I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Page I Visit (2020)
howonlee.github.io
howonlee.github.io
At first, it was as a futile protest, but then the inevitable addiction hunger kicked in. But this time, I had no choice to use the offical Reddit app.
The sluggishness of that app added enough latency, that my Reddit consumption is now non-existent
As someone who's only been using the "old" interface (https://old.reddit.com) on all platforms, I'm remaining blissfully unaware of the debacle.
(And if you are reading this comment on HackerNews, that means you're absolutely OK with the "old"-style interfaces).
Unfortunately, that means that my reddit usage time stays high.
I was daily Reddit user, commenter, and poster until the third-party app shutdown. I still occasionally browse /r/$city anonymously, but other than that I haven’t returned. I don’t miss it in general, but I am sad to no longer see inspiration on home improvement, software engineering, and hobby subreddits.
In chrome and firefox: Settings accessibility text size.
It's what I use on mobile but I mostly browse reddit on desktop. If I could only use mobil I would probably use it a lot less.
I would be hopelessly addicted to Reddit again if they had an HN-esque interface.
So browsing Reddit on mobile via a desktop website is clunky enough to have the same effect as above
I refuse to install the app. Reddit aggressively tags random posts as NSFW and then offers "anonymous" browsing if only I install the app. What? That's silly. And creepy. Going to old.reddit.com still works if there is something I want to see, but I suppose eventually they will close that loophole. And thus will end my reddit experience. I already got rid of my own account ages ago, so I only read, and that cut my interaction time way down. Force me to use the app and we're done.
"Request desktop site" setting in mobile Safari also works for me to bypass this.
IMO the quality of Reddit's product has never been a pillar of its valuation.
To a certain degree, I get it, but for a website that is built entirely on user interaction and input, not even giving the users the opportunity to weigh in?
That was despicable.
Looking back, I would have paid $5/month to own my posts and keep reddit what it was, but we never even got the option.
But now that I think of it, after just choosing to delete my account and go cold turkey, what keeps me from habitually returning is the same thing that would discourage me from spending time with friends I only drank with after having spent some time away, or what keeps me from moving back to my home town, or what keeps me from getting another car; not a lot changes, it's more apparent than ever nobody has anything interesting to say, and driving has always sucked. They're self-reinforcing cycles.
Krugman's observation, so often maligned and mocked for the past 20 years, to the effect that he was ignorantly claiming to have seen through something he had not even seen, is starting to look more and more prescient:
'The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! '
> This just feels like a beneficial dilution of the Internet. It feels like wine to the ancient Greeks, who drank wine but attacked the practice of drinking undiluted wine as tantamount to barbarism.
As a classics major this was always one of my favorite tidbits about ancient Greek culture, so I love seeing it show up elsewhere. It speaks to why I like weak drinks as well... I enjoy drinking, and weak drinks let me drink more and have a higher degree of control.
> Other possible dilutions
Interestingly, I'm already about 60% of the way there without doing anything as intense as intentionally slowing down my web. Something I consistently find myself missing is old-style forums, which I believe are definitely what I want, but aren't easy to get to "stick", so I'm openly soliciting recommendations for any which care about and and enforce quality.
How about using a Core 2 Duo Windows 10PC with 3GB RAM as your web browsing machine?
I still keep mine around, partly for that reason.
(I also wish the developers used underpowered hardware for their work. Then, for once, "if it runs fine on my hardware, it'll probably run fine on yours" mantra would be true — and latency would far less likely to be as atrocious as it is)
If anyone is curious to trying this, I highly suggest combining this with one of those minimalistic launcher apps. There are multiple options, one is called Dumbify on iOS (not free), but I've stuck to "Blank Spaces App" (trial, not free).
The reason I ask is because at this point, it's a trained impulse/habit for me to not ask people for things that would be quicker to search up myself. I've noticed a lot of people act the same way, but also people who lean towards asking others for everything, no matter how small a request.
Trying to understand what makes people operate that way, so I want to ask you directly - is it something intentional? I.e. is it that you might know in the back of your mind you could search it up, but it's nice to hear things from a real person, and interaction is never bad?
It's not the case for everything, but it's often enough that search is just not really my first resort, especially in the case of someone telling me they did a thing I want to do: I want to know their solution, because it works, not trawl through ten pages of "When people use their iOS device, such as an iPad, iPod, iPad touch, iPad mini, blah blah blah." to see if "grayscale" is the same as a "gray filter" and doesn't have to do with image display, etc.
I have 6h a day plus many hours on my notebook.
The hours I mentioned are on my phone only, not on all my devices (laptop & pc). I am not really sure if I should count in total hours spend on all my devices or on my phone only. At the moment, being away from my phone as much as possible have been the goal.
i was once in a medical emergency and was thinking, "it's enough to have it searchable". when in complete panic and terror you want it front and center, not hidden in menus.
Now I always pay attention to these kinds of things to see how can I get more control over personalised recommendations if I can't avoid them
I love that idea. I wish I had a big enough piece of forested property to try that out. Put the kitchen in one place, bathroom in another, and bedroom in a third, all five minutes walking distance apart.
I could probably still find ways to defeat it. But maybe it would help.
Mini fridge in the bedroom and just pee outside on the forest floor. :)
Look, it's not my fault I ate that tray of brownies after dinner. I'm just an addict. I need medicine and government intervention to save me from myself.
Then your friend goes home and drinks alone...
Addiction is largely driven by neurodevelopmental disorders (ADHD, ASD, MDD, sleep disorders, and many more), psychological disorders (anxiety, OCD, and many more), or both in combination. Most folks don't want to be addicts. At the heart of addiction is executive dysfunction caused by the above conditions, exacerbated by stressors. You treat it like any other mental health problem: therapy, medication, support systems, and a society that cares for its populace.
This literally helped me with my depression. Like most depressed people I surrounded myself with depressing things. I would read existentialist books and listen to emo music. Stopping that helped a lot unsurprisingly.
For some reason you think people with a disease have no agency or ability to cure themselves? Since when has this been the case?
If you imagine yourself to have no agency, you will always be a victim and always have different "diseases" that are uncurable.
There are some diseases that can be cured by effort on the sick persons part. There are some that can't be.
A heroin addiction is very different from a reddit addiction.
I took bupropion then prozac, saw real therapists, went to a psychiatrist. Yes, the thing that ultimately led to me stop taking those drugs was changing my mindset and belief system. I stopped exposing myself that made me sad or angry and put me deeper into the hole. I would even watch shows that I knew made me laugh when I started to feel sad.
Some can (for some diseases).
The overwhelming majority can't.
>Since when has this been the case?
Since doctor became an occupation.
That's to say, for the entirety of known history.
It's just unfortunately the case that ultimately you can bring a horse to water, at the gushing water well, surrounded by bottles of water, purified and fortified to a nutritional perfection, but if the horse itself doesn't want to drink, nothing you can do.
Until we have a mind-control shot, people have to ultimately fix their addictions themselves.
In a perfect world I absolutely agree with this sentiment.
In a practical world this is an outrageously useless platitude.
> It's no different than asking someone depressed
The difference here is there is a third party with a vested interest in keeping you as addicted as possible.
I took it not as a platitude, but as a call to change the status quo.
As an industry we went from treating engagement as an art form, to treating it as an optimisation problem. Along the way we got very, very good at it, at scale. While profitable, we now know that the methods used to drive this engagement are harmful. Many countries recognise this harm and have introduced legislation to limit or ban methods used on vulnerable groups, such as children.
It is interesting that we, as an industry, do not talk more about the harm we are complicit in causing. Somewhere along the way we normalised and accepted the idea that addicting features are desirable, and that we are not responsible for the consequences.
With all said, an industry is not an individual. You and I may care about this problem, but it is not clear how to fix it. At the very least, as individuals it would be good to avoid contributing to addicting features as a matter of principle wherever the opportunity arises, lest we become the equivalent of digital drug dealers.
This attitude of “I have X disease, so it’s not my problem to solve” is toxic and it’s the reason for rampant obesity and type 2 diabetes.
I might agree that addiction is a disease if we limit it to physical addiction. But colloquially "addiction" is used for what might be more precisely termed compulsive behavior, like spending hours on Facebook. This kind of "addiction" is more like self-medicating negative emotions, and negative emotions are generally telling us that we are "malnourished" in some area. So we might be FB-scrolling because we are bored (lack purpose, lack challenge, etc), or because we are lonely and want to feel connected. Until we figure out what FB-scrolling is doing for us and get that need met, we're going to feel "addicted" to FB.
You can't think your way out of cancer, a broken foot, or even a plain old bacterial infection. So why do we think we can do that for addiction?
To your second para, we don't know the root cause until we diagnose it. We don't know if it's physical, psychological (trauma), a hormonal/nutritional deficiency or a combination thereof. Right now society wants people to treat themselves without an adequate diagnosis and that's problematic on multiple fronts.
You want to not be an addict? Recognize it, take responsibility for it, and get sober.
I would never tell my friends with depression to just "think happy thoughts". But I have suggested to some close friends that they need help and they could start by helping themselves by doing all of the things that we know to be beneficial for depression: exercise, change in diet, spend time outside, stop ruminating on social media about their mental health issues, etc. And if they can't do that a qualified medical professional can help get them to that point.
Regardless of how bad someone's depression or addiction is, no one can make the first step towards healing except the sufferer. That said, a lot of support and compassion is crucial for a lot of people.
Every time I hear someone took their life because of addiction or depression I get sad. I know what it's like to wake up everyday hating oneself and loathing life. It's not a fun place to be.
If any of you out there are going through any of this, get help. Please, life on the other side of addiction is soooo much better. And no matter what you think, there will always be people that wished you were still around.
A friend of friend took his own life this past week. He'd suffered a traumatic brain injury after falling drunk off of a deck at a party. I have no idea if he was an alcoholic or not. And doesn't matter.
I'm rambling. Carry on.
disable all prefetch in the browser (which mostly server to tell google about links on the pages you visit).
use only quad9 dns.
enable all worldwide AdBlock filters (in uBlockOrigin obviously)
enable browser process sandbox (firejail if you're lazy) so it can only every access ~/Downloads and you have to artisanaly curate and move files beforehand.
disable JS globally on uBlockOrigin and see the site without it, and then think for a brief second before deciding if you will abandon or enable js on that domain.
there are so many GOOD ways to add that latency with a LOT of return.
No JavaScript by default. Each JavaScript file or snippet MUST be whitelisted FOR THAT DOMAIN. My whitelist has about 50 permanent websites.
Cookies vanish when I close each tab. I can whitelist specific domains that won't do that. I never accept third party cookies. I have about 5 domains whitelisted for that.
No browser history. I have around 5 bookmarks. My bookmarks bar is on the same row as the address bar, if I put too much bookmarks I loose address bar space and get uncomfortable, forcing me to clean it up.
My phone only have about 20 apps (including default ones) on the home screen. Single page, only the bare essentials. Everything else is browser based. I don't even have GMail, for example (disabled it). The only things that can notify me are calls, sms and alarm clock. I have zero permanent contacts (memorized phones of closer people).
Result:
- I can't keep logged in on almost anything. Most my accounts require 2FA. Huge discouragement for all kinds of things.
- Most of the web feels completely broken and miserable (because it is, all things I turned off are supposed to be optionals).
- My phone feels sterile. Text, clock, occasional Maps navigation, bank, pagerduty, etc. I hardly look at it.
I am still fairly addicted to YouTube though. History off, comment box hidden and recommendations hidden helps, but I still spend too much time on it. I once did the thing of hiding thumbnails, votes, description and channel name (only title and duration visible). It was good, I need to try that again.
Every time you visit a website, your PC will show you an empty page and in the background it'll click all ads for 8 seconds, then it'll switch to hiding all ads and showing you the content. Most likely, all ad networks will quickly block you for ghost clicks. But I wonder what they'll do next? Can the ad network report you to publishers' pages? Or will you still see the content but all ads will be missing because the ad network refuses to show you anything?
It currently lets you hide all the distracting elements in YouTube - one of the methods the author references. YouTube is my #1 time suck. From personal experience, this alone makes a lot of difference.
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/consuming-articles-off...
(HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739940)
And:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2024/Apr/reading-articles-via-p...
It's rare that I read anything other than very short articles via my screen. I haven't posted followups, but one thing you notice when reading offline is that the things that compete for your attention are quite different vs when reading via a screen.
When reading on a monitor/phone, you are (only) competing with other things on the PC/phone. Other apps, other tabs on your browser, etc.
After reading offline for a while, my brain realized that next to my pile of articles is a bookshelf with books I've accumulated for years, and not read. As a result, even though I continue to print articles to read offline, I read very little of those, and spend more time reading actual books. The quality is higher, as well.
Likewise, while I still listen to articles via the podcasting solution above, I spend more time listening to audiobooks instead.
I firmly believe that had I not gone the offline reading/listening route, I would never had read those books.
Does anybody know of a reasonably-simple way of either increasing the latency or throttling the bandwidth, per-device, with programmable hours? For example, is there any wifi router that lets you do this?
Get some activities for that evening organized first.
Edit: And there are some really insightful comments there. No surprise, of course. But worth looking back at. I already got some good advice for my HN disease. Somehow I missed this discussion the first time around.
I wonder if signaling a low quality network or device would change the behavior of advertisement injection during browsing?
[0] check the alt-text https://m.xkcd.com/862/ (2011)