Ask HN: How you dealt with YouTube/social media addiction?

I quit using social media around 2012. The first year or so was difficult because I had to deal with friends and family not understanding why I was no longer part of things like Facebook which was number one at the time. Now it's been so long that I feel like a complete outsider to social media. Not a care in the world and when I see how my friends and family interact with it, I see it as something that I don't need and probably is unhealthy anyway. It's like when you quit drinking soda and after a certain point you look at soda and can only visual the 40g mass of sugar that dissolved in there.

I guess that's a big long-winded since I never felt like I had an addiction and not sure if this helps. But just evaluate if you think it's healthy, and go from there. However, the most effective way would be to delete you accounts completely and remove any way to re-enter.

It's a kind of FOMO - you want to keep reading more posts or watch until the end of the video. Rarely you'll find something wonderful, often you get nothing out of it. That's how Skinner boxes work: if you got a reward 100% of the time, it's less addictive, and even with diminishing gains, people still stay addicted.

Going cold turkey works very well. It's about as easy as quitting caffeine. And because the gains are, in reality, really low, it's hard to get back in.

Another option is to simply break impulse. Allow yourself social media on certain periods of the day, or if it's really urgent, force yourself to wait about 10 minutes. That makes it a bit harder to build up a habit of browsing when you want to procrastinate. This is also similar to why the Pomodoro technique works.

Don’t have those apps on your mobile devices and block them with your hostfile on desktop. If I really want to check something I have to modify the hostfile and I always put the site back in when I’m done.

But each person responds differently to these types of measures. You’ll probably find a few recommendations here so try all of them and see which is the most effective for you.

Think of what you want to achieve in your life.

Do being addicted to social media would help you reach that goal?

mostly I don't, but I've found that most of the time I mess up is when I have more than 30 min of unstructured time at home with energy.

Remove social media apps from mobile Use computer for social media instead of mobile Focus on health / food / books [hardcopy]

YouTube/social media in themselves are not bad. But when it becomes an addiction, then there's an issue. If they are needed for your job description not for learning purposes, you may not be able to completely cut them off. You can however as someone to install parental control (yes!) On your computer system and/or phone and lock it with a password. That way, even if the urge comes, you cannot help it. Accountability helps. But if it has nothing to do with the above, deletion may not still help. For example, Gmail accounts come with a YouTube account. If there's a way to disable the YouTube account while retaining the email, fine (I dunno). Yahoo! has videos too. You may want to go for email providers without the video option. Drawbacks means you lose those email accounts - not easy.

I'll go with the controlled approach, nonetheless.