My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll
alexanderell.is
alexanderell.is
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-
So you think the standard should be to keep a video playing even if one's scrolled past it? Are you insane?
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.
Personally I prefer it to pause, but I don't really watch many videos on Twitter
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.
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.
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.
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.
> and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood
Y'all, with your expert knowledge, know there's a dialog element in HTML, right?
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.
Endless scrolling is an explicit rejection of skeuomorphism.
Old UIs were designed exactly in the way you describe. And old people liked them. The traditional desktop experience has never really been dethroned.
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 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.
WHYYYyy
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.
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"
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.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/uploads/666d09080e20ea8...
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.
[1]: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/nsBaseDr...
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.
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
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.
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.
+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 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.
I'll often click and close out of a thread just by trying to get focus back on the window so I can scroll down, and its annoying as all hell.
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 :)
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.
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.
They take a larger cut but are much more hands on with the marketing, and this kind of project would be right up their alley.
Couldn't recommend them more after my own experience with them as a 21 year old fresh grad.
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.
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.
Plus, what else that is small form factor and can execute ssh scripts when triggered by a smashable button are there?
A giant plush enter key allows for smashing as needed.
I'm not sure this changes as you age, it certainly hasn't for me. :(
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.
Anything that pisses me off works. Usually that's fully logging out of an app in a browser and not using any mobile apps.
Would be interested to learn more about this approach.
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
Still have a 68k line /etc/hosts from the Steven Black list.
Most alcoholics do need to keep all the liquor out of their homes. This is a necessary but insufficient condition for many of their recoveries.
…
> 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.
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?
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.
I wish you hadn't clarified.
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!
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.
Host lookup should be O(1) and entirely in memory, so I see zero issue perf. wise to begin with.
I gave up my smartphone a decade ago. It's only "inconvenient" when people expect me to have internet in my pocket.
Exploring the option of getting a feature phone but do I really need to carry it?
I also tried a Linux phone but it wasn't very good in terms of usability and it soon became unusable due to hardware failure.
The HW failure was largely my fault because I didn't take good care of it.
The new PinePhone Pro looks very promising, looks like it can be a daily driver and I would like to try it out as soon as Mobian runs on it.
Edit: I'm not clear if Mobian runs on PinePhone Pro already? Looking at this link it seems it does https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2021/12/28/pinephone-pro/ but looking here, it seems we're not quite there yet: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro_Software_Releases...
How do you even mindlessly watch youtube vid after youtube vid on such a tiny screen?
...self-discipline does not come easy, especially if supply and demand are strongly in favor of distraction...
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
My mind has always craved the distraction of the infinite scroll, it's just modern social media has perfected it.
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.
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.
Oh, I just noticed something. HALT!
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
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.
So the consequences of inept, corrupt, and broken governmental systems basically.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The truth is that if I'm busy with something that I have interest in I can easily avoid any of these types of procrastinations.
More generally, making value judgements on the basis of media consumption is something to let go of, in my experience.
Or more bluntly, every generation complains about the next one, but most old farts don’t realise they’ve sleepwalked into the cliché.
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.
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.
Disagreed - one key aspect of the latter is physical dependance where withdraws are potentially life threatening.
It's similar sledge hammer approach to putting weed on class 1 or treating all wrong doings as 'sin'.
They are not the same things, should not be thought as the same nor treated the same.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdJAQZxJ6vY [1] https://youtu.be/JtUAAXe_0VI?t=224
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.
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.
No, it isn't. Only a pretty small fraction of drugs that can have physical symptoms of withdrawal have potentially life threatening withdrawal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
2 bottles of 5% abv beer has a little less alcohol than 1 normal sized glass of 13% abv red wine.
330×5% < 150×13%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?
175ml and 125ml are also UK standards but in a lot of places if you order wine by the glass you'll get 250ml.
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).
1: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alc...
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.
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.)
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.
Everybody is different.
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.
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.
7. Close the tab and go on a dandilion break.
Thank you, that's a good hidden feature.
I like this also for a similar purpose: https://hckrnews.com/
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.
From now on, it'll be mainly HN and books for me.
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.
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.
TikTok is ridiculously captivating. I just don’t use it because it sucks me in.
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.
Im just happy its not smoking or drinking. Would make life a lot harder.
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.
This is legal dopamine, and cocaine although a Selective Dopamine Reuptake Inhibitor (SDRI) is illegal. You choose.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Right now I’ve got one going in science fiction, autobiography, technical and… oh, another autobiography (I’ve been really into those lately).
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'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.
"Expeditionary Force" by Craig Alanson if anyone else is curious. I'll check it out, thanks!
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.
It won't be easy because you'll be changing some habit. But with time you'll learn how to appreciate books again.
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.
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
David Shenk Data Smog
Paulina Borsook Cyberselfish
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.
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.
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.
Whenever I am thinking of redownloading it, I think about why I deleted it in the first place.
Apollo for Reddit has a feature to disable infinite scroll.
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.
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).
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.
Coincidentally, I've written about this topic in more detail a few days ago: https://blog.miris.design/attention-atrophy
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'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.
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!
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)
- be pausable, allowing to reach the page's footer
- be resumable from the latest viewing point on page reload
- modify current URL periodically
- preload new data slightly before reaching the end of last page
- auto-pause at some point to prevent mental overload
- be switchable, in part to "Click to continue" state, in options
This is a big one.
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.
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.
I doubt any product of consequence would allow this to happen.
Doing your job as a rogue quasi-saboteur probably isn’t a better option than quitting.
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 :)
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.
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 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
- Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
- Mastery by Gordon Leonard
- Learning How to Learn (Coursera)
- Mind Illuminated by Culadasa
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt
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.
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.
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/
Good luck to anyone reading this! You can do it!
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
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.
Why would you interact with a company that believes that?
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.
Also, where does DDG have infinite scroll? I just checked (it's my default) and Firefox on Android shows a "More Results" footer button.
But yes, even if they did so, this is the important bit:
> DDG is likely neither hoping nor expecting their users to infinitely scroll through search results all day, without clicking anything.
- 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 blocked reddit on my home network. I can easily use a VPN to bypass this but the friction broke the habit. Next up is Hacker News
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.
It worked for me, its not interesting anymore.
You might as well ask why Google results paginate but you probably answered it (ads).
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Netflix: https://streamersworld.com/enable-disable-auto-play-next-epi...
Disable News Feed: - Facebook - Twitter - LinkedIn - YouTube - Instagram - Y-Combinator News (Hacker News) - Reddit - Github https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
You can wait a couple of decades to realize, or accept, that social media is bad for your health and everyone else around you.
Or you can quit now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Modern times.
* 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)
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.
It's very simple, my brain keeps asking me what's the point of increasing in integer in some database far far away.
But the answer is always that there's no point...
I really should stop reading stuff on my phone that requires scrolling.
It's infuriating!
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
No affiliation with the project, just something I've found really helpful.
There is a lot out there carefully designed to trap, hook or ensnare people.
Serious? If so, did you build it yourself, or is it a commercial thing?
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.
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".
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.
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.