Something that makes me lean anti-Google and anti-Meta is how they make it impossible to disable the addicting features like shorts and reels. This is inarguably an anti-user move because the only people who want to use such an option are those who recognize they have a problem wasting time on those features. In my own small sphere this is the most visible "evil" thing that these companies do.
Totally agree. There should be a digital consumer bill of rights, that includes the right to disable autoplaying videos. Even the NYTimes home page is plastered with them these days, it’s awful. Another one is control over sort order, having the option of “most recent first”, vs. “most likely to keep you here”.
The point was that we should have some kind of social contract that pushes back against the worst known addictive product choices, and to create public awareness about them. Mobile Safari has some limited functionality built-in like "Hide Distracting Items" and reader mode, but it's not enough. iOS has Accessibility > Motion > Auto-Play Video Previews, but that seems to only impact Messages.
You know what makes me anti Google. They have completely destroyed my ability to have a custom MMS app on my own phone. They buy out jibe and completely lock down RCS on their own platform, they have been the instrument of preventing FOSS mobile texting.
I feel embarrassment for the designers and engineers who did the work for YouTube Shorts -> Hide -> “Okay we’ll hide them for a week!” I just cannot imagine having to be party to that kind of hot garbage.
I get that companies are designed to soullessly seek optimization of revenue. But there are humans who work at them and those humans do have free will to be party to it or not.
> companies are designed to soullessly seek optimization of revenue. But there are humans who work
Exactly, every single manipulative, exploitive, and outright evil act attributed to a 'company' was thought of, planned, executed, and overseen by actual people.
They do this with Threads as well. If you’re not on there long enough, they’ll pretend there are notifications waiting for you, but it’s just “Posts that might be of interest to you”. They’ll even show this fake data on Instagram to get you to open Threads.
Modern Reddit does this as well. All kinds of useless notifications like "Your comment go 10 upvotes, congratulations!". Its not as bad on the old.reddit.com version
I've managed to wean myself off reddit almost completely. When I use it, I use the 'old.reddit.com' ui. When they eventually get rid of that, I reckon I'll stop using reddit completely.
I browse the main page and one or two subreddits without an account and this helps for me. No account means no way to comment or interact and this greatly reduces time spent on the site. I just check for anything interesting, and then leave.
Until I have time to get more precise, I settled on just blocking the whole sites at dns level with nextdns, for most of the day. It's not ideal, as using vpn breaks it.. and I would prefer just to target short form video.. and i would prefer to use pihole.. but its working.
Is it a common millennial thing, or is it just me where those have the opposite effect? Shorts etc. annoy me heavily, and the more they get pushed on me, the less I use something. It’s like those people on WhatsApp sending you a voice message because instead of typing.
It comes up all the time. But the power of capitalism is that even this idea will itself be monetized by people selling books, giving ted talks, appearing on podcasts, asking for donations for cause, etc. etc.
Mostly the part that brings groups of humans to optimize for wealth, even if this directly makes the life of other humans shittier. It turns humans into automata who blindly want to make the number go up, and not worry about the consequences.
A potential mitigation could be for governments to make the bad consequences more illegal. And in order to do so they need not be influenced by the algorithm, but unfortunately they are.
You can get rid of money and have communism if you want and guarantee that all have what they need. But somewhere beyond need there is want, and the line is awfully fuzzy.
You can have a barter society if you want, where people trade pineapples for shoes, but you are always going to have people who want more shoes or more pineapples than what others have.
Okay how about we take off the blinders, stop patting each other on the back and call it "an" evil algorithm since exploitation is economic-system-agnostic?
Weirdly, Instagram never hooked me. I guess I only followed people that didn't post, ha ha.
As per boredom (I'm 60, so, yeah, grew up without smart phones), best thing that can happen to your creativity. All my good ideas come from stretches of boredom (driving long distances for example). I love boredom.
When computers came firmly into my life, it was solitaire games I had to actively delete from my machine. So many wasted hours (I thought).
Note: we 60 year olds wasted plenty of time watching shit television content long before smart phones (and computer solitaire) came to be.
I have only just slightly made a little peace with this time-wasting habit. I've come to see that there is time of decompression that I sort of seem to need in the evening. As I say, it used to be TV where I would find solace in "vegging out". Lately it's YouTube.
Perhaps we can accept this but find better ways to veg out? I personally think YouTube is superior to the crap TV (and, god, commercials) of old. But drumming, playing guitar, reading ... these are better still.
I found the stylistic choice to write in all lowercase so jarring that I could barely focus on the content of the article itself.
Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:
The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.
Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.
Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.
I always think it is frustrated kids showing off how "rebel" they are, by not following basic grammar rules.
It automatically loses my attention and respect. I can't take it seriously.
Ah, thank you sir. I’ve been battling with that intense itch to say about all-lowercase long text, but then I realised that maybe that text just isn’t intended to be read by someone else, after all. Or it’s something closer to ‘I’m doing it for myself, so I don’t care whether anyone else would be able to read through it’ kind of attitude. Maybe they don’t respect themselves enough, to make an effort even for oneself, and fix that broken Shift key.
Sit down with a novel and leave your phone on the other side of the room. Read. If you get distracted or lost in thought, that's fine—just don't stand up. Stay where you are. When you're done being distracted, go back to the book.
I’ve thought this for a while too. Just as maybe you start working out if you want to lose some weight and build muscle, maybe reading a book is the exercise to regain your attention and focus.
The key is not having the phone nearby though. Just right now I’m typing this from bed despite having brought a book to bed.
I started doing "phoneless walk". For example in the morning before work, go outside, walk in a park for 20m and do not bring my phone.
Not sure why, but not bringing the phone changed my thinking pattern. Even if I did not look at it anyway while having it.
It really is insane. I deleted Instagram too, but so many other apps have the exact same formula, like YouTube and Reddit. All you can do is repeatedly delete these apps, and journal or read to keep them at bay. I bought a notebook for tricky Spanish verbs, and I've got another one for Jazz music theory. I am terrible at Spanish AND Jazz, but it helps me stay off my phone, and when I am doomscrolling, I make an effort to change course, look up something I'm really curious about and write it down. Hope that helps literally anyone.
I used a “trick” to make YouTube work in my favour. For a few days I purposefully watched and liked/subscribed a bunch of videos about things that I think make me a better me (jazz piano lessons, philosophy conversations, math/physics/CS lectures, etc) until the feed only contains those. If I notice it drifting because sometimes it tries to pull something on you, I make sure I thumb down the new shit and retrain it a little. Has been working well so far!
This is a good technique but I fear YouTube will always try to sway us away from our interests, and towards what they are soft-promoting.
I've always wanted a YouTube which is basically just a searchbar, with results and just the video, so I created a little private webpage with that. It doesn't have anything unless I searched for it. No autoplay, no trending or recommendations, and no comments. The YouTube API is free up to a certain amount of videos (which is very hard to reach for personal usage).
What I find weird about social media is that using it never really "feels good". I can go back to when FB was the addictive app back in 2015 or Insta/Tiktoks now, you'll find something funny here and there but beyond that it leaves you feeling worse than when you started using it. It might also be a side effect of getting old but Twitter and LinkedIn feel particularly triggering with so much rage bait
I recently had a few nights where I stayed up way too late watching YouTube shorts, which are about 1 minute each, on my desktop. I'd notice that an hour had passed, tune back into YouTube, then another hour had passed.
Now that I've recognized the pattern, I've decided to stop scrolling through shorts; watching a short without scrolling is fine. I also setup a systemd service to pause media and lock my screen every 30 minutes after bedtime. The screen lock may be overkill, but I have a bad record of digging too deep into subjects at night, so I think it will still be beneficial.
I really think society is sleepwalking into a ton of problems with mass media consumption (mostly by the phone, and of which Instagram is one component). We are not supposed to be filling every gap in our lives with videos, games, music, and short-form content.
It is okay to be bored and let your mind wonder every now and again. It fosters boredom, which in turn fosters creativity. It also boosts the enjoyment of the (lower amount of) media you do consume and stops you becoming numb to it and seeking out more dopamine constantly.
It is clearly having an effect on people's attention span, stunting people's ability to focus, and affecting their performance, not just in work, but in many areas of their lives.
Maybe the city I live in is an isolated case, but most people walking from place to place are looking at their phone while doing it. I see people walking their dog or pushing their baby prams while staring at their phone (this is supposed to be bonding time). When I go to the gym, there's a whole column of people walking on treadmills (even on a sunny day) because this allows them to prop the phone up on the treadmill or hold the phone and watch videos. The 3-5 minute rest between sets on machines, benches and free weight areas is now a video watching period. Sometimes people are just doing a low-weight easy load with the phone resting on their crotch.
Even if people aren't looking at the screen, a lot of the time they have earbuds in listening to something. Is it a war on silence and letting the mind wander?
Why can people not unplug? Surely by now it's proven that short form video content is stunting people's attention span, making it hard for them to read even a page of a book. How are these people going to competently hold down a job or pursue a hobby? What happens in 20 years when people have been conditioned like this for 2,3,4+ decades. Are we going to have a serious breakdown in mental health, early signs of dementia or Alzheimers?
Damn companies like Instagram for taking part in this, as Google, Meta, Reddit, Spotify and whoever else has. Their desire to occupy ever more of our attention and time is leading this charge.
Throughout most of human history, most people were slaves and workers. They weren't there to think, they were there to push stone from place A to place B. The society at large isn't going to collapse if we return to the state where most of humanity does mindless jobs and have mindless lives, while the ruling class of people with self-control pull the strings.
I guess societal collapse was a bit melodramatic of me. I guess I just wanted to vent a bit. It's just sad that we live with such a hijacking force in our pockets and that seems to be having an adverse effect on the way people handle their jobs and lives.
I honestly believe that intelligence and self-awareness of average person is very limited. This is frustrating to observe from the point of view of someone who was promised golden age of human creativity and whatnot. But it is what it is. My take is, if you want the humanity to move forward, have kids and teach them to read scientific books instead of scrolling TikTok. Alternatively, exploit the human stupidity to put yourself in a comfortable social position, and then stop giving a fuck.
I'm in my late 40s and have Instagram on desktop. I watch reels from time to time. The clips I watch are definitely >6 seconds (more like 30s to 1.5 minutes -- there are very few clips under 10 seconds on my feed). And agree with emily, Instagram on desktop isn't as addictive. I scroll for 10-15 minutes and I'm done.
Also, Instagram's Reels algorithm isn't that smart. I watch maybe 20% of reels to completion (I skip 80% of reels after 2 seconds). The Reels algorithm shows me a bunch of stuff that it thinks would interest me, but really don't. I don't understand why, because I do follow a lot of content creators. I'm also quite reptilian -- if I see a weird animal or a dam bursting or a powerwashing scene, I will watch it. But Instagram doesn't seem to pick up on that.
Now I've heard TikTok's algorithm is much smarter and thus more addictive than Instagram's. I promised myself that I will never be on TikTok.
YouTube subscriptions are my main form of entertainment. I justify it because I learn so much useful stuff from them.
YouTube Shorts? I don't bother at all -- despite my having curated my subscriptions carefully, the recommended shorts are so boring that I never click on them.
I also use YouTube, but I don't use the internal YouTube subscription function; I just subscribe to each channel's RSS feed and use an RSS notifier browser extension.
I also try to limit how many channels I track to only around a dozen tops (if that), most of which are music artist channels to let me know when they have a new song out.
The few that aren't music channels I just download with yt-dlp and temporarily put them on my NAS to watch with my Emby server. This way, I can watch them from the comfort of my couch and I don't have to deal with ads. :)
I recently took a train and watched a child who looked about 4 years old, sippy bottle in one hand, iphone with instagram reels in the other. And saw them try to drink in a way that didn't obstruct their view of instagram.
For me, that was the YouTube recommendations. Between the clickbait and the algorithm just being good, it could suck hours of my life.
Thanks God I found out about unhook extension, i disable absolutely everything but the video, and I use freetube to monitor my subscribed channel, so that I don't even need a Google account and the only thing that appear in my 'feed' is video of channel i subscribed to.
And even then, freetube has a setting to remove clickbait title and thumbnail..
It's been years like that and it feel so much better.
I believe there are tools, extensions, to fight back against the addictiveness of these websites but the general population doesn't know about them and once you're hooked you don't even think about it.
Smartphone just make it even worst but it in no way enabled it.
Hey! Many of us are doing our part by writing revolting software with no chance of addiction ;)
Maybe we need to establish a metric called "disengagement".
It factors in loading times, UX, responsiveness and reliability into a single, hard-to-game number:
seconds of time the software stole from your day (lower is better.)
By this standard, good software starts instantly, works for you, avoids sending notifications, etc.
> in some future some laws might pass (in europe?) to force apps like instagram to give you an option to turn off reels
I'm convinced that laws like this will eventually exist.
More broadly, I think there should be laws that force social media apps to allow you to turn off 'algorithmic' recommendations in favor of basic recommendations like 'most recent posts' and 'most popular videos today'. LinkedIn actually has a setting like this and it has greatly improved its UX for me. And one of the reasons I like HN so much is specifically because it doesn't try to personalize my feed.
This addiction is real. I found it quite shameful that somehow with all the determination to be the best version I would like to be and do things of meaningful nature, I fall into the trap of scrolling through reels almost everyday.
Reading and writing has been a way to indulge myself meaningfully. I really don't know effective ways to remind myself that this consumption of useless content is a waste of time and creator of frustration. How do you all manage it?
I've had similar issues with Reddit and Youtube. I ended up building https://limitphone.com, it's a blocker for Android which uses MDM so it cannot be bypassed. It comes with a default blocklist to block social media, and uses a timer system to delay gratification.
It's been a game changer for me personally and has slashed my screentime.
After reading Cal Newports book on digital minimalism I've removed Instagram entirely cold turkey. It's been three years now and I occasionally use the desktop version to message some friends.
The great thing about it is that I've saved myself many hours. I use that time for reading and walking and a variety of other activities. Also my attention span and mental health improved drastically.
Your mileage may vary. Here are a few ideas and ways to curb your “addiction”; they are my personal views and means, but I’ve heard enough people confirming that they work. See if you can structure your pattern and process to stay within your ways of consuming and using these mediums (YouTube, Instagram, etc.)
The first thing to do is turn off almost all notifications.[1] Even if you have Notifications ON for some critical app, Social Media Apps never need to be ON.
However, you will be tempted to open them up - this is where you delete from your phone, but use the desktop.[2] The desktop is more involved and not so casual that you whip up the App to start using it.
Try to use more physical Notebooks.[3] Using a To-Do, or a Note-Taking App on the phone will tempt you to wander off for just a few minutes of innocent and not-so-harmful distractions that balloon into hours of scrolls. A physical notebook and a pen deter you from straying to anything else.
As others have mentioned, try to resort to reading books as a replacement for these Apps.[4] For instance, have a book handy instead of reaching for Instagram.
It is also OK not to carry your phone 24/7. Walking in the park, reading time, talking to friends, dining with friends, etc., can be done without phones. If you must stay connected somehow, a Smartwatch can be a replacement.[5]
Find patterns that work for you. Keep trying and experimenting. Quite a few of these suggestions were a surprise for quite a lot of people, but have worked out brilliantly.
For Android there are patched Instagram apks with reels and feed hidden. Won't post any links, as the practice seems both shady and risky (in terms of privacy and security), do your own research.
Great if you wanna keep in touch with your friends but don't need any of Instagram's addictive
I feel very much the same way as the author about TikTok. I browse it far too often. I've implemented app based screen time limitations in iOS specifically for Reddit and TikTok but it's so easy to override. Deleting the apps for a few days works, but only for so long.
I really think the new AI panic is not as important as the original social media/algorithmic feed addiction panic. In fact some of the core problems with AI is that it’ll be used to generate slop for the algorithmic feed.
“The feed” is the tech world’s original sin, always will be. I wish there was someone around Mark Zuckerberg that would tell him that he needs to lead a movement to close the Pandora’s Box he’s opened. Be like Oppenheimer, Mark. You’ve become the destroyer of cognitive power worldwide, you should lead the movement to end it.
Everything else we’re trying is lipstick on a pig.
I think its also our responsibility to create a product to get people less addicted to it.
I think the feed is good. Were just so early it's not tamed yet. Can imagine in 5 years there will be an agent between the hardware and the apps to block what you dont like.
> if any clock in your house was off by six seconds, you wouldn’t spend any amount of time thinking about that
Excuse-me.
I'm so glad I never got in to Instagram. And I'm grateful that YouTube Shorts show up as unique pages in your browser history. Every once in a rare while I'll be tempted there, and it's enough for me to see just how many videos I've just scrolled through to scare me off.
Imagine if Reels had a watched count at the bottom of the screen...
I genuinely must have a mental defect. I use these apps casually and I can't say I've ever had the urge to pick up my phone at 4am and watch 2 hours of instagram shorts. They're usually annoying and pushed in my face which invokes a strong backlash effect. I typically watch an hour or two of YouTube a night, but only on the TV.
Every day I make a list of things I need to do. Once that list is completely, I shamelessly scroll whatever I want. This allows me to keep productivity on the level that I want, without sacrificing the pleasure of scrolling.
Imagine if a person wrote a serious article on computer hardware but kept calling the RAM the hard drive and talking about the problem of bit decay without power in hard drives. That's how these articles sound when they keep misusing the word addiction in inapropriate contexts to emphasize their point. It really makes one wonder what else they're getting wrong. At best it's like the people who are "so OCD" because they do some completely normal thing. When a medical term is used inappropriately the framing can lead to even more dangerous outcomes than the social issue being addressed because medicalization of behavior leads to use of force.
In general, many addictions are self-diagnosed. Some guidelines include:
* is the behavior unwanted?
* is it frequent?
* is it uncontrollable?
* is it progressive?
* do you choose it to the detriment of more important things?
If you can answer yes to enough of those questions about anything it can be counted as an addiction. I don’t think the author was out of line.
As a recovering addict, I would worry more about dismissing other peoples’ struggles just because they don’t fit your idea of a “real problem.”
Is substance addiction a different animal than behavioral addiction? In some ways, yes. But substance addiction is not the only kind of addiction there is. No, I think normalizing the use of the word removes some of its stigma.
It's interesting too - some of the GLP-1 drugs to treat obesity control people's food "addictions" but they also are demonstrating effectiveness on opioid and alcohol addictions as well as gambling addictions. It turns out there are a lot of common reward pathways for substance abuse and behavioral compulsions.
The best definition I have heard for addiction is: the pursuit of an activity or substance in spite of increasing negative consequences. Under that definition, social media addiction qualifies.
Something that makes me lean anti-Google and anti-Meta is how they make it impossible to disable the addicting features like shorts and reels. This is inarguably an anti-user move because the only people who want to use such an option are those who recognize they have a problem wasting time on those features. In my own small sphere this is the most visible "evil" thing that these companies do.
This is where user-scripts rock! and why websites are only frontier for defense.
[1] YouTube Anti Shorts - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441709-youtube-anti-shorts...
[2] Hide Instagram Feed, Stories, Reels, and Explore Page - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/474087-hide-instagram-feed...
[3] Bypass Instagram Login Redirects - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/420604-bypass-instagram-lo...
Note: I use[1] regularly, Since I don't have an instagram account I don't have a need to use[2] instead I use[3].
If you disable watch history in Youtube it conveniently disables all front page suggestions and you can also disable autoplay: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/8/23824672/youtube-blank-hom...
Unhooked is an extension that lets you disable many other features on YouTube.
I'm sure that the majority of people watch YouTube on a phone where that extension doesn't work, so it's not that useful.
My pattern of YouTube watching:
1. On my laptop, 99% searching for specific videos like tutorials/reviews of something. Almost never looking for entertainment.
2. On my phone, 80% looking for entertainment + a few reviews
i just use newpipe. seems to work grand
I quite like being able to dig through my watch history
Totally agree. There should be a digital consumer bill of rights, that includes the right to disable autoplaying videos. Even the NYTimes home page is plastered with them these days, it’s awful. Another one is control over sort order, having the option of “most recent first”, vs. “most likely to keep you here”.
I also detest autoplay. But: you already have the right. Don't visit those sites.
The point was that we should have some kind of social contract that pushes back against the worst known addictive product choices, and to create public awareness about them. Mobile Safari has some limited functionality built-in like "Hide Distracting Items" and reader mode, but it's not enough. iOS has Accessibility > Motion > Auto-Play Video Previews, but that seems to only impact Messages.
> Don't visit those sites.
This is not a non-argument used keep things the same (and bad).
You know what makes me anti Google. They have completely destroyed my ability to have a custom MMS app on my own phone. They buy out jibe and completely lock down RCS on their own platform, they have been the instrument of preventing FOSS mobile texting.
I feel embarrassment for the designers and engineers who did the work for YouTube Shorts -> Hide -> “Okay we’ll hide them for a week!” I just cannot imagine having to be party to that kind of hot garbage.
I get that companies are designed to soullessly seek optimization of revenue. But there are humans who work at them and those humans do have free will to be party to it or not.
> companies are designed to soullessly seek optimization of revenue. But there are humans who work
Exactly, every single manipulative, exploitive, and outright evil act attributed to a 'company' was thought of, planned, executed, and overseen by actual people.
This.
They do this with Threads as well. If you’re not on there long enough, they’ll pretend there are notifications waiting for you, but it’s just “Posts that might be of interest to you”. They’ll even show this fake data on Instagram to get you to open Threads.
Modern Reddit does this as well. All kinds of useless notifications like "Your comment go 10 upvotes, congratulations!". Its not as bad on the old.reddit.com version
I've managed to wean myself off reddit almost completely. When I use it, I use the 'old.reddit.com' ui. When they eventually get rid of that, I reckon I'll stop using reddit completely.
I browse the main page and one or two subreddits without an account and this helps for me. No account means no way to comment or interact and this greatly reduces time spent on the site. I just check for anything interesting, and then leave.
Until I have time to get more precise, I settled on just blocking the whole sites at dns level with nextdns, for most of the day. It's not ideal, as using vpn breaks it.. and I would prefer just to target short form video.. and i would prefer to use pihole.. but its working.
> the addicting features like shorts and reels
Is it a common millennial thing, or is it just me where those have the opposite effect? Shorts etc. annoy me heavily, and the more they get pushed on me, the less I use something. It’s like those people on WhatsApp sending you a voice message because instead of typing.
Honestly, I think you probably just haven't been hit with the "right" kind of shorts.
For me it was a quick way down from "these are annoying" to "oh, just another short that aligns with my interests".
Likely yes, after all it works marvellously on billions of people.
you forget to add tiktok which is probably 10x bigger than google and meta combined (in terms of total hours wasted from users)
Capitalism does not care about 'anti-user moves'. They will do anything and everything to get users spend as much time as possible on their platforms.
This. When will the discourse finally become about Capitalism being the evil algorithm?
It comes up all the time. But the power of capitalism is that even this idea will itself be monetized by people selling books, giving ted talks, appearing on podcasts, asking for donations for cause, etc. etc.
Which part of it is evil? Are all parts equally evil? How is this measured?
How would you fix it or improve it?
Mostly the part that brings groups of humans to optimize for wealth, even if this directly makes the life of other humans shittier. It turns humans into automata who blindly want to make the number go up, and not worry about the consequences.
A potential mitigation could be for governments to make the bad consequences more illegal. And in order to do so they need not be influenced by the algorithm, but unfortunately they are.
Do you think greed would stop if we had communism?
Uh, yes?
How do you get rid of a human emotion?
You can get rid of money and have communism if you want and guarantee that all have what they need. But somewhere beyond need there is want, and the line is awfully fuzzy.
You can have a barter society if you want, where people trade pineapples for shoes, but you are always going to have people who want more shoes or more pineapples than what others have.
Okay how about we take off the blinders, stop patting each other on the back and call it "an" evil algorithm since exploitation is economic-system-agnostic?
Weirdly, Instagram never hooked me. I guess I only followed people that didn't post, ha ha.
As per boredom (I'm 60, so, yeah, grew up without smart phones), best thing that can happen to your creativity. All my good ideas come from stretches of boredom (driving long distances for example). I love boredom.
When computers came firmly into my life, it was solitaire games I had to actively delete from my machine. So many wasted hours (I thought).
Note: we 60 year olds wasted plenty of time watching shit television content long before smart phones (and computer solitaire) came to be.
I have only just slightly made a little peace with this time-wasting habit. I've come to see that there is time of decompression that I sort of seem to need in the evening. As I say, it used to be TV where I would find solace in "vegging out". Lately it's YouTube.
Perhaps we can accept this but find better ways to veg out? I personally think YouTube is superior to the crap TV (and, god, commercials) of old. But drumming, playing guitar, reading ... these are better still.
Instagram Reels shows you stuff that it thinks you'll like, not just from people you follow.
I found the stylistic choice to write in all lowercase so jarring that I could barely focus on the content of the article itself.
Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:
The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.
Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.
Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.
I always think it is frustrated kids showing off how "rebel" they are, by not following basic grammar rules. It automatically loses my attention and respect. I can't take it seriously.
Ah, thank you sir. I’ve been battling with that intense itch to say about all-lowercase long text, but then I realised that maybe that text just isn’t intended to be read by someone else, after all. Or it’s something closer to ‘I’m doing it for myself, so I don’t care whether anyone else would be able to read through it’ kind of attitude. Maybe they don’t respect themselves enough, to make an effort even for oneself, and fix that broken Shift key.
The "lowercase everything" style is hell for people with dyslexia too
Reading is good for this.
Sit down with a novel and leave your phone on the other side of the room. Read. If you get distracted or lost in thought, that's fine—just don't stand up. Stay where you are. When you're done being distracted, go back to the book.
It really makes a difference.
I’ve thought this for a while too. Just as maybe you start working out if you want to lose some weight and build muscle, maybe reading a book is the exercise to regain your attention and focus.
The key is not having the phone nearby though. Just right now I’m typing this from bed despite having brought a book to bed.
I started doing "phoneless walk". For example in the morning before work, go outside, walk in a park for 20m and do not bring my phone. Not sure why, but not bringing the phone changed my thinking pattern. Even if I did not look at it anyway while having it.
I went further and just took keys: no watch, no wallet.
Also lengthened my 20 minutes to 40 minutes, with adequate buffer of course, and a known 40 minute loop.
Yea, it definitely starts the day right.
Sounds like mindfulness meditation to me.
Reading a book is like mindfulness meditation? Man, we really are living in a degraded age.
There are plenty of books that are quite a slog, so reading them allows for quite a lot of mind wandering and/or self-reflection.
It really is insane. I deleted Instagram too, but so many other apps have the exact same formula, like YouTube and Reddit. All you can do is repeatedly delete these apps, and journal or read to keep them at bay. I bought a notebook for tricky Spanish verbs, and I've got another one for Jazz music theory. I am terrible at Spanish AND Jazz, but it helps me stay off my phone, and when I am doomscrolling, I make an effort to change course, look up something I'm really curious about and write it down. Hope that helps literally anyone.
I used a “trick” to make YouTube work in my favour. For a few days I purposefully watched and liked/subscribed a bunch of videos about things that I think make me a better me (jazz piano lessons, philosophy conversations, math/physics/CS lectures, etc) until the feed only contains those. If I notice it drifting because sometimes it tries to pull something on you, I make sure I thumb down the new shit and retrain it a little. Has been working well so far!
This is a good technique but I fear YouTube will always try to sway us away from our interests, and towards what they are soft-promoting.
I've always wanted a YouTube which is basically just a searchbar, with results and just the video, so I created a little private webpage with that. It doesn't have anything unless I searched for it. No autoplay, no trending or recommendations, and no comments. The YouTube API is free up to a certain amount of videos (which is very hard to reach for personal usage).
What I find weird about social media is that using it never really "feels good". I can go back to when FB was the addictive app back in 2015 or Insta/Tiktoks now, you'll find something funny here and there but beyond that it leaves you feeling worse than when you started using it. It might also be a side effect of getting old but Twitter and LinkedIn feel particularly triggering with so much rage bait
LinkedIn is the most depressing software ever made
Do you post tho? I get a nice dopamine rush when someone likes or comments or even views a pic I post
I used to get some amusement out of likes but it quickly felt kind of shallow. It feels like someone just being like "neat"
I recently had a few nights where I stayed up way too late watching YouTube shorts, which are about 1 minute each, on my desktop. I'd notice that an hour had passed, tune back into YouTube, then another hour had passed.
Now that I've recognized the pattern, I've decided to stop scrolling through shorts; watching a short without scrolling is fine. I also setup a systemd service to pause media and lock my screen every 30 minutes after bedtime. The screen lock may be overkill, but I have a bad record of digging too deep into subjects at night, so I think it will still be beneficial.
In a few weeks you may find you've turned yourself into a systemd hater by your own hand ;)
I really think society is sleepwalking into a ton of problems with mass media consumption (mostly by the phone, and of which Instagram is one component). We are not supposed to be filling every gap in our lives with videos, games, music, and short-form content.
It is okay to be bored and let your mind wonder every now and again. It fosters boredom, which in turn fosters creativity. It also boosts the enjoyment of the (lower amount of) media you do consume and stops you becoming numb to it and seeking out more dopamine constantly.
It is clearly having an effect on people's attention span, stunting people's ability to focus, and affecting their performance, not just in work, but in many areas of their lives.
Maybe the city I live in is an isolated case, but most people walking from place to place are looking at their phone while doing it. I see people walking their dog or pushing their baby prams while staring at their phone (this is supposed to be bonding time). When I go to the gym, there's a whole column of people walking on treadmills (even on a sunny day) because this allows them to prop the phone up on the treadmill or hold the phone and watch videos. The 3-5 minute rest between sets on machines, benches and free weight areas is now a video watching period. Sometimes people are just doing a low-weight easy load with the phone resting on their crotch.
Even if people aren't looking at the screen, a lot of the time they have earbuds in listening to something. Is it a war on silence and letting the mind wander?
Why can people not unplug? Surely by now it's proven that short form video content is stunting people's attention span, making it hard for them to read even a page of a book. How are these people going to competently hold down a job or pursue a hobby? What happens in 20 years when people have been conditioned like this for 2,3,4+ decades. Are we going to have a serious breakdown in mental health, early signs of dementia or Alzheimers?
Damn companies like Instagram for taking part in this, as Google, Meta, Reddit, Spotify and whoever else has. Their desire to occupy ever more of our attention and time is leading this charge.
Throughout most of human history, most people were slaves and workers. They weren't there to think, they were there to push stone from place A to place B. The society at large isn't going to collapse if we return to the state where most of humanity does mindless jobs and have mindless lives, while the ruling class of people with self-control pull the strings.
I guess societal collapse was a bit melodramatic of me. I guess I just wanted to vent a bit. It's just sad that we live with such a hijacking force in our pockets and that seems to be having an adverse effect on the way people handle their jobs and lives.
I honestly believe that intelligence and self-awareness of average person is very limited. This is frustrating to observe from the point of view of someone who was promised golden age of human creativity and whatnot. But it is what it is. My take is, if you want the humanity to move forward, have kids and teach them to read scientific books instead of scrolling TikTok. Alternatively, exploit the human stupidity to put yourself in a comfortable social position, and then stop giving a fuck.
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I'm in my late 40s and have Instagram on desktop. I watch reels from time to time. The clips I watch are definitely >6 seconds (more like 30s to 1.5 minutes -- there are very few clips under 10 seconds on my feed). And agree with emily, Instagram on desktop isn't as addictive. I scroll for 10-15 minutes and I'm done.
Also, Instagram's Reels algorithm isn't that smart. I watch maybe 20% of reels to completion (I skip 80% of reels after 2 seconds). The Reels algorithm shows me a bunch of stuff that it thinks would interest me, but really don't. I don't understand why, because I do follow a lot of content creators. I'm also quite reptilian -- if I see a weird animal or a dam bursting or a powerwashing scene, I will watch it. But Instagram doesn't seem to pick up on that.
Now I've heard TikTok's algorithm is much smarter and thus more addictive than Instagram's. I promised myself that I will never be on TikTok.
YouTube subscriptions are my main form of entertainment. I justify it because I learn so much useful stuff from them.
YouTube Shorts? I don't bother at all -- despite my having curated my subscriptions carefully, the recommended shorts are so boring that I never click on them.
I also use YouTube, but I don't use the internal YouTube subscription function; I just subscribe to each channel's RSS feed and use an RSS notifier browser extension.
I also try to limit how many channels I track to only around a dozen tops (if that), most of which are music artist channels to let me know when they have a new song out.
The few that aren't music channels I just download with yt-dlp and temporarily put them on my NAS to watch with my Emby server. This way, I can watch them from the comfort of my couch and I don't have to deal with ads. :)
Instagram took the most addicting thing about facebook - the images and visuals - and it became an instant addiction for many people.
It also quantifies social status - more followers generally means more status.
It can be scary evil bc it brings out the worst in us.
I recently took a train and watched a child who looked about 4 years old, sippy bottle in one hand, iphone with instagram reels in the other. And saw them try to drink in a way that didn't obstruct their view of instagram.
For me, that was the YouTube recommendations. Between the clickbait and the algorithm just being good, it could suck hours of my life.
Thanks God I found out about unhook extension, i disable absolutely everything but the video, and I use freetube to monitor my subscribed channel, so that I don't even need a Google account and the only thing that appear in my 'feed' is video of channel i subscribed to.
And even then, freetube has a setting to remove clickbait title and thumbnail..
It's been years like that and it feel so much better.
I believe there are tools, extensions, to fight back against the addictiveness of these websites but the general population doesn't know about them and once you're hooked you don't even think about it.
Smartphone just make it even worst but it in no way enabled it.
I suggest installing a modded version of Instagram which disables the feed: https://distractionfreeapps.com/
Personally, I want to have the Instagram app on my phone so that I can send/receive dms to certain people
This is the world we built, hope you all got your cut.
Hey! Many of us are doing our part by writing revolting software with no chance of addiction ;)
Maybe we need to establish a metric called "disengagement".
It factors in loading times, UX, responsiveness and reliability into a single, hard-to-game number: seconds of time the software stole from your day (lower is better.)
By this standard, good software starts instantly, works for you, avoids sending notifications, etc.
> in some future some laws might pass (in europe?) to force apps like instagram to give you an option to turn off reels
I'm convinced that laws like this will eventually exist.
More broadly, I think there should be laws that force social media apps to allow you to turn off 'algorithmic' recommendations in favor of basic recommendations like 'most recent posts' and 'most popular videos today'. LinkedIn actually has a setting like this and it has greatly improved its UX for me. And one of the reasons I like HN so much is specifically because it doesn't try to personalize my feed.
This addiction is real. I found it quite shameful that somehow with all the determination to be the best version I would like to be and do things of meaningful nature, I fall into the trap of scrolling through reels almost everyday.
Reading and writing has been a way to indulge myself meaningfully. I really don't know effective ways to remind myself that this consumption of useless content is a waste of time and creator of frustration. How do you all manage it?
I've had similar issues with Reddit and Youtube. I ended up building https://limitphone.com, it's a blocker for Android which uses MDM so it cannot be bypassed. It comes with a default blocklist to block social media, and uses a timer system to delay gratification.
It's been a game changer for me personally and has slashed my screentime.
After reading Cal Newports book on digital minimalism I've removed Instagram entirely cold turkey. It's been three years now and I occasionally use the desktop version to message some friends.
The great thing about it is that I've saved myself many hours. I use that time for reading and walking and a variety of other activities. Also my attention span and mental health improved drastically.
Your mileage may vary. Here are a few ideas and ways to curb your “addiction”; they are my personal views and means, but I’ve heard enough people confirming that they work. See if you can structure your pattern and process to stay within your ways of consuming and using these mediums (YouTube, Instagram, etc.)
The first thing to do is turn off almost all notifications.[1] Even if you have Notifications ON for some critical app, Social Media Apps never need to be ON.
However, you will be tempted to open them up - this is where you delete from your phone, but use the desktop.[2] The desktop is more involved and not so casual that you whip up the App to start using it.
Try to use more physical Notebooks.[3] Using a To-Do, or a Note-Taking App on the phone will tempt you to wander off for just a few minutes of innocent and not-so-harmful distractions that balloon into hours of scrolls. A physical notebook and a pen deter you from straying to anything else.
As others have mentioned, try to resort to reading books as a replacement for these Apps.[4] For instance, have a book handy instead of reaching for Instagram.
It is also OK not to carry your phone 24/7. Walking in the park, reading time, talking to friends, dining with friends, etc., can be done without phones. If you must stay connected somehow, a Smartwatch can be a replacement.[5]
Find patterns that work for you. Keep trying and experimenting. Quite a few of these suggestions were a surprise for quite a lot of people, but have worked out brilliantly.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/phone/
3. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/
4. https://story.oinam.com/2018/why-physical-books-matter/
5. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/watch-tiny-handy-computer/
For Android there are patched Instagram apks with reels and feed hidden. Won't post any links, as the practice seems both shady and risky (in terms of privacy and security), do your own research.
Great if you wanna keep in touch with your friends but don't need any of Instagram's addictive
Yeah I've been this and it's great. saves me probably tens of hours of wasted time per week and I can still get DMs and see what my friends send me.
I feel very much the same way as the author about TikTok. I browse it far too often. I've implemented app based screen time limitations in iOS specifically for Reddit and TikTok but it's so easy to override. Deleting the apps for a few days works, but only for so long.
I really think the new AI panic is not as important as the original social media/algorithmic feed addiction panic. In fact some of the core problems with AI is that it’ll be used to generate slop for the algorithmic feed.
“The feed” is the tech world’s original sin, always will be. I wish there was someone around Mark Zuckerberg that would tell him that he needs to lead a movement to close the Pandora’s Box he’s opened. Be like Oppenheimer, Mark. You’ve become the destroyer of cognitive power worldwide, you should lead the movement to end it.
Everything else we’re trying is lipstick on a pig.
I think its also our responsibility to create a product to get people less addicted to it.
I think the feed is good. Were just so early it's not tamed yet. Can imagine in 5 years there will be an agent between the hardware and the apps to block what you dont like.
It's really annoying to read these articles that deliberately do not respect basic grammar rules. Is the purpose of it to make the reader dumber?
> if any clock in your house was off by six seconds, you wouldn’t spend any amount of time thinking about that
Excuse-me.
I'm so glad I never got in to Instagram. And I'm grateful that YouTube Shorts show up as unique pages in your browser history. Every once in a rare while I'll be tempted there, and it's enough for me to see just how many videos I've just scrolled through to scare me off.
Imagine if Reels had a watched count at the bottom of the screen...
There’s an app idea… just a front end for reels, etc that displays watch count. I think most people that get stuck on it don’t necessarily WANT to be.
I genuinely must have a mental defect. I use these apps casually and I can't say I've ever had the urge to pick up my phone at 4am and watch 2 hours of instagram shorts. They're usually annoying and pushed in my face which invokes a strong backlash effect. I typically watch an hour or two of YouTube a night, but only on the TV.
Every day I make a list of things I need to do. Once that list is completely, I shamelessly scroll whatever I want. This allows me to keep productivity on the level that I want, without sacrificing the pleasure of scrolling.
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Imagine if a person wrote a serious article on computer hardware but kept calling the RAM the hard drive and talking about the problem of bit decay without power in hard drives. That's how these articles sound when they keep misusing the word addiction in inapropriate contexts to emphasize their point. It really makes one wonder what else they're getting wrong. At best it's like the people who are "so OCD" because they do some completely normal thing. When a medical term is used inappropriately the framing can lead to even more dangerous outcomes than the social issue being addressed because medicalization of behavior leads to use of force.
In general, many addictions are self-diagnosed. Some guidelines include:
* is the behavior unwanted?
* is it frequent?
* is it uncontrollable?
* is it progressive?
* do you choose it to the detriment of more important things?
If you can answer yes to enough of those questions about anything it can be counted as an addiction. I don’t think the author was out of line.
As a recovering addict, I would worry more about dismissing other peoples’ struggles just because they don’t fit your idea of a “real problem.”
Is substance addiction a different animal than behavioral addiction? In some ways, yes. But substance addiction is not the only kind of addiction there is. No, I think normalizing the use of the word removes some of its stigma.
It's interesting too - some of the GLP-1 drugs to treat obesity control people's food "addictions" but they also are demonstrating effectiveness on opioid and alcohol addictions as well as gambling addictions. It turns out there are a lot of common reward pathways for substance abuse and behavioral compulsions.
Do you believe in gambling addiction? Behavioral addictions are medically recognized. No need to be so pedantic.
The best definition I have heard for addiction is: the pursuit of an activity or substance in spite of increasing negative consequences. Under that definition, social media addiction qualifies.