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Comment by pwdisswordfishz | Hacker News Reader

> I wanted to find a way to use Instagram without ending up scrolling for two hours every time I open the app to see a friend's story.

Why not just Chrome/Firefox/Safari to open the link instead of the Instagram app?

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One problem I have with all these self control style apps is that they only let you set total per day hourly limits. My intuition is that if you give yourself a two hour, one hour, even 30 minute limit per day you're still liable to drift into zombie mode and are more likely to want to unblock after that long brain rot session. My ideal blocking app wouldn't restrict your total per day, instead the key feature would be that you can only scroll for 5-10 minutes at a time with a cooling off period. That is, if you scroll for 5 minutes you then have to wait X minutes before you can scroll again. I think this should have a strong c-c-c-c-ombo breaker effect without giving you enough time to get hooked so badly that you immediately want to bypass it.

I deleted the YouTube and Instagram apps and I still end up scrolling / watching shorts - it doesn't matter, browser still lets you scroll

I deleted the apps too, but unfortunately I still like to use Instagram to follow photographers I'm interested in. These uBlock Origin filter rules have made it usable without being a black hole for my attention:

    www.instagram.com##article:has( > div > div > span:has-text(Suggested for you)):style(opacity: 0% !important;)
    www.instagram.com##div:has(> span > div > a[href="/explore/"])
    www.instagram.com##div:has(> span > div > a[href="/reels/"])

Even if you're not logged in? Instagram barely even wants to let me look at the main photo/video of interest without an account.

What helped me, was deleting account as well. The site has different purpose than when I've registered anyway.

I use Unhook in Firefox on Android to eradicate Shorts from my YouTube experience, it works very well.

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