of gluttony & consumption, and I keep at it even beyond getting better.
Then it takes days or weeks of laziness and excuses to get back on track. And not just sickness but anything of that level. Anything that just kinda derails my life for a bit. I really need to find a middle-ground solution for the worst-case scenarios. I'm still working on it. I think I should be able to figure it out. It took me a while to figure out my best-case system as well.
> While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing
For those looking to drop a(ny) habit: this seems to be the key
On top of what's suggested in the post, I found the following helpful:
- having a "phone box", the small uncomfortable shoe bench now has a shelf above it for phones, phones shall only be used on that bench
- only my partner knows the "screen time" password on iOS
- putting away my laptop and using a desktop computer instead
My current problem is listening to podcasts, I don't have a convenient way to listen to them without my phone.
Get a secondary "podcast only" phone
RIP mp3 players
I had a side gig that involved me driving every day for at least one hour, but usually more. I listened to all kinds of podcasts and audio books. But at some point, I realised I cannot process that much of information. That’s how I stopped, perhaps we humans aren’t designed to process that much daily.
It feels validating that other people have a similar experience. I simply can't take in that much information. It eventually starts making me feel terrible.
The big issue is that I'm not very good at moderating my intake. I'm a crack addict for information and one small dose will turn into a bender.
A few years ago I traded my huge Google Pixel 6 for a 3 inch Uniherz Jelly.
It's not perfect, as I still spend a lot of time on Reddit and HN on the tiny screen while commuting, but it's moved the needle for me.
I've debated getting that phone heavily. My reasons not to:
1. it's gotta be bad for the eyes on a screen that small 2. the Pixel camera!
A small iPhone has pretty good cameras, e.g. 12 or 13 mini.
Huh I came across some very similar looking phones on a similar looking website just yesterday.
I guess these phones are rebadged?
Just curious, do you have to do anything to get Reddit fitting on that screen properly? I almost imagine it would need a reader mode kinda thing
Get a Kindle and read good books while commuting. You shouldn't feel bad for not looking out the window.
I researched this phone, and while being cool (I like the idea), it’s not practical for me to hunt it, it’s not trivial to buy in my area. However, I have a similar idea to others: an old tiny iPhone (4S or 5S if you can survive with the obsolete system, FaceTime and iMessage works there last time I checked, a year or two ago), or SE 1st gen (I use it as my second phone to my 12 mini), which is perfectly usable (Safari is stuck at whatever version it has from iOS 15). It’s not very practical everyday phone, but it works for most tasks, including navigation with maps. So if you’re hunting a small distraction free phone, an obsolete iPhone is a pretty decent thing to buy, and is usually cheap. I bet getting a new battery might be more expensive than the phone itself, unless you’re up to the task (it’s not complicated, if you have the basic instruments). I know it’s the opposite of an open phone with an easily swappable battery, but it’s a decent step into the direction. And I found an old iPhone being very usable for very basic tasks. If I had a Pro Max, I’d surely wasted much more time on it. I know because I had one before.
For YouTube addicts I recommend uninstalling the app, using the website, and installing the Unhook browser extension for Chrome/Firefox/Edge. It can remove recommendations, shorts and a bunch of other stuff.
https://unhook.app/
I second this. I had a tendency to get stuck watching YouTube videos before I hid all algorithmic recommendations and the Home page with Unhook. I can finally use YouTube without getting distracted, and there's no way I'm going back.
I just wish I had an addon like this for, well, everything. The browser is such a great platform because you can have this much control over your experience--no such luck with mobile apps.
You don't treat the symptoms; you treat the cause. dumbphones, minimalist phones, and crippled smartphones are as effective as a smoker throwing away a full pack, only to buy a new one when stressed or drunk. If you use doomscrolling as an escape, you will inevitably fall back to it when life hits. While a few may manage to change their habits with a restricted device if the stars align for long enough, it won't work for most. You need to first figure out why you do it.
“You must figure out why you smoke in the first place, before you will be able to quit” isn’t a universal truth.
This isn't universal but will tremendously help quitting. There will still be the nicotine issue, but it will help clear the other factors that can be as powerful as the physical addiction.
Because you know why you are smoking because you are addicted to nicotine.
so the symptom is the cause
The cause why you started smoking might have gone away but you are still addicted to the substance. We don't have the same chemical addiction with doom scrolling.
Very occidental perspective. There are places where you need your phone practically 24/7, no affordance of escape. I can give an example of my day, which is basically completely phone centered, the only words I utter in a day is some digits to the taxi driver to verify my identity (when i can afford a ride that is).
Edit: mute button is essential and don't allow any notifications outside important messages/apps
Is this out of convenience or necessity? Do you have redundant devices so that if your primary glass slab is unusable for some reason, you're still able to make it home at the end of the day? Are you in some new role and lifestyle that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, or suffering from a disability for which the cell phone is your only means of achieving independence?
The human race has survived for about 2 million years without a 24/7 tether. Our environment is the safest and most human-shaped it's ever been, you don't need to have constant anxiety about true emergency situations resolved by cell phone connections, those are unimaginably rare.
It's totally feasible to go without a cell phone once in a while, just try it! Check your emails once a day, 5 days a week. Set up an auto-responder saying you're unavailable and can check messages at [time]. Navigate with your memory and the many signs that are posted, or with a paper map for aid. Write down things you need to remember with a pen and a piece of paper. Leave the phone behind and just go for a walk in a park with nothing but your surroundings and your thoughts. The world will keep turning for 30 minutes regardless of whether you're keeping tabs on it through the phone.
I think they're referring to (the especially common in Asia) scenario where all payments/ authentication/ local services are handled via smartphone applications? You can definitely go for a walk without it but you might not be able to get on transit, buy from shops, read a menu at a restaurant or so on.
Which is fucked, and it pisses me off when halfwits imply that the US is "behind" because we haven't funnelled our whole society into a fucking phone app (yet).
A big problem I find is that if you are a family and have kids you basically have to keep up and that means turning on notifications for messages and emails and then of course that leads to opening the phone, reading email, checking HN (obviously) and then posting a comment on it! urghh
My high schooler is in theatre and they post critical updates via Instagram. It drives me crazy.
And don't get me started on all the custom apps cluttering my phone that these schools and sports leagues get sold on for sharing flyers and other info (Parent Square, Peach Jar, Playmetrics, Mojo, etc.) I guess it's a feature that most of those apps are not well designed and they don't suck you into addictive engagement loops like the big social media platforms.
I don't have kids, so I can't 100% relate, but have you dug into the notifications settings on your phone? They're extremely flexible. I've set mine up so any non-chat notification gets batched into a group that shows at 5 AM and 5 PM. This lets me check on whatever happened the previous evening while I'm having breakfast, and whatever happened during the day after I get home from work. Once I've flipped through all the notifications and done whatever other time wasting things, it goes back in my pocket and largely does not disturb me for another 12 hours.
Maybe something like that could work. If you find there are notifications that are disturbing you, but they really could have waited until the evening, toss 'em in the batch bucket. Eventually you'll tune out all the low-importance stuff and get your life back. Or find some other cadence that works for you. It takes some effort to tune these systems, but I think it's worth it.
I'm surprised that no one else I know uses this feature. It's helped me a lot.
I followed the instructions here to cripple my phone using Apple Configurator: https://stopa.io/post/297
Now the browser doesn't work and I can't install new apps. I also turn on "Do Not Disturb" almost all the time, which allows through notifications from exactly 3 people.
I’m a big fan of the “Reduce Interruptions” focus mode.
Nah that's what FRS, GMRS, APRS and LoRA / Meshtastic are for.
Come on, raise your kids right.
ooh deleting and pausing off youtube's watch history is nice, no more getting sucked into videos of someone beating dark souls by only pressing the Z button or whatever other bullshit Google has realized I will waste hours on.
I use SocialFocus for iOS/macOS to block recommended videos, etc. It’s incredibly useful.
I think the most surprising thing about it, at least in the US - is that mobile bandwidth is THE most expensive. I imagine that's inverted or opposite elsewhere
For perspective, I pay USD $17.33 a month for unlimited 5G data - in the UK, in GBP, so really £13. Low quality home broadband costs more than that, and is slower, but with better latency.
I've tested the unlimited claim, and they really do let you download terabytes. All my local LLMs are downloaded over mobile data.
So yes, in my experience it's inverted over here. Mobile bandwidth is the cheapest if you can get a good deal and you're in an uncongested area with a good signal. Unfortunately that's not a combination I've found to be reliable anywhere I go, especially over the last 6 months. But the price is good!
How expensive? In spain you can get 20~30GB for 10 euros, which is more than enough for most people.