anteloper

- fair enough, for some users they reach us at a point of "I'm wholesale re-arranging my digital life RIGHT NOW" so they'd prefer to subscribe annually at signup and remove all barriers to better digital habits while they're in the mindset of habit change. will give this some thought.

- we've been thinking about experimenting with this model. I personally find it annoying forgetting to unsubscribe to things I only wanted to trial but I understand your use case.

- yes you can do this - quick demo here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W7gU6ZhlA-fiLx0T2j5h9A14rdc...

- hmm, you could alter your youtube session options so that your only options are 45 minutes or longer? this wouldn't explicitly prevent you from shorter sessions, but might cause you to think "wait I don't have 45 minutes right now - forget it". would be curious to hear if that works for you.

yes - more and more research is cropping up around the chemical response to social media usage but here's a particularly succinct paper - dopamine reward is absolutely associated.

https://www.iomcworld.org/open-access/neurotransmitter-dopam...

To Barrin's point, the jury is still out on formally qualifying this as "addiction" - and for most people the context of habit change is apt.

yes - you can. this works "out of the box" for safari (ie - if you add facebook, you'll have to go through friction to reach facebook.com on safari without doing anything else.)

we just added support for chrome and other browsers by allowing you to associate domains with apps you've added. so associating facebok.com with your facebook app applies that same friction regardless of browser now.

graphs were especially informative, thanks for sharing!

thank you! these anecdotes are literally what get us out of bed in the morning

great question. a few ways

1. no, we're more expensive (at least last I checked they were 3.99/mon we're 6.99/mon or 44.99/yr)

2. yes we just rolled out website support this week.

3. no manual shortcut setup. just one click to add an app you want to moderate. (for websites you can go to an app you've added and just type in which web domains should apply to that app.)

4. yes, probably! we can pull you out of app sessions, which I personally find to be a game-changer. friction on the way in is great, but I tend to get lost in suggested content once I'm actually in an app. I need to be ripped out after a few minutes, and we do that. also adding "teammates" to receive automated texts when I'm slipping up has been very helpful for me personally.

more tactically:

1. we hit you with friction every time you enter an app you want to moderate your engagement with. with screen time limits, as long as you're under your budget, you'll get through no problem. in time this means you learn that early in the day is the best time to use social apps. we think this is a second order failure.

2. we let you stack your progress over time with your streak, which seems to be a far better behavioral motivator for staying in line with your goals.

3. we report usage for the apps you actually care about moderating. (I basically ignore my native screen time report, because "being up 25% this week" might mean I went on a long drive and was using maps to navigate, or that I doom-scrolled in bed until 3am.) we try to report data you actually care about (there's a ton we still need to do on this front, but we're getting better at it)

a few ways! but the most succinct answer is that with clearspace, no learned behavior path can become a compulsive habit for quickly getting more scrolling.

every configuration of screen time limits we've tried has ended with us learning the quickest behavioral path to more scrolling (ie: quickly tapping "5 more minutes", entering passcode, etc).

appreciate that! definitely working through the bugs one by one - both bugs in our code and frankly bugs in the ScreenTime API itself. but we're starting to converge on a stable state, and to their credit Apple has been fairly responsive in moving the API along and responding to developer requests.

It does yes! We actually aren't doing the "replace with a shift that redirects" trick. We're able to intervene on the native app by integrating with the new ScreenTime API

Thanks - just want to emphatically disagree that technology has no place in this discussion. The alternative - "just stop scrolling" doesn't work well for me, personally.

Just like non-alcoholic beverages are useful for people that have a drinking problem, I think it's likely anti-addiction technology will be useful for people that have a technology problem.

I don't think I plugged anything. I shared the best thing I've found to partially solve this problem in my own life (open source software I have no relationship to), shared that my full time job is working on this problem (because it's the largest obstacle in my life, not because I am trying to grift) and what I've built so far, with the explicit note that I would not recommend as a single magic bullet for addiction, because it happens to be a really hard problem. And then shared what I am trying next - to address this problem in my own life and ideally as many others as I can.

Been there - still am. self-control (https://selfcontrolapp.com/) is the nuclear tool in my anti-scrolling arsenal. If you figure out how to get around it please do not tell me - it's the best thing I've found for completely shutting myself out of youtube (and chess websites - bullet chess is a similar drug for me).

Disclosure - I'm full time working on software that arms people with better tools for fighting compulsive digital habits (https://getclearspace.com/) We have a chrome extension and an iPhone app and they're powerful for retraining compulsive habits - but can't honestly recommend them for full blow addiction (yet).

Interestingly, in watching my own behavior, the most effective force for keeping me from wasting my life is knowing that people can see my screen (at the office for example). I'm starting to think that replicating this remotely might be a way to keep my phone usage in check. If I could opt-in to sharing my phone screentime with a pre-set list of friends that might change how I behave - particularly if they were notified if I ever deleted the app that was doing that sharing. I'll be all-in building some version of that for the next few months if you want to be on the beta list for some accountability experiments. https://screentimeaccountability.com/