My Struggle with Doom Scrolling | Hacker News Reader

My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

allthatjazz.me

343 pointssaeedesmaili320 comments

Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

What works for me is removing the antecedent completely by charging my phone in another room at night.

Now the battle is easier: Decide once a day to put it there, and track how many days you succeed.

For me that's a lot easier than having it in my pocket, where the Internet is always a couple lazy taps away. Now I at least have to walk to it if I want it, and that often "breaks the spell."

I finish work and chores hours earlier when my phone is charging in another room, without consciously doing anything else differently.

It really makes me want a 1980s-style cellphone with no screen and big physical buttons.

Second this.

I ended up building a nice charging station right near the entrance. It has storage for keys, wallet, and other things to grab when heading out. It has an abundance of wired and wireless chargers for all devices.

Then I got a dumb (but nice) alarm clock for the bedroom.

Then I noticed that a common reason to pick up the phone is to check the calendar. I ended up hanging a monitor on the wall, displaying the family month/agenda calendars. It’s read only, but it prevents a lot of device checking.

Cannot recommend enough restructuring physical reality to not have device on your person at home. It also helps the kids to put theirs away and learn good habits.

> to check the calendar. I ended up hanging a monitor on the wall, displaying the family month/agenda calendars

I hear the ancients had their own crude technology for this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(stationery)

You come off as snarky, but I kind of agree. We tried this first.

It turns out digital collaborative calendars are pretty great for us in general, there is no chance in hell I could keep the analog one up to date, so it was definitely worth having a screen on the wall.

This one will not display an invitation that was in an email you forgot to even open.

That sounds like a great feature to me

What alarm clock did you get? Curious

And great insight about the calendar. That's the #1 reason why I keep my phone near me (thereby facilitating all the unwanted behaviors)

Not the GP but I use a simple wake up light alarm that was a game-changer for me in winters when a blaring alarm yanking me awake to a pitch-black room was not a great way to start the day, especially before going out into the -40° cold to scrape my car off.

A half hour before the alarm goes off, it slowly gets brighter which I find simulates the sun rising enough to be a more pleasant waking experience. Plus I set the alarm sound itself to bird chirps, starting with 1 or 2 birds and growing into a whole chorus (I'm usually up before then)

I personally use the Braun, because it does not have a snooze function. Just one big button on the top to turn it on/off. Run on a single AAA battery for months. Only problem is no backlighting, so no way to read time in the middle of the night. For me that's a feature not a bug. https://us.braun-clocks.com/collections/clocks/products/bc12...

Not op but I just got a home-pod mini and just ask Siri “Hey Siri - set an alarm for …” or “Hey Siri - what time is it”. Added benefit of not having a glowing LED light in my room at night

Replacing that monitor with an e-ink device could be interesting

or buy a day planner for $3. or print a weekly TODO list and mark it up with pen/pencil

My main problem doing this is with certain 2FA (like Microsoft) forcing use of their 2FA app so I have to pick it up regularly.

I am currently working on a phone designed to reclaim the digital toolbox nature of the smartphone- access to maps, messages email etc, but with an e-paper display. There are some (albeit not so interface friendly) e readers with SIM cards, but I think there is great power in just having a screen that doesn't vibe with the oversaturated video and image based distractions we are so used to lugging around with us all the time.

One of the most interesting things about a hardware based restriction is that it entirely avoids the game of turning on and off apps or deinstalling them. Even if you want to respond to a message in your DMs in Instagram, it will work, but the temptation to pull up the Reels or For you page just isn't there when it's all black and white and choppy.

Mind you we are super early stages but the idea feels promising and by my own testing I have really found it to be a much more pleasant phone experience.

I'll post some links here if people are interested.

> I think there is great power in just having a screen that doesn't vibe with the oversaturated video and image based distractions we are so used to

Similarly (easier but less drastic) I’ve seen people turn their phone to grayscale mode to make the device less engaging and remind you that it’s a productivity device, not an entertainment device. On iOS you can do this through the Accessibility settings. (Settings > Display & Text Size > Color Filters > Color Filters on, Grayscale

It’s possible to create a (greyscale) color filter toggle, as well as time based or app open/close activation with the iOS “shortcuts” automation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W32pf_97onM

I tried grayscale for a few months but it changed absolutely nothing. Videos are just as good as it turns out.

I would give a try to an e-ink based smartphone if there was a good one. The only reason I got a smartphone in the first place in 2020 was access to maps/taxi/banking apps which would work with any display. But given the grayscale experience I wonder if you get used to laggy e-ink videos as well.

Android's Digital Wellbeing also has an option for Bedtime Mode to enable greyscale mode (along with do not disturb etc.). I find that really useful and it also has a sort of snooze option in the notifications if you quickly need to disable it for a short period.

Another option: a touchscreen, but with a mechanical backlight. What I mean by that is a little string you pull that spins a magneto that momentarily powers the backlight, maybe for 5-10 seconds at a time. This frees the battery from a major source of drain (hopefully comparable to e-ink) and also has a built-in limit to how much screen time you get. Eventually anyone would get tired of pulling the string. But it would be plenty for a map or sending a text or email.

I went thru the author’s struggle, too. Here’s what I came with:

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-take-your-brain-back

Are you thinking about a clear USP vs. the Light Phone II/III?

Are you working on the Mudita Kompakt or Minimal Phone?

>Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

You see, I've actually had some success with using Blocksite on my phone and blackholing things on my laptop by editing /etc/hosts. Of course if you have the access to put these filters in-place then you'll have the access to remove them, but the time it takes to fire up the blocker on my phone and disable it or to pop open a shell and type "mv /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.bak" is time enough for me to go "Am I actually accessing this because I care about some particular piece of content or am I just trying to plop myself into the dopameme stream?" It's not about 100% physically preventing myself from accessing these sites. It's about interrupting the flow. I used to have a problem where I'd be doomscrolling FB or TikTok in particular, realize that I haven't had any actual fun in about half an hour, close the app and exit the loop for a second, start looking for something else to do and then compulsively open the app again and start doomscrolling. Getting rid of the apps and having the web version default to being unavailable has made it so that I can still do the social part of social media with real people who send me content that I actually like and want, but I can't do the completely antisocial part of social media where robots send me content designed to piss me off and frighten me so that I interact with them and their masters get money.

I think there's one common element between our two approaches though: intentionality. Whether it's opening up a second app and disabling it, or walking into the other room to physically pick your phone up, there's an intervening step that allows us the space in which to go "Do I actually want this?"

> It really makes me want a 1980s-style cellphone with no screen and big physical buttons.

If you're using an iPhone, you can use Assistive Access to disable a lot of stuff, making it functionally simiilar to a flip phone:

https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...

There's probably an Android equivalent, but I can't speak to that.

The big downside that keeps me from using it is that you need to whitelist the contacts you want to be able to call/text, and can’t add new contacts in assistive access mode. Sad, because it otherwise looks perfect as a distraction minimizer.

A smart watch means you can still take calls with the phone hidden away or turned off. It's my preferred compromise.

I agree with this. No computer or screens in the bedroom, read a paper book; no phone - "but my alarm!" you cry - buy a sony dream machine at the goodwill for < $10. Go for a short trip outside the house without your phone, walk a few blocks, drive somewhere without your phone or GPS, buy a paper map - whatever; it's scary and so liberating! You will feel amazing self-sufficiency.

> Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

OneSec [1] is the only one that worked for me. It's quick enough that I'm not tempted to disable it, yet annoying enough that makes me think twice if I really want to open app X for the third time today.

Also it's just a polite nudge, rather than a full block, or condescending messages saying "you've hit your time limit for today" (that make you feel bad and make you want to immediately disable the thing in the first place).

Wish parental controls were designed with the same principles.

[1] https://one-sec.app/

It's as if no one realizes their phone as a monochrome mode, which can be set as an 'accessibility' shortcut via simple button press.

Black and white kills the dopamine cycle and brings color back to your real life.

I do this a lot when I am around my 6 month old daughter. We can already see a very clear difference in her engagement and curiosity when she sees a colored phone versus a monochrome phone. She grabs for the phone less and quickly returns to previous activity if she notices a monochrome phone.

I guess it depends, grayscale changed nothing for me, I barely noticed the difference.

Or you're talking about literal black-and-white, as in 2 colors no grey?

I like this. Testing the browser extension now and pretty happy with it (after tweaking so returning to a tab has a grace period). I was using StayFocused, which is okay, but too tempting to just disable it (and annoying if I need to access a blocked site for work purposes).

This is the only thing that worked for me as well. Installing browser extensions and distraction-blocking apps helps for a couple days, but ultimately I'd start cheating and would uninstall them.

Leaving my phone on the charger in the bedroom after 5pm completely removes the temptation. If somebody needs to reach me, they can call my wife or just leave a message for me to check in the morning. I've been doing this for several months and it's worked wonders for my attention span, my sleeping habits and my vision.

You can use lockmeout.online to ultimately lock yourself out of your phone for a given timespan (i.e. 4 hours). No cheating, no way to "disable" your own restriction once you set it active. Works by changing your unlock PIN to a random 16 digit combination and will withhold it for you during your preset time lock.

I think you meant to use e.g. (for example) rather than i.e. (in other words)

Same. When I'm home it becomes a "home phone" and stays on the charger.

I also keep it across the bedroom so I need to get out of bed to turn the alarm off.

yup. it basically becomes a ulysses pact with myself to attempt to make it so i can't just undo the restrictions i set up. what good are the blocking attempts if you can disable them when you get bored? you have to set them up with the intention and foresight that you will try to disable them

What about on call? Can it somehow wake you in case of an emergency?

Also what I do. Or try to do.

> What works for me is removing the antecedent completely by charging my phone in another room at night.

A half-measure for this would be to arrange your charging-setup so that you can't use and charge the phone at the same time. For example, USB cables long enough to reach the nightstand, but not long enough to comfortably hold the phone in front of your face.

Reading on an e-ink device has kept me somewhat sane over the past 12 months.

It's still very tempting to just "hop on reddit and see what's there" or "I'll just check bluesky for..." Then it's 2 hours later and you're angry and despondent.

I've found that having no social media apps on my phone has helped. It also helps to stick to just Firefox+ublock on Android and resist every time a site tries to install an app.

Try to steer clear of any sites with infinite scrolling and recognize the dark patterns that try to suck you in. One thing that was eye-opening was to visit reddit and see which of the stories in /r/all were "amygdala-bait"; rage, indignation, hate, fear, superiority, they're all bait on the hook to reel you in.

People on reddit write fake stories that push as many buttons as possible; an obviously wrong/evil antagonist, the ridiculous situations that only get more and more extreme to try to attract notice, the righteous moral superiority over the antagonist and their minions, etc etc.

Realizing that the result is the same, whether it's a fake story or "news", it's all amgydala-bait.

I recommend getting a Library card and reading. Read anything you like, but read!

I hear you about amygdala-bait. Back when reddit had third party clients, I used RIF and it let you block subreddits from showing up in /r/all, and so I blocked hundreds of subreddits. Anything that seemed focused on ragebait got blocked.

Made reddit's /r/all mostly about interesting new things or funny memes.

When reddit banned third party clients, I logged out and have never logged back in. I don't really miss it, even if it means I spend more time here or on fark. That was my last major social media site account, and I don't miss it at all.

I also unhooked from Reddit when the API changes killed the 3rd party apps. Was a helpful motivator. Only use it now when it comes up while searching.

Agreed. RIP Apollo. But I’m the better for it. HN is my only active social media account.

Yeah RiF was great software, it was asinine how we couldn't just buy a reddit API token.

My blocklist was several hundred subreddits long too :)

> People on reddit write fake stories that push as many buttons as possible; an obviously wrong/evil antagonist, the ridiculous situations that only get more and more extreme to try to attract notice, the righteous moral superiority over the antagonist and their minions, etc etc.

I essentially blocked every subreddit and specifically only open accounts now. I completely agree with you.

One of the best advices I heard is: don't let the algorithm recommend stuff for you.

Never click on the recommend for you page. Or doom scroll.

Any time on these sites, you should know what you are looking for. Never get on there just to browse.

> I've found that having no social media apps on my phone has helped.

This. The phone without social media basically becomes a practical tool for basic communications, maps, taking photos, and news.

In other words: boring, and much less likely to be picked up.

I'm really hopeful for e-ink or low-fidelity devices to help ween us off media addiction. Hopefully Nothing pursues something in that space since it aligns with their mission. Would love to switch most of my work screens to e-ink and only have 'normal' screens for explicit recreation time.

"amygdala-bait" is such a good, concise way of expressing the phaenomenon. I too try to stay away from infinite scrolling. I installed an extension to block youtube shorts, for example, as they offer no value to me.

I wonder if there's a "minimum viable connectivity threshold" in modern life - you literally cannot function below a certain baseline of digital access. You could model the failure of "delete everything" strategies as hitting against this hard constraint: banking, authentication, and basic services simply assume browser availability.

Maybe the key insight here is the pivot from prohibition to differential friction. By architecturing high activation energy for distractions (black UI, location blocks) while maintaining low friction for utilities, you've essentially created a "price spread" between productive and unproductive uses of the same capability.

I suspect we're seeing an inevitable arms race: platforms driving activation energy toward zero (think TikTok's frictionless feed) versus commitment devices manufacturing artificial friction. Perhaps the sustainable equilibrium isn't digital abstinence but rather carefully engineered friction differentials that respect our inescapable need for connectivity.

There was a great UX principle around alternative mechanisms or backups. You can't have two rolls of toilet paper easily accessible in a public bathroom because people will naturally use them up at a similar rate.

You need to make ONE OF THEM more inconvenient to use, so that overall your bathroom experience remains useful and convenient. (You'll see this often with a sliding door between two installed rolls of paper, usually with a visible window showing the amount remaining)

Introducing "artificial" inconvenience can be a very powerful usability improvement.

This is often framed in api design as make it easy to use it correctly and difficult to use it incorrectly.

> I wonder if there's a "minimum viable connectivity threshold" in modern life - you literally cannot function below a certain baseline of digital access.

Homeless people can't get access to govt. services if they don't have phone or callbacks in case they next in line to receive benefits. The following guy documents such problems that seem so obvious in retrospect.

https://www.youtube.com/@InvisiblePeople/videos

Thankfully there are already gap fillers here, like (US) govt programs and private charities that give out cell phones with prepaid plans. They're not perfect by any means, but there are people and programs trying to solve these problems.

Does everyone really mean doom scrolling when they talk about these issues? For me personally, it's definitely about dopamine and not about negative emotions, yet everyone uses the phrase doom scrolling - am I the odd one out?

For example, if I'm feeling stressed/anxious, I'll scroll/browse/distract myself to avoid the negative feelings. I'm not seeking them like doom scrolling says.

I don't think you necessarily have to be searching for bad news to be doom scrolling. The problem is with most of these services (this website included) is that even if you're trying to read limited topics, you'll still get bombarded with bad news

Take currently for example, every corner of the internet is saturated with US politics, even for those of us outside of the US. I just want to read about interesting technology.

Fully agree. I've been searching, in vain, for sites that just give me fascinating/interesting science/tech/..., and failed to find anything that doesn't get me in a negative spiral.

Would love to be proven wrong with an example :)

https://arstechnica.com/ (tech, space, science news, maybe avoid discussion pages to avoid spiral)

https://www.tomshardware.com/ (tech - computers, 3D printers, raspberry pi, somewhat consumer sales oriented)

https://phys.org/ (academia summaries)

https://arxiv-sanity-lite.com/ (arXiv papers recommended)

https://www.pewresearch.org/ (mostly interesting survey factoids, does covers politics, other negative inducement)

For me it describes the feeling I have AFTERWARDS. It’s like eating a lot of sweets. They taste great while you’re at it. You feel awful afterwards.

I understand the "doom" in doom scrolling differently.

You're right that in general it's about getting those random dopamine hits when something nice appears in the news feed.

However, after some time, you got a lot of the nice stuff and no exciting stuff appears anymore. At that point, you're still scrolling, hoping for a dopamine hit. It does not come because you are satiated, desensitized and the algorithm no longer has good stuff to offer you.

I get it here on Hacker News. After coming too often and scrolling too much, I already clicked on all the good links. All that is left is either not interesting, or stuff I've looked at before. I still scroll, doomed to find nothing. And yet I scroll.

"I have no content and I must scroll"

No. I think it's one of those situations where the word has changed meaning for certain groups of people, like a game of telephone, because dopamine scrolling and doom scrolling are semantically close. It's kind of like how gen alpha has a different view of what "preppy" means than what previous generations would have thought.

What does preppy mean for alphas?

Dictionary.com has an article about the current meaning:

https://www.dictionary.com/e/the-new-meaning-of-preppy/

> adjective used to describe someone who dresses in fashion associated with college preparatory (“prep”) school that gives the impression of old money

I thought it was about stocking life supplies in the basement though.

I personally use it to mean "there is bad news in the world and I'm obsessively watching it hoping for some glimmer of good news." If I use too much social media I just say literally that, too much social media.

AFAIK - "Doomscrolling can also be defined as the excessive consumption of short-form videos or social media content for an excessive period of time without stopping"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

It initially referred to spending too much time scrolling through negative content, e.g. bad news, politics. But the term has at this point completed a transformation to meaning any excessive time-wasting scrolling.

No matter how much we wish we could stop, we are doomed to scroll.

It’s one of the lesser levels in Dante’s Inferno. We are in hell.

I definitely associate negative emotions with my doomscrolling behavior. Angst is the best word I can find to describe the feeling. For me it usually focuses around some major news cycle (war, politics, catastrophes, etc.).

I believe it implies that it will inevitably result in your doom, because you won't be able to achieve much in life.

Interesting all the interpretations of the meaning of 'doom' in this context. I thought it was because the never-ending feed meant that you'd scroll until the end of time, which is called 'doom' (or judgement day or doomsday) in older literature.

Yeah, to me the issue isn't "doom" scrolling, it's just scrolling in general. By which mean mind-numbing consumption of low value content - auto mechanics showing off "you won't believe what my customer brought to my shop", car chases/crashes, dogs playing around doing silly stuff, trains crashing into things, all those fake "interview" segments where some guy is asking hot girls "what's your body count" or "what's your favorite position", blah, blah, etc.

Some of the stuff is genuinely funny and entertaining, and it would probably be OK in very limited doses. But I have fallen into a habit of (occasionally) starting out watching on ofe those things, and then continually swiping to the next one and watching that crap like a zombie until a hour has gone by. No bueno.

I feel the phrase came into common use during COVID pandemic, so things certainly felt more doom and gloom then. The connotation I think is with the type of negative content being consumed, which exasperates your own feelings.

I think doom scrolling is used to convey that you keep scrolling with no purpose or intention. It's that you want that dopamine or visual stimulation to keep going.

> For example, if I'm feeling stressed/anxious, I'll scroll/browse/distract myself to avoid the negative feelings. I'm not seeking them like doom scrolling says.

In history, what was the equivalent to this? I think a lot of the negative connotation is related to "it's new and therefore it's probably bad compared to whatever humans used to do".

Doomscrolling == Channel Surfing.

"Doom" doesn't have to describe the content. It could be your state of mindlessness as you thoughtlessly iterate through your standard set of net waypoints and the content that's spoon fed to you therein.

> For example, if I'm feeling stressed/anxious, I'll scroll/browse/distract myself to avoid the negative feelings.

Yes, that's doom scrolling

I think this means doom scrolling for many people too. I feel “doom”, so I scroll to distract from the emotions.

Yeah, unless not stated in this article, this is not doom scrolling. This seems more like an addiction issue, which is great that it’s being addressed. But it wouldn’t fit the definition of doom scrolling, which is an obsessive compulsion for searching of negative news.

Personally, this seems like an out of touch definition akin to Gen Z’s version of “dirty laundry”. When I first began to see doomscrolling appear in the digital vernacular it was almost exclusively in reference to scrolling with no end in sight, mindless scrolling, wasting inordinate amounts of time scrolling, etc. with no reference to the tone or themes of content consumed other than that it was short-form and ultimately unfulfilling.

But that is exactly how I expect a dictionary definition of a relatively new and tonally ambiguous term to present itself.

Out of touch? How so? And according to you what would be a more proper definition?

The difference I see with the example you give is that “Dirty laundry” is a metaphor, not a definition of a phenomenon.

The definition listed online in dictionaries reads as though it was defined by someone who did not really know what “doom scrolling” was - they understood what “doom” and “scrolling” were independently, so they made the claim that the “doom” in doom scrolling had to do with the themes and tone of the content, where in my experience online the “doom” in doom scrolling actually represents then endless and mindless consumption of vapid content. Existing in a state of mindless repetitive dopamine scrolls equivalent with being “doomed”, the stagnation of other pursuits for the nothingness of scrolling, I could go on. This is all my opinion of course.

I think the proper definition for doom scrolling has been mentioned multiple times by others in this thread and it would be something like:

Rapid consumption of mobile short form content for extended periods of time, often with no end goal in mind.

Others have done better than me, but that’s my two cents.

That's not what I thought doom scrolling meant. I thought it specifically referred to the existential doom of endless scrolling for a dopamine hit.

The doom refers to the news and info type.

Ugh. I don't necessarily do "doom" scrolling, but lately I have gotten drawn into wasting time on these various stupid "shorts" or "reels" or whatever, mostly on FB. It's weird too... for ages I was vehement about never, ever clicking on any of that crap on FB or Youtube (and I barely use Instagram at all and don't even have TikTok). But one day, somehow, I got suckered in by a thumbnail of a cute dog or something, and lately I've been finding myself wasting an hour or more at a time, idly watching stupid videos of low value crapola. :-(

This is a habit I feel like I absolutely have to shed. Luckily, a lot of the impetus to do that will go away when I ditch FB, which I'm going to do as soon as I get my new personal website/blog set up.

I finally broke wasting hours on YouTube shorts (and youtube in general) by turning off the watch history on my account [1]. It completely removes all videos from the "homepage" (including shorts from the sidebar). There are still shorts in the subscriptions page, but I think this is an acceptable tradeoff. YouTube for me now has just become who I'm subscribed to, which is a much more pleasant experience - there's an "end" where I'm finally caught up and can move on to doing something else. This is also for my entire account, so it's not something I can just disable from my browser bar or that won't work on mobile. I don't need to remember to set it up on a new device either.

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en&co=GEN...

There is a great browser extension for Chrome/Firefox called "Unhook" which allows you to selectively remove parts of the YouTube UI you find distracting. Personally I have shorts and recommended videos turned off.

https://unhook.app/

I've always found "doom-scrolling" fascinating because, for all of my addiction-prone traits and ADHD-granted hyperfocus, I never seem to get sucked into it. I've opened TikTok a few times for some random video I've searched and continued scrolling the next few videos out of some UX-driven guidance...then completely lost interest after 4 or 5.

Funny/Memey videos with low content value are entertaining, here and there. A rapid succession of them does nothing to the reward center of my brain. Or worse, the video would clearly be better as a longer form video and now I'm just frustrated (this is more common with YouTube Shorts).

That being said, I probably have YouTube normal-long form content running in the background 4-8hours out of the day.

That counts as doom scrolling to me.

If while I'm watching short form content like Reels or YT shorts etc, I realize that if you asked me what I watched 2 scrolls ago and I couldn't tell you- I'm doom scrolling.

This is the case almost every time I open instagram.

I don't have any social media and don't travel that often. When I went on a trip this past fall and saw a very high percentage of people sucked in to these short form videos at any idle moment at the airport and out at public events, I definitely felt existential doom.

Couldn't help but look at everyone the same as all the people on the space ships in Wall-E.

Yeah, it's pretty depressing. It also adds another layer of difficulty to stopping your own doom scrolling/excessive internet usage - with so many people ignoring reality in favor of whatever the algorithm serves them up on their phone, there are far fewer chances to socialize in real life, social skills atrophy, and the cycle continues. It seems like it takes even more concerted effort than ever before just to have a real social life.

I know exactly how you feel, 20 years ago I went on a trip and saw almost everybody utterly absorbed in a newspaper, or magazine. Some even had books. I couldn't believe all these people were wasting their precious time entertaining themselves instead of staring blankly at the wall!

Fair enough. I guess I was still thinking of "doom scrolling" as being specifically about scrolling for negative news. But from reading some of the other comments it seems that a lot of people feel like the definition has shifted. I can buy that.

No, the definition was always about the state of the person doing the scrolling, not of the content. For some reason it them changed, and now it appears to be coming back to the original meaning

I had the same issue at one point. I'm not ready to delete some of my social media accounts as they do bring me real value, so I ended up blocking all shorts/reels/etc. on the services I use.

For YouTube there is Unhook [1], which allows you to block shorts. For all other sites I just use custom uBO rules. Both options also work on your phone if you use a browser that can install WebExtensions (Firefox on Android for example).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

I was a heavy tiktok user for the last couple years, before uninstalling the app a couple months ago. It was a lot of fun, truly, but I felt the habit (and its side effects) going in a direction I didn’t like.

I still have IG and FB on my phone, and find myself impulsively reaching for those scrollable short videos whenever I have a spare minute. That format of “content” is just very addicting. I really wish I could go back 20 years to when smartphones were a thing, but there was a lot less to “do” on them. I don’t think I’ll be able to break the habit without a major reset, personally.

> when I ditch FB, which I'm going to do as soon as

As someone who has deactivated and reactivated my Facebook account several times over the years — just do it! Maybe it will motivate you to finish that other project if you have something you really want to share. But the whole “I’ll start that diet after the holidays” thing doesn’t pan out in my experience :(

> which I'm going to do as soon as I get my new personal website/blog set up

I understand why you want a replacement for updating friends and family, but that's a really effortful barrier you're placing in front of deleting Facebook. For this reason you will find it way harder. And it's already harder than you think.

Take any and all barriers away from ditching FB. They are your mind tricking you into staying.

Fair point. But it's not a pipe dream. I've already registered the domain name, stood up the VPC for the new site, configured DNS, installed Apache httpd, and configured the base VirtualHost. So progress is happening. All that's left is installing a blog engine (probably Roller), creating the landing page content for the static part, and create a cert using let's encrypt.

But again, your point is valid. Probably I need to set a "drop dead" date and tell myself "if this new site isn't up by Jan 31 (or whatever), then I'm killing FB anyway".

I used the SocialFocus extension to remove those kinds of features from sites when I was still weaning off the sites.

Removing the official apps was an essential first step. Then I progressed to using mobile web sparingly with SocialFocus to trim the experience.

That's called doom scrolling.

I thought doom scrolling was specifically about negative content, but now it just means any kind of mindless endless scrolling?

No, the original definition of the word always referred to the mental state of the user. Then the definition got hijacked somehow to mean "negative content"

I blocked anything to do with Shorts because of how addictive they are.

Is it possible to block just YouTube shorts and not YouTube?

I have watch history off on YouTube, if I go onto the shorts tab on YouTube it says "recommendations are off, we rely on your watch history...".

It still shows me shorts from subscriptions on the subscriptions tab, which I don't mind. If you scroll on them it shows you ones from other subscriptions before stopping and showing that message again.

In searches it does show shorts, but will only let you scroll through ~5 before that message comes up again.

I really like this setup because I can see my subscriptions shorts, which are generally fine, and it doesn't let me spend more than like 2m scrolling.

I blocked the right elements in Safari on iOS. I use Unhooked in Firefox on my laptop.

> lately I have gotten drawn into wasting time on these various stupid "shorts" or "reels" or whatever, mostly on FB.

Yeah, that's doom scrolling

None of those ways are sustainable. Not only because there are good reasons to use those apps, but also because there are times when forcing yourself to work isn't going to work. I mean, if I am sick, tired, and just not feeling like working, I would go out of my way to beat the system I installed.

What has worked for me is: one-sec extension [1]. The extension asks you take a deep breath and confirms if I still want to open the app. What I have realized is I don't want to completely do away with time-sink websites, I only want to moderate my behavior of pressing Cmd-T and opening reddit/youtube/twitter in the middle of work. I have increased the length of the pause to 30 second and I am actively forcing myself to actually take the deep breath. Such a pause is enough to knock enough sense into me and return back to work. I think such kind of gentle nudging is better than being overly harsh on yourself.

[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-sec-website-blo...

I love the onesec extension and I've often thought society would be better off if this were the way Apple and Google implemented their app timer functionality on iOS and Android. If you could just mark certain apps as addictive and be given a simple few-second prompt before displaying each of them, it'd stop or soften a lot of the addictive loops, I think. I use onesec app on Android solely to do this to YouTube, but the fact that it isn't native introduces some weird bugs, especially when opening YouTube links from other apps (which I live with anyway, but alas).

I think any app that tries to minimize your usage needs to have mays to moderately allow that usage. Black and white thinking, particularly at the beginning, seems likely to fail.

I think you have to just treat this like any other addiction.

I feel like I compulsively play chess online. I had not slipped up from 1/1 until last night. Then I really fell off the wagon tonight and played about 10 games.

It sounds ridiculous but I just have to put that behind me and get back to not playing online chess. I can play in person for fun but not the mindless waste of time chess has become for me online.

For me at least, it is always much harder to moderate than to go cold turkey with basically anything.

oof same here brother. chess is killing me. i go cold turkey but i come back eventually. one idea is to replace it with something and then ditch the replacement. or just capitalise next time there’s enough momentum built up for wanting to get rid off of it. i did do it before though, went not playing for months. but when it’s it’s back for good

There is a big opportunity for someone to make a all encompassing blocker. I am yet to find one. I think everyone is struggling with this in some way.

Anytime I get setup with a blocker it helps heaps. But I always slip back in. Every source of useful information (Reddit, YouTube) comes with toxic clickbait that you cannot disable.

I realized that my addiction is to the point that I cannot reason my way out of it. There needs to be a physical barrier.

A tangible example is sitting eating breakfast and the phone is sitting there and I so badly want to check cnn.com to see what is kicking off in politics.

Today I decided not to check it, and my imagination ran wild and I got really motivated about work. If I checked the phone though this wouldn't have happened and I would have ruined my whole morning searching for little dopamine hits.

Social media kills your imagination and injects someone else thoughts into your head. You want to let yourself think about things that you enjoy and motivate you INTRINSICALLY, not someone else because then you just keep needed to rely on their enthusiasm.

Almost every night I want to learn some stuff I've been trying to study, and I read unrelated stuff online instead. It's REALLY hard to battle this. The double-edged sword of "the world is at your fingertips"... how can I settle on just one thing? >_<

> You want to let yourself think about things that you enjoy and motivate you INTRINSICALLY, not someone else because then you just keep needed to rely on their enthusiasm.

Legitimate question for debate: how does this differ for social media vs other media? Apart from social media being more addictive, all media is pushing someone else's thoughts on you, in some way. I can imagine old folks would've made similar arguments against TV and books.

(I ask this but still 100% agree social media sucks)

Social media is rapid fire short cuts and videos.

Destroys our imagination and creativity. Instant satisfaction.

When we imagine things we are exploring a tree of possibilities and following the branches that give us satisfaction.

Physical barrier could simply be getting a timed K-safe lock box an sticking your smartphone inside it for a configured amount of time

The struggle is real. I wrote about this a while back: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...

What you are doing is "self-limiting" which is not very effective. The devil on your shoulder will always fight this - "don't tell me what to do!"

The wanting to not doom-scroll should be intrinsic. I know that right now, for obvious reasons, it's easier said than done.

"The wanting to not doom-scroll should be intrinsic"

For me, it is, but I would still automatically open Reddit or Twitter when compiling code, and then get stuck in a loop of looking at interesting and/or annoying stuff.

The solution was easy, though, I just put all of these sites, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. into my hosts file and pointed them to localhost. It took about a week for this automatic behavior to stop. Instead, I have a language learning app, so now I go through some flashcards while my code compiles.

Or open news.ycombinator.com. Maybe the next addition to my hosts file.

I do the same. There's also the bonus that, even if you want to quickly remove the block, it'll take a few minutes to apply unless you go through the bother of wiping the DNS cache.

This is just short-term vs long-term gratification and competing desires. That's not intrinsic, except insofar as newly formed habits are compulsive.

Choice and opportunity-cost is all "self-limiting", the only difference is perspective. It's better to have an additive-mindset, i.e. replace a habit with another that provides value rather than merely focusing on restricting something. This works for everything, including diet. In the words of Allan Carr, if you view your actions as sacrifice, you won't succeed.

I think the secret is:

a) Make your feeds more worthy and less attention grabbing by blocking anything that isn't one of your specific interests.

b) If you make good use of your time, you'll find doing stuff more interesting than scrolling.

I've written about this too: https://thisisjam.es/reflecting/on-information-diets/

This obviously doesn't work long-term because when it works, they change the algorithms, the UX, everything to hook you again.

I’ve actually found using screentime limits on my phone for specific apps (which is essentially self limiting) to be very effective. Once time is up, there’s only a single button click stopping me from continuing doomscrolling, but that’s just enough friction that I’m able to say “oh right I don’t need to be doing this”.

Chrome on Android also has per-site limits, which I've also found useful in addition to the overall app limit.

15 minutes on HN, then I'm out even if I still have a Chrome limit.

It's really interesting that we have to resort to little jails like this to get our attention back.

I like your solutions.

I do think having your phone in another room helps tremendously. I fight every morning to not take my phone into the bathroom for my morning ritual and waste 15-20 minutes of dooms scrolling.

Damn that's spot on. Thank you for sharing! Glad to know I'm not the only one struggling with this at a mature age.

Recently my coworker asked me if I could recommend any physical alarm clocks. He said that phone alarm causes him to pick up the phone the first thing in the morning and he wants to break away from this habit. I guess at some point the society as a whole will start fighting back.

My wife and I recently watched the HBO Dune miniseries (it’s great!) and I was thinking how bizarre it would be if people in that universe were spending their days passive scrolling the screen on their pocket computers.

Wall-E depicted a future like that, but I can’t really think of any other books or movies that imagine that kind of future for humanity. Surely this is a phase we are going through, right?

Fahrenheit 451 has the wife mindlessly listening to airpods all day, even while having conversations (requiring skill in lipreading to avoid interruption). The airpods are described as Seashells or ear thimbles, small radios with speakers that sit in the ear canal.

She also had a screen on every wall to watch content everywhere she looked. Fahrenheit 451 was prescient even if it was reacting to the times.

"Super Sad True Love Story" has that and some other interesting insights into potential evolution of existing media landscape, where watching full Narnia movie makes you movie buff and reading books makes you an icky old man. Book is fairly sad as the title suggests, but mostly due to world it portrays. Some of the trends were captures pretty well; some likely won't age that well.

I use a Garmin watch for alarms.

Frequent conversation:

"oh you have a smartwatch"

"no it's dumb in all the right ways, which is the point"

Notably I have notifications but can't act on them, which prevents me from picking up the phone just to check notifications and then be drawn into doing actions. YMMV.

Agreed. My Garmin fenix is one of the most useful things I own. It's just 'smart' enough in the ways I need it to be (mostly for exercise/health), and 'dumb' enough not to bother me with useless dopamine nudges from apps from my phone. It's a delightful piece of technology that improves my life in subtle ways rather than detracts from it or saps it.

> I use a Garmin watch for alarms.

I've tried that, but found them to be too easy to sleep through unless my watch wrist is very close to my head (without a pillow between it and my ear). The sound isn't particularly loud and the vibration is similarly shallow. Useful for reminder alarms when I'm awake though.

My current success is using the Amazon branded wiretap for alarms. Interacting with the dumb cloth-eared irritation sometimes annoys me into being awake rather than hitting the virtual snooze yet again, and it doesn't have the doom-scroll potential of my phone.

Can you explain what the "Amazon branded wiretap for alarms" is? I did some searches with those terms but can't really understand what you're referring to.

I don't think I'd handle a wearing a watch anymore, smart or not.

For waking up, something not technological but working 99% of the time for me: pets (or kids) though you'd want other reasons as well to have those beyond waking you up early in the morning...

Most of my life I've had cats or dogs and their internal clock is amazingly on time. They are actually smart and try different things if you don't wake up at first, adapting to their owner. They include waking mechanisms such as sound, touch, light pain, emotional rewards and possibly guilt tripping/punishment to keep you accountable if you fail to wake up. Birds can work too but I wouldn't recommend keeping a rooster in your bedroom for an alarm unless you're blaring-alarms-levels of hard to wake up and don't have neighbours or a partner, these guys don't have an indoor voice.

Point is you're then forced to care for the pet, wether it wakes you to go out, get food or get cuddles and bob's your uncle: your chances of picking up your phone and doomscrolling first thing in the morning are much lowered.

Same here. The most useful thing to me is it taps me awake instead of making a noise so my partner doesn't have to wake up when I do.

Same, especially important since my wife works night shifts.

if you can't act on them, don't you have to pick up your phone anyway? if it was a bit smarter you can quickly act on it, but using a smartwatch is so uncomfortable you wouldn't want to use it for anything unnecessary.

>if you can't act on them, don't you have to pick up your phone anyway?

Not necessarily. My smartwatch is basically a beeper. I see messages come in, then I mentally prioritize them. 90% of the time, it can wait at least an hour, maybe longer. It's conditioned me (and people around me) that instant reachability is neither necessary nor desirable. It makes it easier to focus on what's in front of me instead of constantly tickling a slab of glass.

It comes with other benefits as well. Not even the cheapest alarm clock has ever failed me. Sure, it can run out of battery power but the low power icon shows up months before it runs out of juice. Phone alarms on the other hand? I had them not triggering at all, or the vibration motor in the phone being stuck (?) and thus not working temporarily, etc... Hence I also prefer physical alarm clocks without software that have one job and one job only.

I've had strange time issues lately with iOS and macOS.

Initially I thought it was a TZ issue because of automatic location but the offset ended up being inconsistent with any TZ. Looks like a mix of RTC and NTP issue, the latter hiding the former when it works but revealing it when it fails.

Luckily I don't use alarms on my phone.

Not really relevant but I'm going to say it anyway. I hate devices that tell me about "low" battery long in advance of actually going flat, it simply trains me to ignore the notification and then it unceremoniously dies on me at a later time.

In this particular case it's my use of NiMH batteries, which have a different discharge slope than normal Alkaline batteries. So it's not really a "feature" of the device but rather a limitation of the type of batteries used. With my alarm clock the signs when to charge the batteries are very obvious (the LCD starts fading away so it becomes hard to read, but the device is still functioning perfectly for some more weeks even then - it just doesn't much power at all).

Its a difficult problem to estimate remaining battery life with alkaline batteries. Devices can only use the voltage reading to make estimates.

I got this for Christmas and quite like it: https://de.braun-clocks.com/collections/digital-clocks/produ...

$100 for a clock, lol...

Yeah bit pricey for what it is. Fortunately I didn't pay for it (was an xmas gift)

Yes we are trying to fight back, but sadly I'm starting to think it will only be the next generations, the ones not even born yet that will fully internalize the lessons of our mistakes.

I use a physical alarm clock, but what distracts me is I have to pick up my phone multiple times a day for stupid MFA prompts. It's so easy to have a quick check of an app.

I would really like a product for like £40 that's essentially a very small (4" screen maybe? maybe smaller?) locked down android phone that's entire purpose is to run 2fa apps (maybe including banks), this would not only separate my banks from my phone so I can flash whatever OS I want to it, solve the convenience issue of needing 2 big phones to do this otherwise, and stop 2fa apps from leading to distraction.

Siri home-pod mini “Hey Siri- set alarm for…” or “Hey Siri- what is the time”. Added benefit of now glowing LED in your bedroom and you can play relaxing sleep sounds if needed.

I went through similar time sinks of micro-optimizing my devices to try to game myself into not getting distracted. What finally worked for me:

- realizing I traded one waste-of-time activity (doom scrolling) for another (device/app fiddling to prevent the former)

- realizing that the clock is ticking towards ultimate death and therefore time is precious

- recognizing when I'm looking for a distraction and, rather than automatically giving into it, asking myself one question:

"Do I want to be thoughtful and disciplined with how I spend my time, or not?"

And then being honest with myself, listening to my answer, and respecting the outcome of my choice.

For me, I want to be a disciplined person. When I'm not, I let myself down. Happiness for me is not letting myself down.

It's not exactly Doom Scrolling, but something I do on my work laptop while at work: I seem to have adopted some kind of tic nerveux during my work as developer that manifests when I get sidetracked for just a couple of seconds. I automatically will start to open my non-work browser/mail or other non-work apps and get completely distracted again. Other in-browser blockers have never seemed to work, but since a couple of days the Focus feature has been released for Raycast on Mac. I find that the system wide animations and the 3 second button delay to pause the session actually work really well. Hope this helps someone.

I think about this all the time. I have tried a few different strats:

* ScreenZen on IOS breaks up screen time into discrete sections rather than a lump sum (e.g. 10 segments of 10 minutes each) making it much easier to know each time I've used a segment ("okay, that was ten minutes, do I want to go again?").

* Utilizing focus modes aggressively. DND and Sleep mode can be used aggressively to limit notification spam. While I'm at it I regularly go through my notification list and prune any app that has no pressing need to notify (or demote it to the daily summary).

* physical separation: my friend put me on to this, which is if I can do something without my phone, I'll consider it. Yesterday I drove to the store and back without my phone. Not feeling that weight in your pocket and not having it there to fill your time is a powerful experience. I have considered paying the Apple Watch cell subscription (which I always considered useless) because it means I will be reachable without being scrollable.

* I'm going to try that Foqos app posted here yesterday, I like the idea of physical blocking mechanisms so we can take the upgrades of phones, like GPS and chatGPT while leaving the poisonous bits at home.

This is one of the y biggest personal initiatives ever since I took my screen time stats and calculated I was losing about a day a week to my phone. My life is getting 14% shorter, given to trash I don't really enjoy.

I am so f-in glad I deleted facebook like 10 years ago and never hoped onto anything else. I only hate that I visit HN every few minutes, when I get bored at cagie.

But apart from that, just don't use social media. It's really as simple as it sounds. The only hard thing is to find something to fill the free'd up time with.

The other hard thing is finding out that you now find out personal relationships are hard work. Quality relationships were always hard work, but with social media it was way easier to keep shallow relationships. With social media gone, you find out you need to put in way more effort to keep those valuable relationships going (and find out the hard way which relationships weren't valuable at all).

What is cagie?

Presumably work, as in "wagie wagie get in the cagie".

> The only hard thing is to find something to fill the free'd up time with.

Like going outside, doing trips, enjoying nature? Oh boy...

Yes, that's kinda obvious, but actually doing that and not go back to your old habits is hard. For some more, for some less

A little over a year ago I gave away my flagship samsung phablet and bought one of their flip phones, in an attempt to change my habits by consciously making myself doubtful/anxious about the longevity of the flip phone's infamous hinge. The idea was that the little front screen would do everything that a semi-dumb phone replacement could (notifications, camera, calls, timers, calculator, calendar), but I'd also have a 'real smartphone' whenever I needed one - it's just that with this one, using it came at a cost. Every time I'd go to use the big screen I'd remember there was an anxious moment that stood in the way, and the paranoia would make me just anxious enough to question whether I really needed to do what I was about to do.

It's been about 15 months, and I haven't really had to compromise or sacrifice anything: I haven't uninstalled any social media apps, my banking apps are all still there, I have contactless payments on hand, etc.. However, I can say with absolute certainty that my habits have changed _drastically_. Interestingly, I'm not even hesitant to use the phone when I need to, I use it all the time - but when I use it I now use it intentionally, and very briefly; gone are the days of catching myself somehow scrolling through instagram just because 5 minutes ago I opened a whatsapp notification from my mum. It's like night and day, and what's more I feel like I barely had to try.

This is obviously sample of one anecdata, but I'm genuinely surprised at how successful it's been. A real 'life hack'.

(And no I don't have any samsung coupon codes nor do I particularly care for them as a company. Worth mentioning though - the hinge on the zf5 is still really solid 15 months in)

I do the same thing (Motorola Razr rather than Samsung), and I've found that working on the smaller screen means I don't get sucked into things as it's useful for quickly checking on a limited set of apps but doesn't lend itself to a "open app => consume => next app" cycle.

It's really too bad that you can't disable YouTube shorts. I like watching YouTube videos on my phone, but the shorts is too tempting and I find myself wasting so much time with totally useless content. I'll probably have to remove YouTube entirely.

If you're an android user, try the Revanced App. I use it to eliminate all ads and enable SponsorBlock on YT, but it also allows you to customize a lot of the experience. You can turn off shorts by[1]...

1. Open YouTube ReVanced

2. Tap profile picture (top right)

3. Tap Settings

4. Navigate to ReVanced > Layout

5. Tap "Shorts components" at the bottom of the list

6. Enable "Hide Shorts in feed"

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/156lw72/the_be...

This may not apply to you, but the way I consume YouTube is by turning off history and subscribing to the creators I want via RSS. That way I seldom even remember Shorts exist; they simply do not appear for me.

If that wouldn’t work for you, consider removing the app and accessing YouTube via the browser. I would be surprised it there’s not an extension or blocker which can disable those.

I do this as well but find it a bit of a pain to add/remove sources since YouTube doesn't offer any easily accessible RSS feed. Wish there was a way to sync subscriptions with the YouTube account but at the same time I would never allow third party access. I refuse Google login on third party sites.

> YouTube doesn't offer any easily accessible RSS feed.

Every feed reader I tried auto-detects the correct YouTube feed URL if you just give them the channel URL.

As latexr said you can disable watch history. This means there is no home page (even when it should have known my interests, my home page was awful so this isn't so bad). You don't get watch-progress memory on videos, which is simple to adjust to. Recommended are less targeted and I get a lot of the typical ragey youtube stuff but it is mostly half relevant. I no longer watch any shorts which I kept clicking just to "see how bad they are" until it became a habit. And the UI keeps pushing it... If youtube makes the no-watch-history method not work, I'm just deleting the app and waiting until I'm bothered to configure revanced.

If you're on desktop, download the Chrome Extension called "Unhook". It lets you hide stuff like Youtube Shorts and makes Youtube less impulsive. Very helpful for focus.

I found it very easy to avoid YT shorts when I realised it's just clips of youtube videos that I've already watched.

The only thing that ever really sucked me in like that was Tumblr. The stigma-less repost culture where most of what you encounter is reposted made it feel like I was building something by being on there and reposting things. It really just tickled the right part of my brain. My wife and I would spend literal hours every night scrolling Tumblr.

I've never really gotten anything near that level of enjoyment from another social network.

I still go on from time to time but knowing my friends are never going to see my feed kind of discourages major time investment.

Here's my current status:

* Facebook

  1. Step one was to delete the app, though there was a bit more friction, I still found myself opening Facebook in (ios) Safari
  2. Announce to friends and family I was deleting my account (yup I'm that person).
  3. Delete account
  4. Success!

* Twitter

  1. Delete account, Elon did me a favor here by blocking access without an account.
  2. Delete second account,
  3. Links into twitter are still a problem, but I spend possible 2 minutes on the site per week tops.
  4. NEXT STEP: Block www.twitter.com, www.x.com, etc. from all devices personal and work via /etc/hosts, pihole, custom dns, etc.

* Reddit

  1. FAILURE

* Instagram

  1. Delete app,
  2. NEXT STEP: block instagram.com from all devices

News

  1. Block news.google.com from all devices,
  2. NEXT STEP (WIP): Block all news sites from all devices

Hacker News:

  1. UGH

Recommend olauncher, a text-based launcher, in lieu of default:

1. No icons -> less temptation to open another app

2. Faster because you only have to type part of the name, eg typing 'po' opens Spotify (for me)

3. Probably less resource-intensive since we're just rendering text

i use such a launcher and still do,

1. Unlock Phone

2. Swipe up, type "ti"

3. TikTok opens

4. Let the doomscroll commence

I do love these simple launchers, though!

Same here, "chr" and "yo" are at the reflex level by now

I wonder if we can have a continuum of "doom scrolling".

For instance digital crack (tiktok )<->X/facebook<->hackernews<->wikipedia<->"soft" novels<->poetry<->james joyce<->legal texts

At some point any information stream can become susceptible to self-reinforcing doom scrolling. Reading novels is probably better than tiktok but could easily become unhealthy. I mostly weaned myself off of traditional social media but find it very easy to have a quick glance at hacker news and notice hours have gone by.

Chuckled on “legal texts”, imagined a person so desperate and not getting any endorphins from “usual stuff” anymore, so only proprietary and very expensive CAD software’s EULA reading makes them “high”.

Quitting is easy. I just remember the Before Times and how peaceful my life was when I gave zero fucks about outrage headlines that I couldn't do anything about even if I wanted to.

I wrote up my own version of this idea in "The smartphone app audit."

https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit

If the idea of auditing all your apps seems daunting, you can take a look at how I did it in bulk by using screenshots of my app launcher screen, then OCR and LLMs to help me do an initial pass at categorizing them. That let me do one quick bulk cleanup.

I found that it's better to simply delete apps and keep the total app count on your phone low, rather than use the various parental control / digital minimalism / Freedom.to style app blocking ideas.

Removing browsers from my phone never seemed like an option for me, but even so, removing all the addictive apps really reduces doomscrolling and other mindless scrolling a good bit.

Lately, I also put any newly installed apps in a "Purgatory" app launcher group and if I notice any of them having addictive qualities, I uninstall them. I did this recently with the Bluesky and Discord apps, for example.

This post randomly gave me an idea for an infinite scrolling site that may help break the cycle while still being fun.

Imagine a TikTok / YT style video scrolling but after each video you have to swipe progressively more times to get to the next video.

By the time you are swiping like 30 times to slowly inch to the next video maybe people would naturally stop.

There would be a new little device that is a fidget spinner with a little gummy on the side as a finger replacement.

Everyone would have one. :D

In my experience, working on the triggers had the biggest impact. Yes deleting the apps helps a lot, but so did removing the things that made me reach for my phone in the first place: notifications and badges. My phone is in do not disturb mode 90% of the time. In any case, I only allow notifications from WhatsApp and my bank. There are no feeds anywhere; not even the weather. I aggressively disable anything that calls for my attention. I add distance between me and the apps I check mindlessly, like Gmail. All that's left is Hacker News, and Reddit with no subreddits on my front page. Removing the default feed from these websites helped a lot.

Basically, picking up my phone is not rewarding anymore. I'm many steps removed from anything fun. It's enough to not think about it.

Deleting apps doesn't work for me because there are topics I actually want to follow on places like X (e.g. ML / AI news). As soon as I reinstall, it will easily suck you in again with some distracting emotionalised / partisan current event.

There is an app called ScreenZen that was immediately effective in breaking my habit. It made me use social media much more consciously.

My go-to "social media" page has been GoodReads for a while, and I don't see a problem with it – not only because it is rewarding reading books, but because it doesn't have dark distraction patterns and is much more like the mid 2000s internet. Half my family is doing the reading challenges now.

Try to find the news for things you’re interested in on other platforms. A good subreddit will usually have all you need, but it’s not endless and it’s not actively trying to „upsell your visit” feeding you other topics (at least in the old interface).

It’s reasonable to want to keep up to date with some things. X is just not the best platform for that.

It's great actually. Nothing else like it.

"- Delete content apps" This is key.

"- Delete the browser from the phone." This is hard because the browser has other uses. I've found similar results by just signing out of any social media accounts on my phone.

Reddit is useable without being signed in, but just barely. It's certainly not as addicting as it is with an account. Twitter doesnt let me see anything without an account. Same with TikTok. I went ahead and deleted my accounts entirely but you can also just make the password hard to type and remove it from any password managers so its difficult to sign in.

This has pretty much cut my Reddit time from an hour+ a day into 5-10 minutes a day.

I've been trying to switch from scrolling to reading my Kindle.

I aggressively curate who I do follow; on Twitter, I mainly use lists. At this point, I'm mostly just interested in AI news. I'm also subscribed to an AI newsletter, but it isn't as tightly scoped as my set of feeds.

I guess I could apply AI to this problem. I'd like a tool a bit like Yahoo Pipes, with email and Twitter integrations, and LLM transformation boxes for summarizing and making decisions.

I should probably look at https://github.com/huginn/huginn

I was trying to do that, then stumbled on the api costs for accessing anything other than your own posts. In the end, I don’t care going on Twitter again.

The only thing that has worked for me is to uninstall all of the social media apps. I still use some of their mobile web interfaces, but the friction of mobile web is enough to stop a doom scrolling loop.

The nature of programming means that there are a lot of small gaps while you work, for example as the code is compiling and deploying. These short breaks are not enough to pick up any long-term activity, so therefore the small bites of social media end up looking very appetising.

Other times you need to search for specific information. When you already have 25 tabs open, it doesn't seem that bad to open tab number 26.

The best solution that I've found was to work on cafés and libraries: places where I can easily let my eyes wander between blocks of focused work.

Having some music on helps me with this too.

I've done something similar recently..

I have always deleted apps off my phone but still suffered from access via web.

My solution for X is to logout. This is enough since un-authed has no content and the login screen is enough to stop me.

Then for Youtube/Reddit I blocked on personal and work laptops by adding to /etc/hosts file. If I still had access to un-authed Youtube/Reddit homepage I would still find a way to enjoy it. Also Unhook is too easy to disable for me.

Then for my iPhone I have added both Reddit and Youtube to restricted sites via the iOS settings.

Works well so far.

If you are on Android you might not want to delete Google Play Store. It provides services which many apps depend on. I have made use of a couple of old 8Gb Android phones and I found that was about the minimum.

If you factory reset and just allow enough time for Play Store to update, I found if you are quick you can switch off auto update on all the other apps (which are installed as stubs only) and end up with enough storage to be useful, yet one which can run other apps successfully.

I've tried various forms of this.

As long as there's a logged in session somewhere, I have to have various tricks and extensions on my browser to manage things.

Most have been only varying degrees of successful, often ending up in me just disabling the feature whenever I want to get my fix.

The most successful iteration I've found so far is keeping these apps uninstalled from my phone, and using https://one-sec.app/ to forcibly install a barrier between me and the site.

It's not too much different, and the wait time can be customised. You can still just learn to wait through it, but importantly it also has an "intervention" feature that will block you off after a chosen time period and re-prompt you if you want to stay on.

It's been quite flaky on Instagram on desktop, but it's been very useful for Youtube on mobile (which I keep to play videos in the background sometimes).

Otherwise, Unhook for Youtube on desktop also helps blocking things like the home page and shorts.

I haven't found any extension for LinkedIn that works for blocking the feed (or at least suggested posts), and Facebook ones are sporadic in which work for me or not.

Pihole is a simple effective solution for blocking right at the source, your incoming network connection. No need to faff around with different apps on different computers, etc. It will block on your entire network.

If you want to double (or triple) up on it, add the sites to your hosts file and send them to localhost and add them to your ad blocker and block the html tag. Now you've blocked all the sites in question 3 different ways.

The downside here is that a smartphone will happily still visit those sites whenever you wander out of full wifi coverage

Fascinated by everyone’s take on what the “doom” in doomscrolling means to them. One of those weird phenomena where someone is saying this word and someone else knows exactly what they’re talking about when they say it, but the two parties have different definitions of the word that just happen to exist peacefully with one another.

I'm currently reading Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism". Something about his approach that I really appreciate is that he doesn't just recommend abstention and ways to disconnect from social media.

His approach is on the one hand to focus on other rewarding offline activities that are creative or which help grow deep in-person relationships. And on the other hand, to engage with technology in specific ways when that usage is justified by being the best way to solve a particular need.

For an example of the latter, one suggested practise is to always keep your phone on do-not-disturb (except for certain important contacts who may genuinely need to phone you in an emergency) and then to triage any notifications only at specific limited times of the day. Avoid the buzzes and pings, but carry on conversations when you aren't trying to focus on something else.

I used to have an issue with smoking too much weed during the day (I still do).

The only thing that helped was the KitchenSafe / kSafe.

I put my phone in the kSafe during pomodoro sized chunks. If there is an emergency, I can still do calls from my apple watch/ipad. I keep my ipad in my closet so i don't use it for doom scrolling.

It is funny because I random found out that the ksafe got popular from a sharktank episode where the inventor was advocating for controlling binge eating lol.... I found that funny because I've only heard it propose to quit smoking/vaping nicotine/weed.

Still figuring out the interface for other things. When I am at work, social pressures help. Still figuring out a way to prevent myself from opening incognito on my mac laptop and opening hackernews / reddit.

My strategy is to do a lot of "Not interested" curation about any negative content, like ragebait, thirstbait, politics, etc.

This leaves mostly meditation and health advice, spiritual and religious uplifting content, cute animals videos, sweet things to share with friends, etc.

I used to do this with Reddit but lately more than half of my feed is their recommended posts which include a lot of negative or ragebait content. Maybe a plugin can help with this

With Reddit, I unsubscribed from all the defaults and only subscribe to small, specific subs, which I browse via the Home page and via /new. If I see anything undesirable, I unsubscribe right away. It is a pretty good experience as of today.

I used to do that but I can’t keep up! The amount of bait (particularly rage bait and fulmination bait) has gone up considerably on social media, even in the last 2 years.

I blocked a lot of social media sites on my home network to help ease my addiction some. Especially Reddit. I found the mornings I was on Reddit before getting out of bed my mood suffered. I still need to have them available to communicate with some people and for research. But now, in order to use those sites, I either need to leave the house or disconnect from the wifi.

Functionally, this seems to have helped a lot and usually the only time I end up on social media is when I am killing time waiting while out or when I really really want to look at something specific, and only on my mobile device. It seems that making it slightly more inconvenient worked on me without me having to give them up entirely.

as a former sysadmin, dont mix work and personal profiles on same machine. treat your machine as not your property, please, unless you have a byod policy - it is simply bad practice. i understand the realities of super federated logins and am not innocent of some of this behavior, but if anyone interested cares to go digging, they probably can figure out exactly what you’re up to on a work device and that’s just not a situation I think people should be willingly entering into when you can just maintain separate, semi-isolated devices and accounts. if for some reason someone is making or encouraging you to use personal profiles for work stuff, treat that as a red flag.

This pretty much. The last time, I had a work machine, the only data there was my picture profile, that I needed for setting up account. I also needed to log in my github account. Apart from that, anything else I needed to do can be done on my personal computer or my phone.

I had reasonable success deleting Safari from my iPhone. I still need to hit weblinks sometimes, but iOS does a reasonable job at providing a basic web browser for those (no URL bar so I can't then waste time on it).

Of apps, I am currently using ScreenZen, which links into ScreenTime to provide a warning message and delay before I browse a customisable list of websites/apps. (HN is on it...) It seems to work better than OneSec, though it isn't perfect.

[update] Another thing I find useful is to regularly measure my screen time, and have a manageable goal for how long I spend. That's more productive than hoping to go "off-grid" forever.

> I had reasonable success deleting Safari from my iPhone

How?

Weird — it seems that "doomscrolling" is used here just to describe regular social media addiction.

For me, "doom" scrolling is what you do when there's actual doom. When there's a terror attack and you don't know if you your close ones are safe, when there's a coup, when another war in one of your countries starts. You're horrified as hell, but you can't actually do anything useful, so you are glued to the "scroll": news, hearsay, and all the images and videos that you really should not be looking at for the sake of your own mental health.

I built an app (https://usedigest.com) for this exact reason, I couldn't stop with the doom scrolling. I wasn't particularly looking for anything either, just swiping and swiping... constantly reaching for my phone even when I'd just stop to pee for 30 seconds I'd find myself taking out my phone and swiping. The app I built aggregates content from all the sources I was looking at and just sends me a daily summary. I've been able cut way down on this addiction.

My thing about doom scrolling is that if I’m scrolling for very long it likely means I’m not running into much worthwhile content…

At that point I’m just annoyed and I quit.

I wonder, are people doom scrolling for a long time seeing a lot of content they LIKE?

We need an app that starts a user defined timer when I open a doom scrolling app. Unless the timer reaches 0, I cannot use the app. So for example, in order to browse reddit, I need to wait a minute. Delayed gratification.

Other people here have recommended such browser extensions. E.g. "one sec" and LeechBlock.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is LeechBlock for Firefox. With it, you can set up site block lists that will either never allow access or allow access after a period of time (60 seconds default) and on a schedule.

I have found this helps because when the motivation is that dopamine hit, the delayed start generally gives me enough time to think, "I should be doing something better with my time."

Edit: of course you can reconfigure and delete LeechBlock, but if you are committed to reduced scrolling it helps. (Obviously I haven't been able to do it with hackernews yet.)

My current solution is the freedom app. I have all social media blocked during work hours and after 10:30 at night. I am mostly susceptible to reddit, twitter, instagram reels. I track some issues on reddit & twitter that I am genuinely interested in and impacted by. Freedom will block on the phone and laptop.

Last time this didn't work because I kept turning off the freedom app. (Sigh.) This time I seem to be holding the line though. I'm getting more done and feel better.

I've adopted the habit of always having an e-book on my phone, and when I crave a distraction, I read a few pages instead of opening reddit etc. It's been great.

Does Doom Scrolling apply to resources like GoodReads or IMDB? I think of it as endemic to feed-based social media, where you have an endless stream of algorithmically selected content. Maybe there's a way to engage with those sites like that, and I just haven't discovered it myself. Anyway, it's his project, I'm not saying he can't do whatever he wants, but for me, that'd be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I replaced doomscrolling, a passive and empire-led activity, with active playing chess. I play correspondence games so a minute or two of engagement, per active match, fits me just right any fit time of the day.

I don't at the slightest feel bad about it.

Tell them I sent you: https://www.chess.com/?ref_id=7467288

where your username

The Lightphone is all about making the phone a tool, minus infinite feeds. I've preordered a v3 and am very much looking forward to its arrival. My Android can live on my desk for 2fa apps, etc. If I want to consume the internet, I'll do it using nice screens and a real keyboard. Doing anything via a mobile is less good generally, just more convenient perhaps.

remember - the light phone is a product. they’re selling you the idea of simplicity, not the reality. if you don’t fundamentally change your life or behavior, i guarantee it’ll be sitting in a box collecting dust within 6 months.

as soon as you’re out & about and need an uber, or maps-based navigation to another location, or to transfer money from one bank, or even to look up an important tidbit of information - the phone number of a local business, for example - you’ll yearn for the power of a normal phone.

the answer is not buying things - it’s changing your behavior. put your phone in another room. stop using it at night. purge harmful apps one by one. focus on changing your _behavior_ instead.

the lightphone is a heavy , worse supported, worse integrated, less featureful wrapper around android - do you really want to pay hundreds of dollars for that?

i have firsthand experience - i fell for the lightphone, and it’s sitting in a box next to me.

what actually worked for me was:

- setting my phone to greyscale

- disabling ALL notifications except phone calls

- charging my phone in a different room at night

Maybe, I'm not so sure. The pre-order was cheap enough, it will sell if I don't get on with it. It alleges maps with GPS, ride-share isn't something I use or has much of market in these parts. Banking isn't something I need or want in my pocket. A calendar is most important. I agree the answer is not buying things, not being spied on (less spied on?) to perpetuate an ad-based economy is a feature to me. I just want my attention back, the trade-offs don't seem to have much value. We'll see. :-)

I really want a modern BlackBerry where I can make phone calls, send messages, check emails, use maps, use NFC payments, and occasionally play brick breaker. I don’t need the entire internet in my pocket. I can sit down at a computer when I want that access. I just need a good communication tool that’s lightweight and has a battery that lasts for days.

I am struggling with this myself at the moment, but I find that just doing something else entirely - away from my phone or laptop - is way more effective than deleting apps. Activities like buying groceries, cooking, going for a walk etc all create a sensation when I'm done with them, that I enjoy a lot more than what I feel after an hour of scrolling.

Very true. Filling the time with non-scrolling enjoyable activities, particularly IRL is effective. It's like eating healthy - rather than stressing about what to remove from the plate, think about what you want to add to the plate and enjoy it.

For Android folks, my friend built an app to limit / restrict the apps and websites your phone has access to. It's essentially like workplace fleet management, but for yourself.

I have a little more personal self control, but found his technical implementation pretty neat!

https://limitphone.com/

It not being able to uninstalled is a catch 22. I understand why it is uninstallable to prevent people from breaking, uninstalling it and getting around it but I also don't trust the app and it being uninstallable sounds like a risk.

Limit Phone Dev here!

Yea I get it, I have similar feelings about installing such a privileged app on my phone.

You can remove the app (with a delay, so it doesn't defeat the controls!).

I'll make this a bit clearer on the site.

I wouldnt say I am someone who struggles with doom scrolling but I do share how easy it can be to fall in a trap. I think its just easier for me because my smartphone is really for messaging and calls.. with some niceties of discord. I refuse to have TikTok or use typical social media on my phone.

To clarify, its not that "I refuse" its just I find little incentive to. On top of this, I do not view my smartphone as a replacement for my laptop. Yes, its great to have the internet and apps that can fit in my pocket. For many people, their smartphone replaced 90% of their activities on a desktop/laptop but not for me.

Sure when I go on youtube I watch a Short I find interesting. Before I know it, I am pressing down, down, down... etc.

I also admit that when I am learning or trying to solve a problem I can venture off to youtube or other sites. I can vaguely relate what it must be like for younger kids who grew up with the internet and smart phones. It is easy to get sidetracked.

Despite being in my 40s I hate to be that "back in my day" type of guy but the truth is, before the internet was common, we had little distraction on our PCs. We could only run what our computers had installed, right? Sure, we could still get distracted by our TVs or video games but they still exist today + everything else.

I try to teach my kids (one of which has a phone) that its easy to get caught up them... to be a third arm if you will. My eldest is slowly learning and, in my opinion, is a better example that my spouse.

Lastly, I have enjoyed reading other comments on here and their methods to improve their daily lifestyle choices.

Anyway -- a bit of fun for you...

Not long ago I was in an important meeting with 30 other people. The organiser had to leave to take a phone call. The moment he left EVERYONE took their phones out and all you could hear was 'tap, tap, tapping...'

I was the only one not on their phone. I didn't even bring it into the meeting room with me! I couldn't help but smirk look around the big table with everyone looking down on their phone.

^^ This was in 2011... 14 YEARS AGO!! This would be around the IPhone 3 era. As I looked around the room I started to hate the idea of a "smartphone" and how reliant the average person will be... and I consider myself an introvert! It was just a reflection on what the future holds. Personally, I am glad (even to this day) not to have a reliability towards it.

How I phrase it is: my phone is for utility, not pleasure.

I check emails, I ePay, SMS/Discord messages, utility apps like hobby score tracking or taking notes, necessary company apps like airlines or resorts, etc.

I never use my phone for pleasure. If I look up a YouTube video, it's for a purpose and it ends at that purpose. If something takes me to a social media site, I read the post and end there.

I keep pleasure on my computer. When I step away from my computer, I'm disconnected from all the carcinogenics of the modern online life.

My phone is ideally for

- Call

- Text messaging / WhatsApp / Discord of few groups, etc

- Alarm clock

- Taking pictures or videos. (Likely family oriented)

- Booking tickets - document, shows, travel (the main reason I have email setup on my phone)

- Travelling - Geolocation / map (gmaps, etc)

- Exception: Internet if working on laptop with no internet (ie in cafe) (This could also be youtube videos or similar)

If smart phones were banned tomorrow then my life would not change that much. The above is mostly for better convenience of what is other methods and requiring a some paper or printer, etc.

I do wonder what the percentage is today that rely on their smartphone (even if not serving a decent purpose other than "social") and struggle with daily life if a ban started tomorrow.... waking up to no smart phone. I think it will be pretty high even for people in their 40s. Its rather sad.

Im trying a ”new” thing, in fact something I abandoned years ago. Namely rss.

I made some scrapers for the sites i follow that lacks full rss feeds, and can now enjoy distraction free focused reading again, without inflammatory comment sections.

However, I’m here commenting so I guess im still under the spell. :-/

Tried this for twitter as there are some people I still like for their concise content, but I don't want to be drawn into curated corporate doomscroll. Doesn't work as good as I thought, but I still consider RSS to be a valuable tool to put a safe gate to personal internet use

Yea, I dont follow ppl on twitter anymore, but you can use nitter to turn any user into a rss feed.

https://nitter.privacydev.net/elonmusk/rss

For subreddit you can use redlib which has rss feeds, example https://redlib.zaggy.nl/r/insects.rss

Using this as a source, you can combine a bunch of subreddits you like to follow into a single feed for minimal usage effort.

Since you are processing the feeds by now, it is trivial to filter out crap you dont want, such as Musk news.

Moderation is a high form of discipline. Keep the apps, learn to limit usage. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Keep food in the house, learn not to pig out on the sweets. Works in other areas of life where removing access is not an option.

So basically 'just be successful' it's easy: just learn everyday, do sports, eat well...

But hey thanks for your tip!

No one said it is easy to be virtuous

Moderation is more difficult than abstinence because it means you are fighting an activated dopamine loop in real time.

I wonder: are there any good games where the game is literally to escape dopamine loops in various ways? That would actually be a novel and interesting game mechanic. You could make it a puzzle type game or even work it into a role playing or fighting game where sneaking you into some kind of addictive game loop is how the enemies get you.

I guess the problem is twofold: some of your mental faculties rather want to drown in digital distraction while you engage other mental faculties to stop the former

While some people can engage in moderation, abstinence has it's place so that you don't spend double your energy just to stay on track. Imagine someone made a fresh cooked BBQ steak and puts it close to your work place and tells you "it's alright, moderation buddy! Keep working!". So everything has it's place and time, it's usually the blending of different places and times that makes things difficult

I can stop any time I want!

Of course I can! I just don't want to right now, maybe later!

X (Twitter) is best used as an RSS. Instead of going to the app and the feed, just make some bookmarks folder with the people you want to follow and read their feeds directly.

Occasionally rabbit-hole threads to find new interesting accounts to follow.

I can relate on so many levels, tried so many techniques and tactics and often returned back.

Now I have similar system in place, however I kept the Chrome installed because of the bank authentications just like you said. But I'm using the Wellbeing app (Pixel) to block all the social media domains so even if out of habit I start typing twitter, it does not load.

The daily game I play is rotaboxes that's super relaxing and exactly, has an end.

I really enjoy reading someone else who is going through the same struggles overcomes them. Good luck sticking to them.

But there are fascinating things happening in the world, and there are stories I want to hear. I wish there was some way to see them without wading through all of the crap from people trying to influence my thinking.

Try Inoreader. It can ingest and deduplicate most feeds oit there, ibcluding things like facebook groups, reddit and hacker news.

The paid version also can desuplicate across the sources, which is really nice.

Then just block every other source.

Read this while procrastinating.

How many others would classify hackernews as doomscrolling?

It can be for some, I would imagine. However, I actually learn a lot from this site. I feel like there are so many knowledgeable people here about topics of great interest to me. I procrastinate a ton here, but I wouldn't classify it as 'doomscrolling.'

Deleting Chrome on Android is difficult but you can go one better than disabling it.

  adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.android.chrome

It can still be put back, but you need a computer to do it

Under "later modifications" he mentions an app for web site access limits and a "new browser", but doesn't say which. I guess this is not meant to help others?

You don't need to do all of this, just install a pihole on your network and block all social media sites. Then literally every device on your network will block them all. No need to faff around with other apps, etc.

If you want go to even further, use a hosts file to send all these sites to localhost and set up an ad blocker to block the html tag on all these sites as well. Now you've blocked the sites 3 different ways.

Problem with the home network is that I can just switch to LTE on my phone... I guess the ad blocker one should work for Firefox, but Chrome doesn't allow extensions on mobile. Perhaps I should deactivate it.

Brick has been very useful: https://getbrick.app/

Also, and slightly tangential, I added this to uBlock today:

www.linkedin.com#hashtag#main[aria-label="Main Feed"] .scaffold-finite-scroll__content

Which makes LinkedIn essentially write-only for content: I can share content I want to, but don't have to read brain-dead takes from other people.

I'm increasingly annoyed that we can't have nice things without exposing ourselves to attentional strip-mining.

I really want to be able to see my close friends' Instagram posts and read interesting tweets from ~50 people I've chosen to follow in my field. There are no technical blockers to letting me do these; they aren't even much technical work. It would be a material life improvements for me (and I believe for everyone). But I'm not allowed to use the subsets of consumer tech which would enrich my life without exposing myself to the Reels button, the For You feed, and an avalanche of black magic attention hacking. I am bad at moderating my use and I have a low tolerance for doomscrolling, so I don't let myself use these products. As a result I'm cut off from the genuinely life improving subsets of social media which could be so easily made available.

We just accept that _of course_ you have to be willing to get your frontal lobe mined if you want to see what your friends have been doing. _Of course_ you have to be willing to scroll an infinite feed of AI-generated slop if you want to read opinions from people you respect.

I'm perfectly happy to see ads, I'm happy to pay money, I'm happy to come to any fair economic arrangement; but I value my attention highly and I can't pay the attentional price demanded of me, so I don't get to use these products.

People on this site might say "just don't use Reels / For You Feed" and maybe they're right. But for me and the vast majority of people that's not an option, it's my individual willpower pitted against an army of designers, PMs and data scientists every hour of the day.

I am happier without social media than I was with it; but I would be much happier still with the genuinely enriching subset of social media which is there for the offering. As social media becomes a bigger and bigger part of modern life it feels more like essential infrastructure which we _should_ be able to access in ways which work for us. The Fediverse is a great step though I haven't gone as far as to built a custom frontend which works for me (I think it's a big untapped market).

Youtube is the clear winner here. They let you turn personalization off - at which point the Recommended tab disappears, Youtube Shorts don't work, and I can still see new videos from people I subscribe to and follow links to videos when I need to watch them. It's a fantastic compromise and I live in fear of some PM (maybe reading this thread) inevitably realizing they could squeeze a few more minutes of sweet attention juice out of me by taking it away.

We're primates, we see and tactilely use physical objects.

Use your strength. Put different things in different objects. Now you rationally reason about them.

I can totally relate to this feeling of frustration with doom scrolling - I was in the same boat a few months ago, especially with YouTube. Fortunately, I managed to break free from the cycle by tweaking a few settings in YT itself (no special browser extensions needed). These are the changes that helped me:

Main settings that gave me a starting point:

1. Uninstalled YouTube app and now using only the browser version (on mobile and desktop)

2. Turned off Watch History in https://www.youtube.com/feed/history - "Pause watch history" (you can only pause the watch history and YT will periodically remind you to turn it back on. OH yeah, nice try Google!).

3. Turn off AutoPlay (toggle switch on the video player toolbar)

4. Tweak all the settings in https://www.youtube.com/account_playback - disable info cards and video previews (the setting that makes the videos to play when you hover over thumbnails)

After making these changes, your YT homepage and History page will be empty spaces - no videos at all. It is so refreshing! As a bonus, now YouTube shorts show only short-forms content from the channels you subscribed to. So it is more meaningful than some random junk.

Additional habits that helped me:

1. Subscriptions - I subscribed to specific channels that I want to follow - eg: Dave2D, MKBHD, fav cooking channels, NPR etc. and watch their videos via Subscriptions link

2. Topic-specific playlists - save interesting videos that I want to save for later - e.g: 'Health', 'Good recipes' etc.

3. Related videos - When a video is playing, YT shows a bunch of 'related videos' on the right. Most of these videos were not really related to the video, instead they are just trigger content. So I do two things here:

     - select the 'Do not recommend channel' from the vertical "..." menu in each video.
     
    - if the related video is genuinely interesting to me, choose the menu option 'Add to watch later'

With these changes, I watch videos in one of three ways only - by searching for specific topics, or selecting from my playlists, or browsing through Subscriptions.

This was a big shift from a "push" to a "pull" model and has effectively stopped my doom scrolling habit in just a couple of weeks. I feel like I am watching YT on my own terms now.

Oddly enough, a big help for me has been not using an adblocker for sites like Youtube. I can only watch so much before I just become enraged by the sheer number of ads in a 20 minute video that I just rage quit the app.

That's an interesting point. I get what you mean. I hate videos that start with an ad. And if the next video also has an ad, I am more likely to give up and go elsewhere. You are right, it is counter-intuitive, but it works.

congrats on your success. rather than fight against the myriad dark patterns employed by youtube, one can also opt to bypass their slimy frontend entirely. for example you can enjoy the same videos with no toxic settings via:

invidious

freetube

pinchflat + jellyfin

MPV + yt-dlp

tubular/newpipe (mobile)

I use the strategy of not having any social media on my phone.

If I want to doom scroll, I have to open up the laptop.

iPhone has this nice accessibility feature where you can greyscale the screen, this along with putting the phone away in a distance that I would have to get up and walk to it made a huge difference in frequency of usage.

Yes I found the grayscale surprisingly effective. An additional tip is to bind it to the triple-click side button accessibility shortcut, so you can quickly enable/disable it if you need colour for something momentarily.

Change your phone. Mudita Kompakt or Light Phone 2 would be a game changer

What's a good chrome extension to block reddit, hn, etc. these days?

Not sure why doom scrolling is a thing when joy scrolling is what’s popular

Idk... reading on a phone experience is so awful, I never really wanted to read anything there anyways. Every now and then I need to fight one or the other proprietary jail on the phone to get essential services to work. Like Google Play sometimes wants me to give it my email. So, I had to reset it to get around it. I don't read mail on the phone anyways. I have to have it to receive messages from son's school, the worthless but mandatory 2FA for work, GPS, bank...

I just don't understand how this can be such an enticing experience. I couldn't bring myself to read the news on my phone even when that was the only device I had for a few weeks.

So... maybe a solution is to try a better device / medium?

Also, being used to Linux, using Android feels really awful because of programs trying to control what you can do instead of the other way around. It could be really infuriating. Also, everything is mildly broken / really trashy quality in terms of UI interaction (things move on their own when they shouldn't, UI element partially drawn offscreen, very variable response time, absolutely garbage keyboard).

So... maybe another solution is to get used to Linux, and just the taste of freedom will deter you from using smartphones?

Doom scrolling is when you endlessly scroll negative news and communities.

What's doom scrolling for you is user engagement for the company, and by their definition you're not wasting your time, you're increasing their revenue by seeing and clicking on ads. That's the only thing that really matters to them.

The Matrix was prophetic, only it’s a phone not a vat and it’s humans behind it not AIs. (Though you are providing training data for AI!)

I always thought a good twist on The Matrix would have been that as a big reveal: humans are running it.

Remember when reading Hacker News was considered a time-waster?

a lot of these posts usually deal with people that can work, have a life, are free human beings

what if you are not a free human being? scrolling the only source of entertainment till death

yes, "distraction" but distraction from "what"? That's the subtle difference. Where basically back in the 1920s but instead of physical cocaine it's digital now

slow death?

grew up in a cult now prevented from getting any employment living in a house full of cult fanatics scrolling the only thing to do.

way cheaper than drugs. less side effects. idk nice to have something to entertain me on the road to dying

imo it's not as bad as people make it seem people just like coming up with struggle stories once they have jobs and life etc

more like sleeping and dreaming I guess. Do you think the more free people are the more they gotta somehow justify their freedom with simulated struggles?

deleting instagram isn't feasible for me. I like to use it to connect with most of my friends, but then also get distracted by their short form content scrolling

just use it on pc. It gets most of the benefits for contact maintenance. You can still watch the reels you are sent. But no reels, and the feed scroll gets very boring suddenly.

Delete safari from your home screen…it helps a lot.

Things that worked for me:

1. Disabling all YouTube thumbnails, making the YouTube home page layout as a vertical list instead of a grid, only allowing YouTube in Incognito mode, requiring a log in each time I want to use it

2. Unfollowing/muting most people on social media such as Instagram and Twitter. Only allowed in Incognito mode so I have to log in to use.

3. Blocked all subreddits except for one, which is AskNYC for me, via custom CSS.

4. Built an RSS reader to serve a web page rendering of the content.

5. I'm working on my own content recommendation algorithm. I'm trying out things like get a random Wikipedia article -> search the YouTube API for the article title -> return videos. Which makes YouTube content feel less brain dead and more educational.

Seems like solving the symptoms, not the cause, which is likely some deeper dissatisfaction

Shutting down the noise may help to find out the causes.

I don't think so. Pain exists as a signal to tell you that something is wrong with the body. Removing the pain doesn't help diagnose the condition. Though I agree that once a sound diagnosis has been found then pain relief can be pursued. Before then, though, you are throwing away a signal.

I don't have this problem. Recommendation algorithms disgust me so much that I end up closing the site/app in anger.

Amen. I don't understand the problem here. Do something real instead of playing on your phone. (Says me while I play on my phone.)

And I thought that it was related to Doom. Disappointing. (tongue in cheek)

I would love to see more phones with PureOS, and distros based on PureOS. A non-Android FOSS OS that I can fully customize.

What's great about Linux distros is they are designed for different purposes, and they can decide what apps they ship by curating the list of ones in their repository. App delivery is secure, there's no random malware, there aren't a billion different nearly-identical apps with [probably] nefarious purposes, no barrage of capitalist free services designed to addict you. Just basic apps that let you be productive, without bloat, without malware, without BS.

I don't know why we aren't all using that right now. The PC is definitive proof that an open hardware platform can support any number of OSes. Let the user choose.

Carrying a book is another helpful solution.

Hmm meanwhile... I had a facebook tab in my browser...

... i switched back to it and noticed my login expired. Didn't bother to log back in.

Yes I'm bragging. Yes, I'm also commenting on HN :)

What are you guys reading from your infinite scroll suppliers? Are you really that dumb to cease reading (e)books for observing some stories written by no-names? And do you consider your pictures' ability to move as a superiority? How can you know at least anything about the world, the Nature and the agressive nature of the Government, how are you supposed to obtain this knowledge from your infinite scrolling devices?

> Are you really that dumb

Do you really want an answer to your questions, or do you just want to flaunt some misguided moral superiority? Insulting people isn’t an effective way to get them to do something for you.

Are you really that lacking in empathy that you’re incapable of understanding your fellow humans are being constantly bombarded with addictive messages and technology which—surprise!—makes them addicted? Are you really that cruel that instead of encouraging those trying to leave a bad situation, you find it more amusing to pile on and ridicule their efforts? Are you really that disconnected from society and the human experience that you have never even so much as skimmed any of the countless articles and books on the subject?

I am incapable of understanding why our follow humans are constantly bombarded with proprietary software. I am encouraging those to read a printed word, not the capitalists' burp, how can I ridiculate their efforts if "the efforts" is nothing?. The books I have "skimmed" are from Psychology which is a pseudo-science, sorry.

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