Making the Internet Boring
cemrehancavdar.com
cemrehancavdar.com
For phones, ScreenZen is great at this. Makes you pause before visiting an app or site, and you can configure the pause to grow each time you use it. You can also set a timeout on the app. Very flexible settings.
For desktop, I recently built a free browser extension called MooBlock - it's similar to ScreenZen in that it adds a forced pause before you reach a distracting site. But once you reach the site, a herd of cows start walking all over your screen to make the website less appealing.
It's available in both the Chrome and Firefox extension stores. Hoping to make an Android version later this year too.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mooblock/eanbagjehd...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mooblock/?utm...
"When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you’re giving it power."
When I learned to stop feeling bad/guilty/thinking this was a problem to solve and just let my mind drift, I found that my mind naturally learned when it was disciplined work time vs. browse the internet time. Personally, I noticed that when I didn't have any artificial restriction, I was less inclined to waste time on those things.
In practice: "oh, my mind doesn't want to do that other thing right now but it does want to go look at this thing; let it." The more I've loosened my grip, the less distractions have affected my productivity.
You have an army of behavioral psychologists at Alphabet and Meta working against you; it's only fair to fight back.
The fall only comes later when all your having fun leads to a lot of not having fun (work piles up, relationships sever, projects fail etc.) I find living in a certain amount of fear of fun is healthy. If I feel like I've been having fun for too long, I've probably been neglecting something important that is going to really ruin my fun later.
I say all this, as I scroll through HackerNews looking for hits of dopamine instead of continuing trying to fix the CI issues that have been paralyzing my work for almost a day now. That's not good to be a fun conversation in my 1-1 if I ignore it for much longer...
You have to practice taking a step back, assesing the current situation and determining what's best for you. Ideally do this every time you feel like mindlessly doomscrolling. You'll get better at it.
Turn off Notifications.
Turn off location services except when navigating or calling the taxi.
Uninstall as many apps as possible, use browser.
Use adblocking anti tracking browser (I use Duck, alt suggestions welcome).
Report unknown / unwanted senders as spam.
That said, I am a NEWS ADDICT. There are four world leaders whose downfall I eagerly await, and frequently check the news for this ;-) .. you might be able to guess three but not the fourth.
Putin
Trump
Xi
Modi
Trump
Fico
Erdogan
Israel is abusing Holocaust guilt in Europe to get away with genocide and massive cyber ops against their own allies and open bribery in US elections. And North Korea is so insane that the power transition will be fun to watch. All the generals and family members are waiting on him to die, and when he does there might be a military coup or even a civil war.
or don't! instead use
Peel (Geckoview)
https://github.com/mazzz1y/peel
WebSpace
https://github.com/theoden8/webspace_app
Native Alpha
I recommend taking a page out of the FSF's book and just straight up not using it, because it doesn't respect its users.
A lot of info on Youtube is not available in alternative forms such as books or blogs with just words and images.
E.g. A random person uploads a video on how he repaired my particular washing machine by isolating the relay that broke. It's not in blog form because the guy is not an HTML expert or WordPress user. Instead, he simply used his smartphone to record a 10 minute video of what he did and uploaded it to Youtube.
Was I "fine" before Youtube?!? In the past with that type of situation, I would have spent $1000 on a new washing machine instead of spending $2 for a new relay part and soldering it myself. There was no equivalent resource available to show me how to DIY repair it. Trying to avoid $1000 by calling an appliance repairman wouldn't help because these days, they charge a $150 trip & diagnostic fee just to show up ... and then in the end, they say the electronics board that's fried is discontinued so they can't get the part which means the only the only remedy is to buy a new washing machine. So I would end up paying a guy $150 to tell me to pay another $1000 for a new washing machine... for a total of $1150. Youtube helps in avoiding all that. As a knowledge base for DIY learning how to repair random stuff around the house, there is no alternative to Youtube.
I'd say it's more of specific hypothetical, and I don't understand how one couldn't read about a fuse on a forum or in a manual and diagnose with a DMM. Sure, YouTube is convenient because we are all out of time, all the time.
It's also a further reflection of how helpless we have become with regards to so much of what we rely on.
He spent a month trying different repairs (replacing pump, etc) that didn't work and then finally stumbled onto the electrical relay as the root cause. This is the deep link to the video I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gm_2qISYvk&t=2m41s
>So why couldn't you?
Maybe I eventually could have fixed it if I spent weeks on it and replicated all his failures but I didn't have to because ... he uploaded a video to help me. His video was the breakthrough I needed because it identified the particular relay. I actually had to watch more Youtube videos to learn how to actually replace the relay because the board is encased on epoxy resin and I had no idea how to deal with it. Various Youtube videos showed ideas of using an exacto knife and Dremel rotary tool to cut through the plastic case on the other side.
>, and I don't understand how one couldn't read about a fuse on a forum or in a manual and diagnose with a DMM.
One could hypothetically read the text of fixing a single relay of that particular washer model on a forum ... if... that guy in the vid hypothetically wrote a post on a forum... but he didn't. Sometimes, the mode of sharing is Youtube instead of a forum post. I can't control what other people do.
I did eventually find the official Samsung service manual PDF file and had to download it from some sketchy warez website because end-consumers are not supposed to have it ... but it only talks about board-level repairs ($250) instead of isolated repairs of replacing a single faulty relay.
Without hypotheticals or exaggeration, Youtube has literally saved me thousands of dollars. Showing how to fix cars, plumbing, ice makers, sewing machines, coffee machine, sprinkler systems, etc.
You can of course say the same thing about reading books, instruction manuals, asking somebody for advice, and so on.
Why should there exist any instruction manuals, when you could figure out everything in them for yourself. You aren't a stupid idiot, are you? Then why would you need a manual? And why would you ever ask other people for advice? That's only for stupid idiots who can't figure out things for themselves - not for hackers.
I agree that there's a huge difference between $2 and $1150, but you're absolutely positive that only this Youtuber knew how to do it and that no repair man would've been able to?
Repairing a relay is something that's easy for someone to do by themselves. However, it is not worth it for repairmen. By the time they get the relay, which means a second trip for another $150, plus spend the time to unsolder it and re-solder it, so a bit more of their time, so now we're up to $400. Worse, they replaced the relay and sometimes it turns out the relay failed because something else is broke and another thing is just going to break the new relay right away and now they have to spend another $150 on a repair trip to figure out what was wrong that caused the relay to burn out, replace that part and replace the relay. We are very close to the cost of a new washing machine right now and that is assuming whatever is wrong is easy to repair and not the result of something else that is also broken. Thus, the right answer for a repairman is you make the simple, cheap, quick fixes you can or you just sell them a new one before you end up wasting more of their money than it
Modern factories are very efficient at making things, however, that only works when the assembly line is there. A repairman working alone doesn't have all the advantage of a factory. I was recently talking to one of our factory engineers at work and they said this part, whatever it was, took two 'man hours' to build in our factory. But a repairman just taking it apart to replace one cheap seal and putting it back together would be at 10 man hours. This is why more and more things are going to modules that can be replaced. If a repair person can come out and look and say, this module is broken, grab a new one, shove it in, and it works, they can be in and out quickly and it's cost-effective. If they have to tear down to the relay level and diagnose things if you're at why it really broke, that quickly becomes more labor and thus more cost than it's worth.
Your devices in the 1960s did work and they were worth repairing because they were a lot simpler. Those devices also didn't have nearly as much automation in the assembly line and so there were many more man hours to build in the first place. They were also, although this is less true depending on what we're talking about, but very often had unreelable parts that because they were broke often, they specifically designed those for your parable. You fixed a 1960s TV by replacing all the tubes, something that was not very hard to do because they put more expensive sockets under each tube to make it easy
Turn off your YouTube watch history. This disables video suggestions when you open the website or the app.
Just to add to that, it's a two step process: disable saving new history, and then clear all history
I estimate my watch time dropped by half per day the first time I did that. Then I started curating my subscriptions better, and watching from that.
I told a friend this and told him this flips the script on the Algo. Now instead of YT telling you what to watch, YOU are in control of what YOU want to watch.
We have to start breaking this cycle somehow. This is a great way to do it.
Getting only the stuff you've curated is way better than the algorithm.
Unfortunately, I now have to scroll through the "most relevant" section, then through shorts, and only then do I reach the videos in the chronological order. What I also hate is how when a channel I usually engage with uploads a video I have no interest in, then it's stuck on top of my subscription page in that "most relevant" section for like a week.
Water still finds cracks, but it's about reducing the likelihood and increasing the time between binges (so that they mentally register as necessarily intentional and abnormal)
Another thing, the thing that really stuck out to me was this approach aimed at "boredom." I'd recently seen that video you mentioned with Arthur Brooks. In fact, last year he had another called "You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why." posted on Harvard Business Review's YouTube channel. So getting comfortable with "boring" really can be a viable approach.
bow to never bother them about the piece/s of paper unlesls you are stranded in the middle of the ocean and need to use the phone. When you visit them, you might unlock the phone and repeat the process
Firefox already includes a better version of this: Settings → Fonts → Advanced settings → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above.
It makes the web much better. Firefox even includes a list of icon font names that will be permitted (pref browser.display.use_document_fonts.icon_font_allowlist) to minimise icon font breakage, though I chose to block font loading altogether and there’s not often much trouble from it (and most of it is Google’s, and Material Icons’ ligation technique is in practice so dumb, achieving results quite the opposite of the original reason for the technique in an entirely predictable way).
> I need colors for code
Quite honestly, try doing without it for a while and see how it goes. Make a new theme that’s limited to just black on white, with regular/bold/italic font styles (me, I did keywords bold and comments and macro stuff italic and that was all), and use it for a week. Then consider if you want colours, and how to add them. Me, I went to strings red and comments green and numbers blue and not much else, though it’s grown a little over time. Others add greys, and perhaps background shading.
The key point is that you can only unblock when a physical usb drive (paired with the app) is inserted.
I've found this is the "just right" amount of friction. Too much friction (like impossible to override) and you have to be careful about when you turn it on, in case you genuinely need Reddit or YouTube or something. Too little friction and you just always override. But having to walk over to the next room to override is perfect.
But even I consume information now only from my carefully curated subscriptions I realized I still need to filter out most of the articles. E.g https://news.ycombinator.com/best has ~20 articles per day and this is only one RSS source. So, I just LLM-filter them.
https://hank.bond/posts/highlighting-my-code-based-on-how-mu...
An addict with addict friends needs to find non addicted friends to escape the addiction.
Edit: Forgot to mention I also blocked Shorts. In fact, I forgot they even existed. I guess the medium is the message. Short and forgettable.
For the iPhone users, I got similar results to Olauncher using the iOS Shortcuts app, and then linked it to the action button for easy access. I have a blog post in the works with the detail.
- from a phone addict
What does help is understanding that the problem is often me. Not that the internet isn't a hellscape of addicting design, or that I've not been flex to screens of some sort or another since childhood, but that my level of engagement with it scales with my general wellbeing.
In the recovery world, they talk about HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I'm worst on my devices when I'm one of those. Oh, or hungover.
Content blockers and greyscale and whatnot are all fine, but I've had most success looking away from technology to help.
I still suck at this, I bet a lot of us do, but knowing myself has been most helpful. Being able to understand why I'm doing it helps me break the circuit and engage more with other things.
It's an ongoing battle though, I hate it.
Self Plug : If someone is interested, I built a plugin for youtube called Flowtube - Distraction free youtube on chromestore http://tiny.cc/w4s9101. It blocks all comments, recommendations, sidebar and homepage.
It was initially an attempt to train the algorithms away from emotionally exploitation, but for the most part that was never fixed while my screen time dropped to almost zero.
As an upside I'm now also much more aware when a post is trying to manipulate my emotions, and I've come to realise how a majority of reddit posts are designed to undermine basic faith in society and your fellow humans. Horrifying to think about the implications, but glad I at least have a personal handle on it now.
The secret is learning to use your tools to bring joyful moments of surrender into your otherwise mundane existence.
Edit: looking at your other comments, the answer is yes