It feels a bit silly to need guardrails for something as trivial as scrolling.
Shameless personal plug: I wrote about it here. https://nabraj.com/blog/swipe-scroll-repeat-addiction/
No, this is full-on war for control of your mind. And the adversary spends millions to hire teams of the world's best psychologists and engineers to deploy technology that never sleeps with the sole purpose of grabbing and keeping your attention.
Once I realized this, I started treating doomscrolling and Youtube rabbit holes not as personal insufficiencies, but as systemic failures in my psychological defense system. I started installing my own tech to keep me safe, and I am much, much happier.
Predictably, companies like Google try to disable the defenses (e.g. with Manifest v3, which was a garbage excuse to disable many defensive extensions). And so the war goes.
Addictive media content, particularly short-form casino-style recommended content sucks time away from you in a way that's deeply meaningless. You have no time for friends or real social stimulation and you sit in bed continuing to scroll because it's easy, and you repeat the cycle until all you're doing is that and being sad and lonely, which makes you want to see people more or have a hobby, but that takes a modicum of effort and you have your phone right there.
I was with you until here but this seems like a restatement of the same thing. No it isn’t a failure of you, it’s simply an attack of overwhelming force
But it is possible, without having to install tech to defeat these systems for you.
I think, as with most bad habits, the easiest way to defeat them is to never start them to begin with.
If you haven’t ever smoked, don’t start. If you haven’t ever gotten hooked on Shorts/Reels, don’t start.
I watch YouTube quite often, but only long form content. I even watch some content that takes me multiple nights to finish (e.g. a 5-hour stream of a great board game). I think the only time I’ve watched a Short was accidentally, or if someone shared one with me (fewer than a handful of times).
It also helps if your friends/family don’t do those things too (e.g. so they don’t keep sharing them with you).
But 100% agree that ideally, platforms would give us control over the types of content that show up.
The best I can do on YouTube is to subscribe to channels that don’t do Shorts, and only use Subscriptions as my feed. This has been quite effective.
I don’t even use Instagram (and definitely not TikTok).
My biggest vices are HN and Board Game Geek, but I feel that’s relatively tame (but I could still have healthier habits even with those).
Yeah, this kind of realization can be surprisingly empowering, because it takes something that seemed like unavoidable natural law and reveals it as an adversarial relationship.
To offer a boring but lower-tech version: Shopping centers which are deliberately designed to make people enter/exit through stores, and the companies that pay to rent that space in particular. So there's nothing awkward about tracking in some water on a rainy day, the company chose that tradeoff.
Companies have no power to force you to use their products/services, and despite the millions they spend trying to hook you, you always have the option to simply stop using their product/service, delete their app and/or stop visiting their website.
You don't have systemic failures in your psychological defense system. We are adaptable creatures.
Using technology to protect us from more technology works right up until the prior technology fails, the latter technology adapts, or you lower your guard and fall back into old routines. Like many things in life, such as eating healthily, exercising regularly, managing finances and relationships well, you need to assess the situation you're in, note the advantages and disadvantages it gives you, assess a plan for action to use it for the good parts only, and stick to it.
I don't think we should have a society that demands constant personal accountability in order to not get suckered by marketing, SEO, algorithmic feed optimization, etc.
Not only do they have well-paid experts working on getting you using their platform more often and for longer, but they also have a scary amount of metadata on hundreds of millions of people... they can pluck a person that behaves just like you out of the ether, compare their engagement trends, and apply the same algorithm to you.
The resource imbalance becomes really difficult to comprehend. It's like you're trying to avoid a pickpocket that has successfully pickpocketed millions of people, and the pickpocket has years of your behavior at their fingertips and can cross-reference it with every pickpocketing attempt they've ever attempted... oh, and they designed everything about the city you're walking in to make it easier to pickpocket you.
The same applies when you get to the elite levels of any kind of endeavor--they have long since consumed all of the proverbial low-lying fruit, and so they pay skilled professionals a ton of money to carve out marginal advantages. No presumption of intentional action is too paranoid or unreasonable when you get to this point. Assume every word, comma, image, sound, etc. has been carefully chosen for maximal impact, conscious or otherwise.
It's like food, easier to have self control not to buy candies in the supermarket than to have self control at home when you know you have candies in the pantry.
I haven't felt the need to watch a reel since I uninstalled IG, before that I ended up scrolling here and there, not much but enough to regret the lost time at the end of the week
However on the App there's no way to do this.
The whole situation is so user-hostile that I'm actively seeking to move somewhere else.
Years ago, I designed a minimalist YouTube player that removed video suggestions and autoplays but used their player, didn't evade ads, etc. I got banned by Google because they disallow any alternative site for YouTube, only embeds are allowed.
Pretty sure I am still banned on all Google APIs too.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that seems like a perfectly reasonable policy.
In fact, I would have assumed that's the case before reading your comment.
"You'll consume using our dark-patterned, unhealthy interface which we deeply tuned to maximize addiction and obsession, or you'll GTFO!" -Google.
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-utube-distractio...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clickbait-remover-f...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapb...
I'm happy to see that BlockTube is available for Firefox at least. Thank you for sharing (all the recommendations).
Sent from my Firefox for Android.
The embed links back to YT which is a major part of why they provide it for off-platform playback.
But if they somehow singled you out for overuse of the embed that seems rather arbitrary
Struck me as very anti-user and BigCorpo.
It was the project that solidified never building on someone else's 'lawn' again.
Why did you think that??
Thankfully, it's rare because people using ad blockers is apparently rare on the whole.
I wish this were the case. There's quite a number of websites that use Admiral's services to detect adblockers. Admiral got 19m dollars in funding last year, so I imagine the adblock threat is meaty enough.
This business model is poison. Service operator’s interests will never be aligned with the interests of the users unless they are paying customers.
(By contrast, if the users were paying customers, Google would have no problem with your client—it would in fact be saving money on compute & traffic.)
But dammit YouTube is my one vice. And then they throw those damn shorts on it, I can feel my attention span decreasing.
Seems every product just descends into this anti-human shitscape.
Also now that we have two big companies vying for attention, the competition is fierce to show "relevant ads" first because both receive intent almost simultaneously.
I got a youtube short of an office chair company in the feed. I wasn't looking for it explicitly. It was organic feed. Almost immediately I got an ad for that same chair in gmail. Because all of our phones are always listening for intents and keywords. This is recursive ad slop.
Same goes for tiktok and similar other shit forming and then feeding on addictions. Everything becomes much easier afterwards, especially long term.
I removed FB apps quite some years ago when they were draining batteries of phones even when not used, a typical bad engineering that facebook seems to never get rid off (their web had always some issues, stuff doesn't work, feed doesn't load, comments fail or get posted 2x, albums don't upload all photos etc. with just ublock origin on firefox on fiber optic). I just don't need even their messenger, any worthy contacts can be migrated to other apps.
The exception to all above - whatsapp, simply too much used in Europe and literally everywhere else outside of US. But that's much better engineered product from start.
I take a hybrid approach - keep uninstalled by default most of the time, engage a browser extension for web to keep me in place, and failing all that use an app like this as well.
It has substantially reduced my usage.
However, I do have to check it from time to time for one of my jobs (to monitor our Page and events, and respond to customers), and the occasions when I switch to the second profile can still hook me for 20 minutes of scrolling...
But it still saved me a lot of time in long run (and some phone battery too). I don't go to FB much, don't use instagram, tiktoks, tweeter and so on, and happy with that. Quality of actual real life and all that.
There you go Meta, you can enjoy the 4 times a year I use your site (and no others).
No doubt they'll track me via many other means that ought to be illegal, but it feels like a good start.
I'm thankful that I'm weird enough to be actively annoyed by the mere existence of Shorts. No chance of getting addicted.
Don't use Instagram either so.
Your adversary is playing to win. Why should you forfeit the contest?
That's why we invented a pill that helps with the former, but we might never have one that helps with the latter (although that would be nice)
There is the additional addiction of the physical action just like addicts can get addicted to the act of using a needle, but this is in addition to the severely addicting nature of the substance itself.
Any drug that affects dopamine has the potential to be highly addictive. Nicotine is one such drug.
So I guess you could think of it the other way around. If you can believe scrolling is addictive then you should also be able to believe that putting a stick of burning plant matter in your mouth is addictive. Once you open your mind to the reality of psychological addiction you'll see it everywhere.
Or if the platform owners had a minimum of scruples or empathy for their fellow human beings, instead of being disgusting money-hungry goblins concerned solely with their own personal wealth.