What the Grayscale Challenge Taught Us About Phone Addiction | Hacker News Reader

What the Grayscale Challenge Taught Us About Phone Addiction

blog.mozilla.org

87 pointsrbanffy59 comments

> I asked myself how many people already see the whole world like this by default. I guess about 8 percent of men are colorblind (women are much less likely to be colorblind) and I was thinking about what that might be like.

For the record, the most common type of colorblindness is red/green. So it's not like 1/10 men can't see any color and "see the whole world like this".

I know that my phone has a "low power mode" which turns everything greyscale. Many phones have a "low-light reading mode" as well that turns warmer colors. I wonder how difficult it might be to have color blind mode for specific types of blindness? Might be interesting to UX designers

On iOS, Settings/General/Accessibility/Display Accomodations/Color Filters. There even filters for specific types of color deficiency, or modify to taste.

A lot of video games have filters now for things like friendly/enemy tags and such.

I use Android.

For Android Simulate color space is the option in the Developer options.

If you don't have developer options enabled you need to tap on the "Build number" 10 times in the "About phone" settings to enable it on Android.

This exists in Android. Greyscale mode is implemented with the very same color-shifting functionality.

It's usually under Developer Options.

> my phone has a "low power mode" which turns everything greyscale

Why do grey pixels consume less power than red pixels of the same brightness?

In fact, assuming (maybe wrongly) that your phone screen's colors are created from RGB, CMYK or some other combination of primary color 'dots' in each pixel, grey would require lighting all the dots in a pixel, while 'redscale' would limit power usage to 1/3 or 1/4 of the dots. I realize there are many other issues potentially involved, but perhaps someone could explain.

EDIT: Sorry, the correct terminology of 'dots' and pixels is lost in my brain someplace and I don't have time to find it.

Display technologies that light up are all based on RGB, as far as I know (additive color). Printers and such, which use subtractive color, would use CMYK.

What takes more power depends on the hardware. An OLED display would take more power to light up a pixel than to keep it dark. An LCD display would typically take slightly more power to show a dark color. The backlight is always shining (which takes most of the power), but darkening an LCD pixel takes more power than just letting the light through does.

Maybe the actual power savings would come from lighter rendering calculations (only having to calculate a single color channel)?

Maybe it's an issue of LCD backlighting?

The backlight has to be strong enough to supply the highest R,G, or B value, while the lower values have light blocked off (by polarization) and turned into heat.

When the LCD display shades of grey, the RGB values are more likely to be in tandem, so maybe you can get the same final brightness coming out with fewer photons being overproduced at the start.

On my Android phone: settings->developer options->advanced->simulate color space, which has simulation of 4 varieties of colorblindness. Developer options has to be enabled by finding the kernel build number in the "About" page of settings, and tapping on it about 7 times.

Separately, I've got a "Night Mode" setting, which lets me set a schedule and a color temperature to use.

> Separately, I've got a "Night Mode" setting, which lets me set a schedule and a color temperature to use.

What a dream. May I ask what Android version you're on? On 8.1.0 it's not there.

EDIT: will not work on 5X, only on Pixel devices...

I've got a wileyfox (s2) and it's one of the options on there? If not there's apps for it, I remember seeing something on f-droid for it, but since it's built in I don't use it.

Yup, there are apps on f-droid but they (Red Moon) suck because they're just an overlay that kills all blacks.

7.0, on a couple year-old HTC. Thanks for reminding me...HTC seems to have stopped security updates at the 2 year mark. It's probably time to look into running LineageOS on the sucker.

I've used Sim Daltonism[0] for some stuff at work. I've only used the Mac version, but looks like there is an iOS version, as well.

[0] https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/

I'm currently going greyscale and have not noticed many differences in my habits. In the past week I've been using YouTube less but my YouTube habits have always ebbed and flowed. I'm reading the news apps on my phone slightly more.. greyscale makes articles have a dead tree newspaper feel with the black and white photos. Google maps is noticeably more difficult to use and so is Google calendar, which categorizes events by color.

I think that for those that go for the visual experience this may detract them. But I go for the text experience, so..

Yeah, I thought about doing this...but then I realized I've already cut back the behaviors this is trying to control, or never adopted them in the first place (I was a late smartphone adopter and have had most notifications disabled for as long as I've had one).

This grayscale challenge seems more to help phone addicts break their habit, but seem to do much if you aren't one and/or don't use social media apps.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea. I'd probably do it if I could selectively enable color only for certain utilitarian apps, like my Camera and photo-viewer.

on iOS you can make it so when you triple click the home button (or the side button on the X) you can toggle color filters

I have a Pixel and when I tried it I had to dig into the developer settings. Phone addiction isn't a big problem for me so only a more polished solution would make sense.

I'd really like something like the pre-existing app-specific settings like Android has for notifications and permissions.

I'm wondering if personally keeping track of it somehow skews the statistics. Maybe the change is significant but overall not that big something like ~10%

I would be interested in cranking through the data myself to see how my phone statistics change vs others. If there was a way to time activities spent in apps...

>I asked myself how many people already see the whole world like this by default.

>...

>As a designer, I depend heavily on color...

I'm a little surprised that a visual designer wouldn't already be applying basic accessible design practices - but I guess it's not something most people think about day-to-day. Still, at the very least, consider running your palettes through a simulator such as:

http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simula...

If you're doing things on the web, this extension can simulate the various types of colorblindness on any page you visit:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spectrum/ofclemegk...

By extension (get it?), this extension simulates other vision deficiencies:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbn...

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this product besides that I use it.

I've been on this for a few weeks now and has made a huge difference in compulsively checking email and twitter.

Pro tip: add it to the triple home button click (Settings>General>Accessibility>Accessibility Shortcut (all the way at the bottom)>Select 'Color Filters') for easy switching for color/grayscale.

It's weird, I have "invert colors" but not any other options. I'm on Marshmallow (samsung s5)

I just went through this on my S5.

"Here's a solution! Go to "about device", find "build number", and tap it a bunch of times until the phone tells you you are a developer. Then, go back to settings, and above about device, you will see a new option called "developer options". Open it, and find "Simulate color space", and set it to "Monochrome"."

Ref: https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/686329-why-th...

Worked for me, thanks!

BTW, I had to vouch for your comment to get it to not be [dead].

That's weird. A couple of days ago their comment was visible fine, and they only have one comment.

I think we're at the tail end of a unique cultural moment where "phone addiction" is even a conceivable idea. They are already arguably the human tool, and in a decade or two the devices will be so firmly a fixture of interaction that "phone addiction" will seem as quaint an idea as "book addiction."

I would compare it to sugar instead. At some point in the last century, food companies figured out that they could leverage the sweet tooth inherent in us using refined sugars. Dental health declined rapidly and obesity went up. It took a couple of decades for society to catch up and put in place countermeasures. To me it seems it's getting better, although at a pretty slow pace; people generally know more about the issue, sugar taxes are being put in place, and there's now some social stigma around excessive candy eating.

Similarly, we're beginning to wise up around the exploitation of our attention. The dopamine hit is real, just like with sugar, but we can also learn to override those impulses by focusing on longer-term goals (being in shape, having a healthy social life).

This is a great idea because it's in that goldilocks zone - pretty easy to toggle but not so easy that I'll disable it for something arbitrary.

On iPhone I set it to switch between Greyscale and Normal with a triple click of the home button so it's really quick to change if I want to watch a video.

How do you set it to do that?

Settings -> General -> Accessibility Shortcut -> Color Filter.

Thank you!

I found this challenge actually harmed my productivity - I wound up reading more reddit comments and playing less little puzzle games (think Flow Free, not Clash of Clans). The little puzzle games were relaxing and I could pay attention to music or a podcast while playing them. Reddit comment threads are often political and angry and reading text draws my focus entirely - leaving me feeling mad about things I really have no control over and which actually have fairly little impact on me. Uninstalled the reddit app when I realized it had this influence for me at least.

On ios, you can set the accessibility shortcut to enable/disable greyscale quickly. Useful for when you need colour.

Settings --> general --> accessiblity --> scroll to accessibility shortcut at bototm --> choose colour filters

Enabling greyscale itself is in the display accomodations --> colour filters section of accessibility

Once enable, just triple tap home to turn greyscale on/off

At least some android systems have a similar setting.

I am not sure if this is actually affecting my usage, but I only figured this out a couple days ago. My compulsive usage is mostly text, which grayscale has little impact on.

On Android, under Accessibility, you can set color mappings for various types of color-blindness, but (at least on 7.0) you have to enable Developer Options to get access to the "simulate color space" option, which provides monochromancy.

Its possible that its better to leave the option more inaccessible to further incentivize yourself from reverting back to color mode. Maybe those few extra steps of converting back to color will stop you from doing so

Agreed. But, in my case I couldn't use grayscale without this. I need colour many times a day for work.

So, this is actually what made greyscale possibly at all. I do agree you have to watch for leaving it off though.

If you find yourself switching it off you can set a daily reminder until the habit sticks.

Does anybody know how to grayscale all web pages in browser, and then add my custom syntax highlighting for code and links. It is not possible to change colors after applying CSS grayscale filter.

I tried doing this also, but couldn't find a way to make it work easily. Since my use case was slightly different (wanted to de-saturate everything except the body text on websites), I used a semi-transparent layer instead of grayscale. You can see what the result looks like in my Chrome extension [1]—it's the Focus Mode feature, which is still in beta and off by default.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

Interesting, I've been using my phone in grayscale only mode for a couple of years mostly for battery life and cause it doesn't really matter when all I use it for us reading and writing. But when I try to use it for something else I have to disable the grayscale, which is annoying, so I guess I've been unknowingly curbing my usage by doing this...

In design class we were taught light text on dark backgrounds are easier on the eyes for light emitting mediums. A nice side-effect of forcing such themes on browsers and Windows is that it cut out colorful distractions.

Sadly these themes and style overrides often make sites unusable.

Edit: typo fix

Has anyone tried changing their computer display to grayscale as well? I tried it for a bit but found that code syntax lacks color. Also graphics in papers all of a sudden are infinitely less informative (elucidating blue from red is really hard in grayscale)

Indeed, there is a small movement in the development/programming community that advocate this :)

https://dev.to/huytd/turning-off-the-syntax-highlighter-8af

http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/syntaxhighlighting/

https://kyleisom.net/blog/2012/10/17/syntax-off/

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0s...

https://www.robertmelton.com/project/syntax-highlighting-off...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12886067

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/disable-syntax-highlig...

https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/8751/how-to-completel...

On one hand, configuring my phone to grayscale is to me a very intriguing "lifehack". But for better or worse, my phone is also my primary camera, and I tend to think that setting it to grayscale would impair my ability to take photos.

Not at all. You’ll develop an eye for tonal contrast with your hip black and white camera!

Yet the most atmospheric professional photos are often monochrome.

I wish I could try this!

I doubt there are many others here, but if anyone is still using a Windows Phone, I just submitted a suggestion for greyscale options to the MS Feedback Hub, so you can search "greyscale" there to upvote the suggestion.

At this point do you really think Windows Phone is getting new features?

I thought it was already abandoned as a failed project by Nicrosoft?

Microsoft added it to the Windows 10 platform already, so I would suspect mobile should get it when it the fork merges back (mobile is currently an RS2 [CU] fork, not quite feature par with RS3 [FCU], and supposedly sometime after RS4 the platform should remerge as the CShell and other efforts move along).

Related: on any Windows 10 device updated to the FCU the shortcut key Win+Ctrl+C switches the current Ease of Access color filter (which defaults to grayscale) on/off immediately. It was making the rounds recently as one of those quick "confuse a coworker" pranks like the monitor orientation keyboard shortcuts.

The Insider builds are showing a lot of interesting work going into a rules engine for Quiet Hours which in recent builds was renamed to Focus Assist. Grayscale might be a good suggestion for Focus Assist rules, especially if the Focus Assist rules engine also takes over Night Light functionality (which I don't know if has been mentioned yet, and my Insider tablet was in the process of updating through a couple weeks of updates when I last left it).

Wow, I am trying this now. This is very strange. It definitely makes flashing red notification badges easier to avoid. But the lack of color diversity makes it hard for me to navigate certain apps. Very weird.

I tried this and it didn't make me use my phone less. That said, I don't use my phone for hours and hours to begin with. Was this anyone else's experience?

Is there a way to do this with color profiles in Linux?

Your monitor might support it?

Using a laptop, unfortunately I can only control its screen via the OS.

I wondered if Redshift would have it as an option, sounds like "no" but a dev thinks it could be used to do it, https://github.com/jonls/redshift/issues/364.

Maybe other night-mode apps include such options?

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