I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.
When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".
But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.
On Android at least, you can toggle "desktop view" in any browser. The UX is crap on some websites, but you can make things work enough to not need the app.
For example I use Opera to browse `facebook.com/messages`. It's a bad UX for writing (somehow it "swallows" some of the written text when you type too fast, or select text and try to overwrite it), but this makes me use it less. Won't ever install FB app on my phone.
For the first time ever I ran into a web app blocking Desktop Mode on Chrome for Android somehow. (ChowNow) I've seen sites detect it but issue a warning, but this was a full functionality-block.
I was literally using it fine one day, then the next they started saying I need to use the desktop website for menu editing as it's "more optimized."
Dinguses, if I'm manually turning on Desktop Mode I know it's not gonna be "optimized." Just let me get my menu edits pushed goddamnit!
Safari has this setting, but the half dozen times I've tried it, it doesn't work. I suspect you're right that it's because sites just look at the resolution.
That's because trying to detect desktop/mobile is itself gross and hacky, as well as hard to work with as a dev. Just doing resolution-based stuff is easier, more reliable, and usually a better experience when devs aren't lazy enough to just leave things out in the smaller views.
Yep! The dickbar in Apple's iPhone Safari app to install an app for the website I'm currently viewing is one of the reasons I no longer use Safari on my iPhone. The fact that there's not even a setting to turn that off is grating, because I have increasingly found that for a lot of websites, given a choice between the website and the app, I vastly prefer the website. Not always, sometimes I prefer the app, but there are some really shitty apps trying to pass themselves off as website replacements.
Also Wikipedia. I don't remember if I particularly disliked the first-party app, but I vastly prefer Wikipedia in a web browser.
There are several useful apps available for iOS that work as Safari extensions handling that kind of stuff. Banish is very useful, as well as Hush. In addition Opener allows you to chose if links shall open the respective app or just stay in the browser.
I appreciate your input and if that were the sole reason I switched browsers that might be enough, but how unreasonable is it that you have to get a 3rd party extension from the App Store to turn off an annoyance that Apple clearly thinks is a feature? Like if they’re going to retain the dickbar, it should be a checkbox in Safari’s settings to turn it off.
Tbh the link problem is common for everyone. I sent a tiktok link to a non tech friend and they couldn’t view it because they didn’t have an account. So I used a downloaded tool to send the video directly. All of the major social media sites are locking out users who aren’t signed in with the app. So you usually just screenshot or use an external tool to rip the content.
I simply reply, "I can't see that because it requires an account". Often people give up and don't send me anything... which I'm also fine with, since it's mostly "funny videos"
I don't have any social media accounts - I use rapidsave or faceb.com to download what they linked and send it right back to them every time, as a standalone video rather than a link.
Eventually they realize that's the better way to share it, ask me how I did that, and start doing it themselves.
RE: TikTok. I get links sent frequently and I can view on the web. They make it very difficult though! Muted and autoplay by default and hard to find the unmute button under a web of popups. I think the site isn't responsive either so desktop site on mobile. Also - for some videos at least on TikTok you can download the video via the share button! So not always necessary to use a third party tool.
> I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.
Yeah, we can waste a lot of time in front of the PC, but it at least can be used for creativity and productivity.
This might depend on one's age/generation. There are tons of internet-connected people today growing up without ever owning (or knowing how to use) a PC at all. They do everything on their phone, including the creative stuff. I didn't believe it either until I saw my friend's high-school age kid writing an entire 15 page writing assignment on her phone. Us PC people are kind of dinosaurs.
15 pages on a virtual keyboard? So that would have been, what, 100 pages on a computer?
I agree with the parent comment. Smartphones (and tablets) are useless for anything productive. They are entirely consumption machines. If somebody is able to do their job or studies entirely on a smartphone and tablet, it says more about their job and studies than anything.
What vexes me to this day is that you still can't really use something like VS Code on an iPad (you can do it in a browser in a limited way). A tablet, with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard would be a perfect hybrid for creative and productive work. I haven't really found a 2-in-1 that provides the same standard.
While you xan be productive, procrastination is right at the corner even on a PC.
For instance some people making music like to have a dedicated, offline computer to do so in lrder to not be tempted to open the web browser for 2 minutes that transformz itself into hours. Same for some writers who try to seek dedicated environments focused on writing and limiting their exposure to the internet.
Cannot relate. Aside from creating things for computers (code) I do a lot more creation-related stuff with my phone.
I mean, it's covered in cameras and microphones and shit. I can measure things with it. In a pinch, it's a level. Photos for reference at the hardware store. Filming content for most any purpose short of outright pro-level work, great on a phone. Tuner for my instruments, metronome if I want that, good for sheet music (iPad's best, but a phone will do in a pinch, and I'm not gonna carry a laptop around and unfold it and stuff). It fits in my pocket and I always have it, which means it's the only "notebook" I've been able to stick with for writing down ideas. Working with MIDI? Phone or tablet. In the workshop? Phone or tablet. Cooking? Phone or tablet. Working on my car? Phone. Working on the garden or any handyman-stuff around the house? Phone. A laptop would be a downgrade in every case, I don't really have any use for one aside from writing code.
I messed around with stuff like MSPaint as a kid, like everyone else, but these days I'd do that in Procreate on the iPad (and that is in fact what I use for drawing). Even the Pocket version on a phone would be better.
Unless I'm making things for computers an I-device is at least as good, and usually better, for creation-related stuff. Phones are worse for long-form writing, mostly due to the tiny screen, but a tablet's better for that than a laptop, given an external keyboard, because you can place the screen somewhere other than right on top of the keyboard, for better ergonomics.
The phone size is too limiting for a lot of work, and since most work involves writing in some form, it's a pain in the ass.
A lot of the things you listed are utilities, which I'd agree the phone is great for. If any of the things you've listed are a key feature of your job, for you it works. For the endless office hordes who write emails, code, documents etc. for a living, their only using a smartphone would suggest their job is largely superfluous to me.
A tablet is a happy medium, and a tablet with connectable keyboard is perfect. I wish VS Code (the full version) worked on an iPad. It's that extra bit of real estate.
Not much to add other than I switched to this exact model in 2020 and have had the same pleasant outcome for 5 years now. I’m much more productive and can execute deep work for weeks on end. I remained in the zone on my current project for 4 consecutive weeks. I attribute this to having no distractions. The outcomes produced from remaining in the zone for so long are objectively measurable and high level.
Yes though only 15 minutes a day max at regular break points in the day. Breakfast, lunch usually.
I have one of those parental limit things set for it from 5 years ago. I used to run into the 15 minute limit every day but now I rarely see it pop up.
Deep work isn't just about focus, it's about staying long enough in that state for the compounding effect to kick in, and it sounds like you've nailed that
I did all of this and it has served me well — as far as distractions and unwanted comms go. The problem is, now whenever I get that isolated spam (still happens daily or few times a week — just a little) it gets on my nerves, almost like a rage. Because it feels like a violation. For others I see, they don’t even register it.
I feel similarly whenever I carefully set notifications for apps, turning off everything but the most essential ones (like “your driver is arriving” from Uber) and then the corporation uses the only remaining notification channel to send me marketing engagement notifications like “20% off your next 3 rides!!”
I get pretty upset at this. I have a 1 strike policy for most apps. Now even Uber just doesn't get any notifications at all on my phone.
Same for email spam. If I didn’t opt in or if I unsubscribed and still get emails, or if unsubscribing requires more than 2 clicks, every single one gets reporter to Google as spam. If there’s no unsubscribe link I report it to the FTC.
I do it out of principle. If everyone took an absolutist hard line on these things, the world would be a tiny bit better.
Apps and phones are just so much better for surveillance which I know, duh. Most users simply don't give it any thought and install apps left and right permissions included. The smaller screen real estate is also better for surveillance - smaller number of things on screen equals more granular information on what you're doing precisely.
Extra toe-stubbing wishes for those that are pushing this paradigm into desktop - it's bewildering to me when I hear non-technical folks tell me that an app on desktop needs to come from an app store. Or when web design is being "simplified" and dumbed down really on desktop to facilitate surveillance.
Toe-stubbing-every-morning wishes to a lot of people for contributing to this reality.
I have been trying to reduce my usage.
I still cannot find a way to resist pulling out the phone to:
- perform a quick search (browser or ai)
- listen to podcasts
- listen to audiobook
- check the data of the last running or gym session.
Are there alternatives that are as friendly? Or being friendly is the danger here?
I had to combine two apps to really nail it. I should say that currently I'm in Android.
The first is an app called Bloom (theres another called Brick thats similar) that allows you to lock app access behind a physical NFC card. You lock the app and to unlock you must scan the card.
The second is an app called "freedom" that blocks access to specific websites or apps on a schedule.
I setup Freedom to block the distracting apps and websites during specific hours, then used Bloom to block Freedom, this prevents me from just disabling Freedom when I'm bored. I keep the NFC tag in my car.
Now I use a full featured smartphone that does what I want, and if I actually need access to social media or blocked sites I go to the car to unlock Bloom. I still have all the options, they're just a little more inconvenient.
The added friction of having to physically get up means I usually just don't bother, and Freedoms scheduling and category based blocks mean I can be pretty flexible about what I block and when.
Disable fingerprint unlock, add a long password, airplane mode unless you actively want to check something, &c. Add as many barriers as possible so that by the time you get through you either forgot why you came for or realised it's not that important
I don't think there are alternatives to what modern phones can do, unless you want to carry multiple dumb devices around (ebook + GPS + mp3 player for example)
I do carry my ereader with me, because I can read it without glasses (astigmatism) which is hard to do with an lcd panel. Using gps is rarer than using a phone. And it’s even rarer to listen to music on the go (I do have a small mp3 player with 512gb of storage, but it only comes when I have a bag)
Just a small data point/anecdote: I think the calls to install native apps are actually decreasing now. I don't get spammed for that nearly as much as 2014-2018 or so. Even banks seem to be getting comfortable with making mobile optimized websites now.
But like I said, just my perspective, I don't have any hard data points.
> Even banks seem to be getting comfortable with making mobile optimized websites now
At the cost of making an actually useful website for those of us not on mobile. My bank insists on making their website/online banking platform work as if it was their mobile app. The flow of bank transfers, paying bills, writing to your banking adviser is now entirely confusing and feels unsafe. Even a 14" laptop has plenty of space to show you detailed overviews, but no, assume that the user is on a tiny ass screen and show them mostly white-space.
TBH I've come around on it and I kinda prefer the Fischer Price phone UIs over the sites with random smatterings of 7px microfont, .ASPX pages redirecting eighteen times, and functions hidden two levels deep in floating overflow navs (which don't properly track hover state and disappear when you try getting into a deeper level).
But it's really a pick-your-poison situation. All of it sucks on some level haha.
Somewhat off-topic, but since it might be useful to you and others:
> if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
I'm signed in to both my Firefox on Android and on desktop, and I can hit the share button while viewing a website and then tap my desktop Firefox under "Send to device". Saves a bunch of steps there.
You did everything right (set boundaries, kept things intentional) and still the internet crept in through the cracks like water under a poorly sealed door
Most of those mobile application nags can be removed by enabling the corresponding filter list in uBlock Origin settings. If you're not using Firefox on the phone, both Vivaldi and Brave have this subscription in their settings (I think it might even be enabled out of the box).
> When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go.
From my social circle, the only such annoying links I get are from Instagram.
I have a deep, almost visceral hatred for the current incarnation of social media, so I go out of my way to not create accounts on those things.
For Instagram and similar shit, I could find some nice downloader bots on Telegram. They typically require you to join some spam channels, but you can join and archive those so you never see that they exist.
>> For Instagram and similar shit, I could find some nice downloader bots on Telegram. They typically require you to join some spam channels, but you can join and archive those so you never see that they exist.
Why is this better than just joining Instagram with a 'ghost' account only used to view things you've been sent. No following or viewing otherwise. Is it just self-control (which I fully understand if it is)?
Because I think social media is inherently evil, and by creating and account (even a dummy one as you described) I would still be feeding a beast that I would rather see dead.
It does help with self control - I intentionally hamstring my ability to see Instagram (and other social media) content by following a slightly cumbersome procedure on Telegram that also makes it impossible for me to search or view any related content. But that is a second-order benefit.
Also on Android you can use Firefox Nightly with uBlock Origin. Go to settings and enable all the Social and Annoyances lists. This should suppress many prompts to download an app.
I found the one thing that kept me off of my phone was using a degoogled pixel 4XL with Graphene OS on it. So much you can't do on the stock version using F-Droid app store. I really enjoyed until I needed to start downloading a few banking apps that didn't work on it.
So I'm back, but limit what I have on my phone now and its like you said, a constant struggle NOT to download and install something.
> The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or *visit them in-browser.*
Tiktok having a borderline unusable web app has done wonders for me. I'll end up on it because someone sent me a link, I can watch that ONE video, a single time, before normally I get a spot-the-boat style captcha or an "install the app" modal. Even trying to get past that point, it feels like the site is somehow falling apart at the seams as you navigate around. I know the concept is "well people will install the app then" but that's also annoyingly frictionful.
They unintentionally made the most literal social media experience: some one sends me media, I watch it once, I leave before the site crumbles to pieces like an ancient tomb that was only held together by a load-bearing dog video.
I like Reddit, I pay for an app on iOS to have a reasonable experience. The mobile web experience otherwise is terrible.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
I'm firmly convinced we will, eventually, look back at algorithmic social media with the same revulsion as we now look at leaded gasoline or ubiquitous cigarretes. No less harmful.
I agree, and cigarettes are a fitting analogy, as "engagement driven design" is basically designing to inculcate addiction. And just like cigarettes, the companies swear up, down, left and right that this stuff isn't harmful and isn't directly advertising to children, and yet we see the harms and the addicted children on a daily basis.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
100%. I've been sleeping poorly recently. Made the decision to leave my phone in another room. Immediately started falling asleep within 30mins (instead of 2-3 hours) and felt much better. After a couple of weeks I brought the phone back in. Instinctually, before I even knew what I was doing, I was picking it up. A few mins would pass, I was still awake, I'll watch some Reels. It was completely unintentional. As an ex-smoker I can confidently say this stuff is much more addictive and much harder to quit. And just like the cigarette companies, the engineers and data scientists know what they're doing. It's evil.
The arc of social media is truly breathtakingly awful. At this point it’s hard for me to see any value in it at all.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
It is amazing to me how dogshit the reddit mobile experience is. Some comments load, others don't. Will the child comments load? Who knows. Is this ordered in any way? How about 5 links you don't care about instead of the discussion thread you clicked on.
old.reddit.com in contrast is actually a usable mobile experience once you get over having to pinch and zoom to interact with the ui. Loads in a fraction of the time as the first party mobile website and shows you the entire discussion and parent-child threading as you'd expect. No nondeterministic behavior.
It was a solved problem with apps like Reddit is Fun from the time I got my first smartphone (it ran Android 2.2), but the fun had to end with locked APIs.
Instagram has had broken web notifications for a month or so. You click the notifications and nothing happens; the post doesn’t open. The first days I thought someone had messed something up but after a month I’m not so sure. And there obviously is no way of telling them (and have a human read the report).
Instagram is the worst. I started on there because I got back in photography and people said I absolutely needed to be on it.
Notifications has been broken off and on for months now. Before you would see there were message on your post. Click on post? Nothing. First it would load the image and show zero comments. Then it wouldn't load the image and just a blank screen. Now its the same problem in the notifications menu. Can't click on the comment, won't bring up the notice, nothing happens.
Its 2025 and its the worst UI experience I've had on any social media app and its not even close. I just keep wondering how this can be this bad for this long without anything changing.
I believe that short form video coupled with infinite scroll mesmerizes humans. It keeps them in a trance by using suspense. The brain absolutely must know how the video plays out whether that be waiting for the punchline, a fight to break our or a fact to be delivered. Once the brain has locked eyes on the video the user must put significant energy into making a conscious decision to look away.
Even OpenAI's latest Sora app leans into this format and the videos there are literally the poorest quality on the Internet. 99.999% of them are eight seconds of unintelligent, unintelligible, low grade digitally created excrement.
There should be a law against it.
Big Tech knows this. They have teams of people with doctorates making apps engaging.
It's a slot machine. Everything social media and e-commerce is a slot machine. Each scroll is a pull of the arm, hoping that the algorithmic gods will smile kindly on you and give you some sweet content or deal.
Read "Supernormal Stimuli" by Barret [1] for an exploration of the psychology of this "mesmerizing" effect - at least in general, if not specifically in short-form video and infinite scroll.
Whether the artificial stimulus comes in the form of junk food, entertainment, social connection, sex, we've seen time and time again that trillion-dollar megacorps employing thousands of the greatest minds of our generation have been able to invent substitutes that are more compelling than evolution has prepared the human brain to be able to deal with.
It does seem like video shorts are especially easy to exploit.
dopamine reward feedback loop. Video scrolling is an insidious form of it because the feedback time is so short that you end up hooked on it for hours, feeling bad afterwards; seriously potent stuff.
It’s insane. And once you’ve got a habit for it it’s so hard to stop. Without thinking about it you end up back on there scrolling slop. I’ve started to look at using the Screen Time feature on iOS, but it’s hard when some apps have a dual function like YouTube I use for music but also has Shorts.
Maybe consider getting a different, dedicated program for music (line Spotify)? Sometimes doing thinks just to work around your brain is the right thing to do.
I guess I'm fortunate enough to find shorts unbearable.
I occasionally watch some from creators I like, but tbh I find a great majority of them really annoying. The vertical frame, the silly endings after 30s of crap. God. It's so bad.
I'm really glad that for whatever reason my brain has completely rejected short-form content. It seems to be a serious problem for a lot of people. I don't understand it the same way I don't understand heroin addictions. My mind is just screaming "STOP DOING IT" and cannot get passed that concept very far.
You're on HN, though. In some sense, reeling in people like you has been a solved problem for decades, since forums were invented.
I apologize for what is doubtless egregious projection on my part.
I am like you in the sense that I seem "immune" to TikTok/Reels, especially relative to my wife, who can definitely get sucked into it for 30-60 minutes. However, I'm easily-snared by things like "the last year of drama in the NixOS community". I can easily spend an hour I don't have reading forum threads in which people are accusing moderators of abusing their position in a forum about a piece of technology I don't use.
So in some sense the tech industry didn't need to "innovate" in order to suck me in. I was getting sucked into reading about web forum drama 20 years ago.
There's also the very real trap of traditional forum comments being ranked higher in your brain's algorithm for "relevance" since you can explain it as reading alternative perspectives. There's real FOMO in reading news without having comments for me sometimes, because what if there's a perspective that I'm completely missing here?
Of course, long term I know time spent this way is mostly wasted for the value I get out of it.
It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.
Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.
If HN was boring, it wouldn't have a "noprocrast" setting.
This forum is addicting to a lot of people. There are also clickbait titles (though less than elsewhere), heated debates, even flamewars in the comments.
I disagree. Debate, karma, religious tech wars, replies. All fun. I spent so much time here in the early days that I noticed my personality change. I'd been debating online so much for a few years that it was seeping into the real world me. I couldn't let people be 'wrong' without correcting them and, even if you're right, that's an annoying person to be around (I see the irony of this comment).
Eh people can develop those with pseudonymous accounts too. There's a reason why people bemoan the death of early twitter "communities" and whatnot. There are plenty reddit celebrity accounts as well.
People do project their general behaviour patterns on social media regardless of the form, though some forms are more malleable to that than others.
Oh shit, I wasn't expecting you to be serious about it.
Well, in that case, I need some sources. For example, I'm not convinced that people project on social media to the extent that you're implying they do. It's a statement that needs support (which you didn't provided).
I am confident that you are able to find those sources, then we'll be able to talk about it on a common ground!
You need sources for the fact that there are celebrity Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit accounts? You can easily find many of these, just some google searching is required. Not accounts owned by celebrities mind you (of which there are also many), pseudonymous accounts that have become celebrities over the years.
As for evidence for people actually miss old Twitter, sorry I can't prove to you I have friends who mention that multiple times a month. You can take it for what it is (someone sharing their experience) or you can assume that I'm making this up for the sake of a throwaway internet conversation. Your choice.
I find it incredibly more distracting when someone nearby or in the household is watching tiktok or similar within earshot than if they are watching a longer-form video or television program. Seemingly because I can "tune-out" the long form program but every time the video switches with tiktok, my brain "activates" and gets distracted to check if it needs to pay attention or not.
The trick of short form video isn’t the content itself but the channel flipping, hunting hook action. Changing the channel is fun when you actually land on something-good in the sea of garbage. And sometimes that something-good is a an endless handkerchief. One that you can keep pulling out good somethings with. Now you feel extra special like you’ve found something novel as you’ve completed the hunt and are satiated. And you keep that endless handkerchief you found. Soon you will have found many novel endless handkerchiefs. You mount them on your profile page like boar heads on a hunters wall. This pride is tied to happiness and you know how to hunt for more.
I highly recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal[0]. It is the book that effortlessly detailed how to build short form video networks (as well as other addicting software over the last 10+ years). The people who built this stuff read it and the people who want to stop the addictions should read it.
I find the shorts on youtube super addictive, but the algo is too repetitive. I once watched a drumming video to then end, not I get heaps of drumming. It's cool, but I'm just not that into drumming.
I've been trying to correct the algo but giving a down thumb to videos I don't want to watch but its not learning.
It's amazing how much a couple small changes can make on your browsing experience. The companies that own these products have a huge incentive to make every element purposefully addictive. I've also patched the iOS Instagram app to remove all Reels (using FLEXtool & Sideloadly), so I can keep up with my friends without falling into the traps. As developers, we have the ability to target these manipulative tactics and remove them, and I encourage you to do this as much as possible.
The issue for me is that I really want History (sometimes I need to go back to a video I know I watched 3 weeks ago). It's bs that they need history disabled to also disable recommendations.
I heavily use android's focus mode to keep myself from being too distracted. Originally I tried using app timers, but I found myself just constantly bumping them to the point where I wasn't getting a benefit. Whenever I notice an app being noisy with notifications (even if I appreciate them when I'm not busy), I add it into the list of distracting apps. I have a daily focus timer that enabled when I get to work and ends when I (generally) leave work. This keeps me focused during the day, but I also occasionally enable this when I want to focus on other things, or if I find myself spending too much time on random apps. Because of the way that the breaks work, I have to keep asking for 5/15/30min and I'm very aware of how much time I'm wasting. I also enable flip-to-shh mode, which disables all notifications when my phone is face down on a surface. I realize that focus mode and flip-to-shh can seem extreme, but I noticed this works well worked for me.
+1 to focus mode; at least on Samsung-flavored Android, you can set a recurring schedule so that focus mode (or any mode) automatically kicks in on certain days/times, which I use to block notifications from and access to certain apps during peak working hours.
Another feature I really like that also might be unique to Samsung-flavored Android--it's been a decade since I've had a device running Vanilla android, lol--is the overall daily screentime tracker. It's purely observational, so there's no penalty for going over, but unlike the app time limits that you can snooze there isn't a way to subtract time that you actually spent, which helps keep me accountable. Mainly I like having a widget that tracks the day's stats on my home screen, because being able to go "oof, did I really spend 45 minutes on <app> today already?" is a strong motivator for me to shape up.
As a bonus, you can also _exclude_ certain apps from the time limit tracker, which I like because it nudges me towards more constructive habits. Stuff like my notes app and Waze don't count towards the timer, nor does my e-reader of choice, which means I'm more likely to read a few pages of a book if I have time to kill since it's "free" against my daily screen goal.
I wanted to develop an alternative to App Timer on Android. I need something more like "App Timeouts". App Timers are per 24 hours, so as soon I hit X amount of minutes, I'm blocked from using it until midnight and then it resets.
What do I mean about App Timeout?
I want to say "Once I reach 20min on this app, block me from using it for 2 hours". Then it resets after 2 hours from that point. Both of those times being configurable of course.
The problem with the built-in Android App Timers now is I end up setting it to something large, like 1 hour or more because I'm thinking about how much time I want for a full day, but then I just sit there in 1 sitting swiping for that whole amount of time. And this usually happens after midnight so I know that I'm going to be blocked for my next day until after midnight again and the cycle continues.
I'd rather something force me to use it in shorter bits of time. So at midnight I can allow myself to get into an Instagram hole for 10 or 20min, but at least I know when I wake up it's been reset. I think doing this will train me to use the app for shorter amounts of time in general (or at least I think so and I want to test that theory).
I don't even know if this is possible in Android. How can one app block another. Maybe by allowing it to overlay over other apps or something?
The opposing viewpoint is that smartphones do fill a need of the modern world, and that is that most people have been separated from their families due to the logistics of finding paying work.
Some of my relatives in the 90s, things weren't much better without smartphones. You had long distance calling and TV, or otherwise you were alone. One of my relatives attempted suicide when she was very young, you can guess why.
But yes, it obviously makes sense to use smartphones intelligently. Meta products and Tik Tok are poison for the mind. And unless you're at home it's a good idea to just shut the smartphone off.
> The opposing viewpoint is that smartphones do fill a need of the modern world, and that is that most people have been separated from their families due to the logistics of finding paying work.
I agree. Tech-minimalists seem to forget that not everybody lives in some heavenly small mountain-side commune.
The article says a lot of things about being 'present', 'mindful', 'nurturing relationships' and 'enjoying the world'.
I don't want to be present. In fact, I want the complete opposite. I want to be literally anywhere else 99.99% of the time.
If I look at my phone and get to look at nice things, talk to incredible people and imagine lots of wish-fulfillment scenarios, I can pretend for a while that not everything is absolute dogshit 24/7.
Yep, same. For those of us living in heavily polluted industrial shitholes, in undeveloped countries, with absolutely nothing of value to do outside and no easy way to get out of the city in a reasonable amount of time, the internet is an absolute godsend. I'm pretty sure I would be an alcoholic, or wouldn't be alive at all if it wasn't available.
Smart phones are the best and the worst glued together. None of the past solutions came with a crack dealer nudging you to ruin your life and waste your time every few seconds.
Thanks for bringing this up, it's a great alternative POV.
I think what is meant is that if the phone is acting not only as an "escape" but also as a way of avoiding dealing with things or even changing them, then it is, in fact, harming you from the possibility of improving your condition.
Not for me to judge who is in that position or not, but I would definitely say many people use it as an avoidance rather than having to deal with hard stuff. Change is hard, always was, even before phones.
Playing the victim card is always easier: my life sucks, there's nothing I can do, at least my phone keeps me happier. In many cases, there is always something you can do if you are willing to put the effort. But then again, not for me to judge. Some people are in really tough places.
While completely believing what you write, hasn't it ever occured to you to try to change those things for the better? Using such a sleazy device as a phone to escape reality around you is... bad on many levels you surely are well aware of.
Its easier than ever before to move away regardless where you are, change jobs, reinvent yourself, to form relationships (I know this is much deeper topic but tools for meeting people are really ubiquous, and the rest is just a number game and some self-improvement effort), and at least do your damnest to (re)define rest of your life. Yesterday was the best time, today is second best.
> What am I supposed to enjoy, exactly?
I've spent recently 2 weeks backpacking around some pretty remote parts of Indonesia. Cheap trip, most of the cost were tickets, the rest were just coral/wreck dives. The only westerners I've met (and there were relatively many) have all exactly same bug as me - its absolutely stunning and life-redefining experience. Its not easy or pleasant some times (since you go deep into 3rd world countries with only basic infrastructure, even phone signal can be rare, internet much more so), and properly amazing at others, and the only thing you think of when coming back is how and when to do it again, more, more remote.
One of many suggestions how to make one's life much better and give it some proper motivation. Plus as said it changes you for the better, this I can guarantee 100%. There is tons of beauty in the world, just ignore the noise, politics, and people and companies gaming you for your data making humanity worse off one step at a time.
Reinventing yourself only goes so far before you bump into the political and economic reality of today.
Especially since I'm not a westerner. It's not great out here.
> There is tons of beauty in the world, just ignore the noise, politics, and people and companies gaming you for your data making humanity worse off one step at a time.
It would be easier if said politics and people didn't want people like me or my (online) friends suffering and/or dead. I avoid going outside as much as possible.
I'm not doing too badly economically, honestly. I'm extremely lucky to be able to gild my cage. Doesn't really make me happy, but I guess this is as good as it gets.
That's great and that's what I aspire, but as it's so easy and quick typing and sending a mail I just send it like that. I remember the days before when I hand wrote the occasional letter and delivered it myself or sent it by post.
Would you consider handwriting a letter and then fax2email it also an option, if not why not? Writing a letter can be much more intentional, but the sending process could be automated.
I remember I bought a german book with bundled talks/essays at the Goetheanum bookshop last year about how to relate to the digital revolution. Distracted by the internet I haven't had time yet to read the book.
"Das Ende des Menschen? Wege durch und aus dem Transhumanismus" (The End of Man? Ways Through and Out of Transhumanism), edited by Ariane Eichenberg and Christiane Haid.
Often I'll include a stamped postcard, addressed to my PO Box, because I think there is something important about paying for the privilege to communicate with somebody off-line [the stamp]. It forces your message to be more concise/worthwhile.
There is also something sweet about having a built-in delay for the message to "gestate" — perhaps if politically-related, your point is even further reinforced as "prescient," as the pre-dated postmark attests (upon delayed arrival). Perhaps you're wrong and wasted a stamp.
----
Mostly I agree with (I believe) P.G.'s premise that email is nothing more than a to-do list that anybody can add on to. I do not wish to ever be immediately reachable, again, and this is an expensive freedom/lifestyle.
I am simply too angry to have access to a system [email] where I can immediately tell anybody in the world how I feel about something [and did for a quarter-century]. If something really bothers me, it has to be worth a postage stamp (I usually write postcards, but also have thousands of FOREVER Stamps™).
It's not a competition between eras to see which is worse, my point is only that smartphones fill a need for isolated adults. That can be true and they can still pose a problem for teenagers, it's two separate issues.
I find most of the debate on smartphone use tends to fall on the extreme. Why not find a happy middle ground and recognize that they do have valid uses?
The most addicted family-as-a-whole to the screens I know of live literally 100m from each other (3 generations). Suffice to say this is far from their only addiction. What you describe is certainly true for some people, but I am having hard time believing this is majority. I live long term far away from family and an occasional whatsapp video call is covering our digital meeting needs.
Most people are simply too weak mentally to resist various self-forming addictions and don't care about these topics at all.
It isn't so much about the smartphone replacing family as it is about phones giving us something to do in our homes in lieu of the presence of other people.
Even a family that lives close to each other is separated in space by different homes and will often find themselves alone. But their situation will be much better than someone with no family around. They have the option to see each other, many don't.
I think the more detailed point is that we're largely atomized these days into separate physical spaces where we're often alone, or confined to a small number of people. Smartphones and computers make it a hell of a lot easier to break through that problem.
I have a similar great+simple system for curbing consumptive screen-time, i.e. I don't keep any of those apps on the phone, I block all of those websites on phone/laptop web-browser using an extension like Leech-Block and Un-Hook (YT). Some things that I allow are - YT long-form videos from subscriptions only, Hacker-News, and Linked-In.
THE biggest impediment for me has been stuff like getting sick. When I am sick, I just cannot lie there and do nothing. And it is TOO difficult to do stuff like read books or go out and talk to people or whatnot, it's too much effort. I HAVE to get back on consumptive screen-time. And then it devolves into something uglier - an ugly spiral, of gluttony & consumption, and I keep at it even beyond getting better.
Then it takes days or weeks of laziness and excuses to get back on track. And not just sickness but anything of that level. Anything that just kinda derails my life for a bit. I really need to find a middle-ground solution for the worst-case scenarios. I'm still working on it. I think I should be able to figure it out. It took me a while to figure out my best-case system as well.
I just use an old phone. App developers are lazy and very quick to pull support for devices that are even a little old. A large number of apps won't even install or start, or complain to you to try to shame you into buying a new phone. Use developers' laziness to your advantage.
Ditto! I try reading some silly things, play some old silly games (e.g. Warcraft, not arcades), or just watch some YouTube. But I don’t watch YouTube in my daily life, so I’m not addicted to it.
For me reading books works well when I’m sick in bed.
You probably need to force yourself for a while but it’s worth it.
That being said i was a voracious reader in the past so it might not tickle your toes in the same way
I keep my phones in the other room on silent all day, don't use anything with an algorithmic infinite feed, don't use social media, and blocked all the news websites I could.
It's amazing to me how many people can't seem to walk down the street these days without staring at their phones the entire time.
I think they're addictive, bad for your mental health and acuity, and bad for society. And it's amazing how much time I'll spend even just checking the two small hobby discords I'm in just cause I've been so tuned towards picking up the phone when bored.
Leaving it in the other room on a speaker is nice cause it at least forces me to get up, and since I keep it on the speaker I don't often sit with it anymore. Which means I do other stuff like read, and clean, and work on things, or just sit and stare at the wall and let my brain breathe.
I still use maps (without location though), check out which helicopters and ships I'm looking at, weather, email, search, and Spanish flashcards through Anki. Which I think are nice activities.
I've been using two decks, adding 20 new cards a day.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1631165043 - This is 5000 common Spanish words. Be warned, the pictures appear to have been pulled by some sort of automated process and some are risque. That being said, I learn words and then see or hear them fairly quickly while watching baseball en español, o leyendo las noticias o los librose.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/638411848 - Spanish conjugation. Super hard at first, especially since it starts with the most unique verbs. But patterns emerge, and incredibly useful.
Those two are the only... "formal" work if you can call it that that I'm doing. The rest is writing to friends and notes at work, watching baseball and tv (and with subtitles and audio where possible), reading the news sometimes (still difficult, but has added benefit that I read less news), setting interfaces to Spanish.
My Spanish is really coming along at this point, and it's very cool. Wishing you good luck in your endeavor!! The most important thing is to just stick with it.
I had a side gig that involved me driving every day for at least one hour, but usually more. I listened to all kinds of podcasts and audio books. But at some point, I realised I cannot process that much of information. That’s how I stopped, perhaps we humans aren’t designed to process that much daily.
It feels validating that other people have a similar experience. I simply can't take in that much information. It eventually starts making me feel terrible.
The big issue is that I'm not very good at moderating my intake. I'm a crack addict for information and one small dose will turn into a bender.
I think it's fine if you accept it as entertainment and nothing more. That's why I don't get how people listen to audiobooks on 3x. The goal isn't to ingest as much as you can--the goal is to enjoy it and maybe learn something useful here and there.
I have an old phone I've repurposed as a media player. It has a 500 GB SD card and Oluancher to give it a really convenient way to only show the apps I want.
I've got a somewhat weekly 6 hour round-trip commute where it get a lot of use.
I think best thing I did with my phone is turning sound off, it doesn't make sound except my alarm, it doesn't vibrate either. Granted I don't have kids/don't work in a place that has on-call.
For computer I'm almost 100% on there all the time whether at work or at home, I can't handle silence. The present thing is funny, when the internet goes out I'm in the present like oh man what do I do.
I think going out and being in nature is good for being present. Watching the ocean/large body of water, huge field, being in a forest, etc...
It is funny how your mind operates where you're always in some state, it's 9 AM I gotta be at work, it's this time I have to do this next... that's what I aim for is not huge wealth (although that'd be nice stealth anyway) but freedom with my own time. Right now from dumb choices I'm burdened with debt so my main reason to continue living is just working to pay bills. Not saying that in a bad way I just realized that, trying to get passion back in something. And my cat gotta care for him.
> While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing
For those looking to drop a(ny) habit: this seems to be the key
Why disabling youtube recommendation? It is literally the only recommendation engine that works, just don't watch shite (at least from your account) and you will never be recommended of that. Other smartphone services are irrepairely wrong, but youtube is a search engine for what you dream. Everything you are searching in google or mentioning somewhere on youtube forum will be added to your "interests". Regular search is broken but the recommendation "search" is the best service I ever had, it is like an oldschool librarian who knows what book will interest you.
because it flips the content consumption model on its head. instead of "i want to watch a video about X" -> search for video about X -> watch, the loop becomes open youtube -> see interesting recommendation -> watch. you are no longer using youtube as a tool to consume videos, it is using you, increasing time spent on the site/app and therefore generating more ad revenue.
How youtube can use me if I spend all my time outdoors and yt is just a radio? There are some ways to see it without ads even wihout deepening the profile with the credit card.
My point is that there is no better software to get acknowledged about the different Xs than yt. My point is to go cold turkey about any other recqmmendation services because they can not serve my interests when I work with my hands, or walking, or driving. I have listened some 3.5 hours podcast about Math and I am sure there is no other way to consume such a podcasts other way than I recommend here.
I believe the point he was trying to make is that he doesn't want to be recommended things he wants to watch. He wants his YouTube use to be be focused and intentional, and not let himself get sucked into an endless stream of engaging content.
And my point is that your words is about any other recommendation engine. Youtube is very different, there is no better information source to shape oneself what is really good to be interested in. Except of maybe book search websites.
The author wants to find content when he is looking for something specific. He does not want his attention grabbed by something he wasn't looking for, no matter how educational it may be.
Multiple people have clearly explained this to you in several comment threads and you're still insisting it makes no sense. At this point the only question is why you don't want to understand.
Well, what is enough good to grab one's attention? If not Youtube, something/somebody else has to provide this function for the person. The impact Youtube does on me is like having fucking Aristotle as a teacher. Tell me please what is better.
> It is literally the only recommendation engine that works.
do you really find this to be true? i find it’s incredibly wrong like 90+ percent of the time. i am not close to interested in most of its recs. i’ve tried for years to tell it what i like and its just wrong so often. i’ve even tried entirely new accounts.
i mean, sure every once in a while im like “whoa, that’s a great rec” but thats pretty rare. it’s definitely better than spotify and the like etc… they’re wrong almost always, but a miss rate of more than 9 times out of 10 is so bad.
recommendations from people is so much more accurate.
when i get a music recommendation from someone who works at the record store the positive hit rate is so high, same with movies and music recommendations from friends, etc… if it works for you that’s great but my feed is overflowing with video after video where i’m like “why in tf do you think i’d want to watch this?”
> when i get a music recommendation from someone who works at the record store the positive hit rate is so high, same with movies and music recommendations from friends, etc…
That tells me you are a simple person so yt gives you a simple recommendations. Music content in yt is poor, your music taste can be improved in different places. Movies are just a stupid time consuming, if you like to watch them, why to complain about bad recommendations?
> recommendations from people is so much more accurate.
You are happy to have well-educated friends probably.
> a miss rate of more than 9 times out of 10 is so bad.
For me its top 10 slots are 100% about the persons I appreciate, so to get to the point is time when 9 of 10 are bad I need to watch everything what the persons have published for the time I have been offline. 90%/10% is just the usual Pareto, it's ok.
> i’ve tried for years to tell it what i like and its just wrong so often
It doesn't take years. Just open all youtube links featured on HN and start playing those from your account without even seing/listening. You will see the changes immediately. Next step is to just stop watching any channel with 1M subs and any videos with 1M watches. Soon yt will ask you in some modal window: do you want to see the content from the smaller channels? Press the "yes" answer and you will unleash the real power of yt without clickbait headers, with no arrows on previews etc. Join small channels and treat them like Reddit subforums. This totally works for me, I participate in more discussions on yt than on HN.
I'd say YT recommendations are more than 90% right for me. It almost always recommends me stuff I'm interested in, related to things I've watched. It seems to have the best recommendation engine of all the social media I use, hands down.
I just have to be careful, when I watch something I don't want YT to think I liked, to remove it from my watch history.
Spend every day for a year watching the highest quality YouTube content and it won't get you as far as spending every day for a month directly engaging with content yourself, or some other use of the same time. It's fun, engaging, and easy enough to turn into something you can argue "but it's not slop, it's <x>!". At the end of the day though... it's still 95% entertainment.
I spend a lot of time "protecting" my YouTube recommendations (clearing garbage videos from my history, blocking certain channels, opening links from friends separately) but I still try to immensely limit the amount of time I spend on the site, and the recommendations go directly against that.
You still seing it wrong. Youtube is the best radio possible, it never disappoints me while my outdoor activity. There are no reason to "watch" 99% of hours of content, nothing is interesting in seing talking heads.
Negative measures such as clearing history, putting dislikes and using "not recommend" just doesn't work because from my experience the only negative metrics which works is just refusing to watch shite. Youtube actively uses spaced repetition approach so consider any time you are being recommended to shite as active shaping your recommendation engine. Don't even touch that square with the cursor. Try teaching your recommendation blackbox in positive ways - watch some channels when you are not watching and listening, subscribe to small channels, write comments with no less than 8 words and actively use such nouns which you are welcome to be recommended to.
I also avoid spending much (if any) time listening to the radio/podcasts/etc these days for the same reasons.
> Negative measures such as clearing history, putting dislikes and using "not recommend" just doesn't work because from my experience the only negative metrics which works is just refusing to watch shite.
Clearing history certainly works, just make sure there is absolutely not a single unwanted video in your history or the algorithm will go on a tirade thinking "I REALLY bet I can get this person interested in Lego videos because they watched one 4 weeks ago and I have a ton of Lego content they've not even touched yet". The instant you clear the final offender the recommendations change like night/day.
I'm not sure dislikes/"Not interested" actually do anything. "Don't recommend channel" also definitely works, though there may be a limit to how long they are saved and it's better to just aim the algorithm.
The only thing the algorithm is really good for is finding videos it thinks will suck up your time. The curation is ultimately down to how much work you put into it, which isn't all that unique to YouTube. Putting similar effort into curating any large body of content will also get you more content than you have time to consume, but still doesn't help you actually gain much from engaging with it anyways.
I haven't really try cleaning all the history but I have 2 points of why I consider cleaning the history as futile.
1. Youtube obviously grabs some info not only from Youtube but it also grabs all history from Google search and most of all some random words from Gmail, cleaning that all just for the sake of experiment might be not handy.
2. If some video has got deleted it obviously disappears from history. But there is a man I really fond of, his channels are regularly get banned after a month of activity, than the man finds a new channel with new author/interviewer. Somehow I am among the first ones to get recommended about new interviews with the man.
> "I REALLY bet I can get this person interested in Lego videos because they watched one 4 weeks ago and I have a ton of Lego content they've not even touched yet"
I can share another anecdote. Ten years ago there were a music video "Wintergatan - Marble Machine". I used to watched it dozens of times almost every day. Now if I scroll the feed to the end (Yt is not a doomscrolling) I have 90% probability of receiving the Marble Machine in the very last line. I have not touched it even once in the last several years but it knows I used to love it earlier. BTW it doesn't remember what I loved 15 years ago when most of the videos required Adobe Flash.
> The only thing the algorithm is really good for is finding videos it thinks will suck up your time.
Isn't that how a really great teachers teach? Forget about the teacher's interest, the teacher exists until the fellow pupil is interested.
> The curation is ultimately down to how much work you put into it, which isn't all that unique to YouTube.
That's a lie because FB and other rivals have nothing except the engine (no useful content). Just consume it responsively. The only reason to not use yt's algo is when you are so fond of your work that you have the chair glued to your arse and every second spent to someone's wise thoughts means a lost penny. So pity I have typed a lot of text but noone has asked me to share all my hacks to shape the algo towards one's satisfaction.
I concur. The YouTube algorithm actually appears to work, and doesn't feel like it's trying to steer me away from my interests. My only issue is that it will suggest "current event" type content that is years old sometimes.
Youtube does that for some channels or persons which are so favorable for me that I use to watch all of their videos.
My recommendation about human interests and yt consuming is not to close yourself in your shell, but actively explore what are there any interesting. I become cold turkey to any other recommendation services since I have unleashed the power of Yt.
I researched this phone, and while being cool (I like the idea), it’s not practical for me to hunt it, it’s not trivial to buy in my area. However, I have a similar idea to others: an old tiny iPhone (4S or 5S if you can survive with the obsolete system, FaceTime and iMessage works there last time I checked, a year or two ago), or SE 1st gen (I use it as my second phone to my 12 mini), which is perfectly usable (Safari is stuck at whatever version it has from iOS 15). It’s not very practical everyday phone, but it works for most tasks, including navigation with maps. So if you’re hunting a small distraction free phone, an obsolete iPhone is a pretty decent thing to buy, and is usually cheap. I bet getting a new battery might be more expensive than the phone itself, unless you’re up to the task (it’s not complicated, if you have the basic instruments). I know it’s the opposite of an open phone with an easily swappable battery, but it’s a decent step into the direction. And I found an old iPhone being very usable for very basic tasks. If I had a Pro Max, I’d surely wasted much more time on it. I know because I had one before.
I've been running dumbified version of iOS for a few months now, and I'm very happy with it.
I removed every 'fun' app except for a few exceptions:
- ChatGPT, but mostly in voice mode, and with other people - as a party trick.
- Whisper Memos (https://whispermemos.com/), I record voice memos and they end up in my email, so I can continue with that idea when I'm on a computer (whether that is a prompt for AI, or a todo.)
- Basics like Banking, EV charging, Maps, Parking, Messages, Weather, Authenticator, Reminders, etc.
I removed App Store as well as Safari, so these apps is all I can do on my iPhone.
In the beginning, I set up a Screen Time code so I wouldn't be able to cheat. But in a few weeks I got used to it. So App Store and Safari are enabled again, but I never use them. (Maybe Safari is disabled. I have no idea to be honest.)
The biggest downside is I never know where my phone is. However, I'll gladly accept this downside.
30 minutes per day on your iPhone each day is insane. I spend 2.5 hrs according to my phone, and that's about 50% necessity and 50% nonsense like Twitter.
May I ask what you do that requires doing it on the phone?
If "necessity" means work-related: On my work-issued iPhone, I call and (briefly) text with people, triage some e-mail, have a look at calendars, take some in-situ photo/video, refer to a few notes, and so on. I don't have the screen time feature turned on but I guess I'm also below 30 minutes on that phone on most days. The exception being traditional voice calls which occasionally can go on for (much) longer than those 30 minutes, depending on what's happening. However, most of my more regular, scheduled conversations happen in real-life or in Zoom, Webex or other such platforms and not on a mobile phone.
The only work-related thing that I can think of OTOH which really required me to use a mobile device is hardware that requires an app to work (which is fortunately still rare).
It's especially amazing because it's so easy to fuck up. Read a few articles on the web. Scroll social media on a lunch break. Watch a video or two on YouTube. Listen to some music. Take care of some banking stuff. Suddenly you're at an hour or two and you've barely noticed. To keep it to 30mins you have to be so intentional.
A few things that made a noticeable difference for me:
- A do not disturb mode that is noticeable: no wallpaper, no clock (black on black), no notifications, battery saving mode. If I'm around others, my phone is in that mode.
- No social media apps, and stay logged out of the mobile website. Don't remember the password.
- No email app. I thought it would be a problem, but I've been logged out of Gmail for over a month. I forget to check email. It's great!
- A wrist watch. Get the time, not the notifications.
- Something to keep busy, but only for medium periods. I like reading articles queued in Instapaper.
- Ad block rules and other delays for the things you really struggle to stop doing.
- Ad block rules to remove the distracting elements of websites you must use. Remove the feeds wherever you can, or redirect the feed page to the notifications page.
- Turn off ad blocking. I never use the internet on my iPad because the unfiltered internet is unbearable. I see a cookie banner I can't skip and it takes me right out of it.
- Keep your phone in your backpack or in a separate room.
I have an Xperia X Compact phone that I bought in a used shop in Japan for $50. I think you can buy it online too. It's pretty small, runs kinda slow so I don't use any demanding apps. Mostly just use it for directions, studying flashcards, and messaging people. It's sad they don't make phones this small anymore.
You might be interested in looking into an android phone with an eink screen - I find it to be a good deal less stimulating. I think a lot of people use the boox palma.
I recently tried to put my phone into black & white mode via iPhone accessibility shortcut (triple click on power button)
This did not seem to work for me. I would forget about it and after a while just left it on color.
Now I use a shortcut on the action button. By default my iPhone is black and white, pressing the action button gives me color for two minutes.
The crucial step is that after this time it is automatically switching back to black and white. Even when the phone is locked.
This now seems to actually help. And as a side effect I also enjoy looking at a few things in black and white. A new experience.
All these great ideas for how to prevent you from doing something, they all need to allow me to bypass it when I want to, but they also need to automatically switch back to the “locked” mode.
This needs to be seamless so that the “yes I am sure I want to read this” bypass does not become a new, meaningless habit.
What is also interesting is that apparently, for me, a hard lock-out, a hard disable, is not good enough.
Instead, reducing the joy (black & white filter) seems to work much better and does not motivate me to work around the restriction.
I doubt I would be happy with a dumb phone either. So this is a good middle ground.
One other thing I’ve always hoped to see is a kind of scheduled check in with me, where I am asked / reminded to get out of my Netflix / Reddit / YouTube tunnel vision.
Hardware and software to do that is tricky. iOS locked down too much.
But there are today quite capable and cheap Esp32 based smart watches (~$25) and I am trying to figure out how to integrate one of these into my life purely for tunnelvision-interrupting “are you really sure you want to do this right now?” notifications.
I feel privileged to have had a childhood before smartphones.
At least I can remember how we used to be.
All of these measures are not because of how it is today but because I am afraid of where we will be a few years from now. Endlessly engaging generated AI content.
Better try to build some boundaries while I still can.
I have a distinct moment in my memory of when I stopped being a voracious reader, and started spending more time online: when I got an iPod touch.
To reverse the trend, I’m trying to read physical books or ebooks on a dedicated ereader as much as possible. No one seems to care, they are on their phones.
When I do use social media, I try to use a computer where I have much more control over what’s happening. So far I’ve read a ton more books this year.
Great article, I'm a cofounder of Clearspace and think about this a lot.
> I'm an adult, I know how to circumvent these limits, and I will if motivation is low.
It's impossible to build systems that perfectly prevent you from doing this, but it is possible to build systems that can perfectly deter you from doing it. You could set up one - for example - that texts your spouse if you delete it. Or charges your bank account. Or whatever other doomsday device you want to rig up.
> Time limits don't affect the underlying addiction. You don't quit smoking by only smoking certain hours of the day.
Yeah but if you could encode cigarettes to ween you off of them by force, that'd be a big help. Also cigarettes don't have any real utility, so cold turkey is a reasonable strategy. Unfortunately the social media platforms have real utility, so a guardrail strategy makes more sense.
> The companies that build these apps have tens of thousands of really smart people (and billions of dollars) trying to get me hooked and keep me engaged. The only way to win this game isn't by trying to beat them (I certainly can't), but by not playing.
When it's all said and done, someone is going to build the right set of digital environment modification tooling that does beat them. It has to be possible, the internet is intrinsically customizable
I have found vast improvements on my mood and focus by not bringing my phone with me to classes and work. Not checking it in the mornings (analog alarm clock!) or during the day has significantly improved my focus and how deep I go while working. And I just feel better. Not being bogged down by whatever is going on in the digital world while I am trying to churn as many good thoughts out of my brain is really quite freeing.
> I'm an adult, I know how to circumvent these limits, and I will if motivation is low.
That point can be easily fixed as there are various online timelock services where you can put in your security code or password that will not reveal it to you within a certain timeframe [0][1].
I use my phone on average 5m per week. This week is bigger, due to lots of medical things. I've spent 3m on it today as of 6pm.
No social media. No videos. No Music. I don't click on links in texts except the one that will show me where my taxi is.
At restaurants people around me sit together with food going cold on plates whilst staring at their phones. People walk around and into me whilst staring at their phones. I saw someone nearly step on a nesting Bush Stone Curlew, despite the protests from the bird's mate, because they were staring at their phone.
I do not believe we are cognitively capable of dealing with interruptions that demand our attention every 30 seconds. I know that despite a long list of life threatening illnesses I am the least anxious person I know, and I think that everyone else is stressing because they are staring at their phone.
I am still trying to turn the clock and read books (on paper), at least before bed. Decrement the screen. I must be lazy. Going back to the screen to do nothing is so much easier.
> If we assume people sleep roughly 8 hours per day
I'd strongly question that assumption. Based on what I've heard from friends (and also personal experience), I think there is quite a large number if people who spend too much time on the phone, but also still want to do activities/work on projects, etc - all in addition to work, family life and chores.
The result is that the time is taken from the activity that appears most "compressible" at first glance, which is sleep.
When I got in the habit of putting my phone in a KitchenSafe at 9:30PM every night my sleep (according to my watch sleep tracker) increased by a full hour. From 10:30 I'd get into bed and peruse Reddit or Twitter on my phone, often past midnight. Now I just read a book for 30 minutes until I'm too tired and doze off.
> Now I just read a book for 30 minutes until I'm too tired and doze off.
Hard books are the real soma: I have all these books that I want to read because I want to understand and know what's in them, but there are so many charts, graphs, maps, equations and simply complex-ass thoughts that they're hell to get through during leisure time without waking up falling out of your chair.
That's perfect night table insomnia reading. Either they put you to sleep just by a couple glances at the page you left off at; or you in fact have real insomnia, and that's going to be your wings to get you through them. Added bonus: sometimes you fall asleep and have complex dreams, and understanding that argument ends up like when you're debugging in your sleep.
I feel like these articles come up all the time now. The advice is always the same (it's not rocket science), but people are either slowly defeated by their addiction, or they just don't really follow the advice in the first place.
Media (not phone or computer) addiction is the socially acceptable addiction of our time, just like alcohol formerly was. Most of this consumption is completely pointless, depressive and degrades your mental ability to stave off boredom and be creative. So many current problems in the world are caused (alongside inequality and many other causes) with our society-wide acceptance of this media addiction.
Right now, my colleague opposite me is using their phone to dick around on Facebook. They will spend 1 hour to 1.5 hours on it at work today (equivalent to 12% of their salary), with it sat there vibrating on the table every 3 minutes (you need 25 minutes of uninterrupted concentration to get into a flow state). You can see the Pavlov dog mechanism kick in every time it vibrates. This colleague makes tons of mistakes, distracts me and others, and this is deemed acceptable because everybody is in the same position.
It is wild to me that media technology companies achieve the valuations that they do, and only makes sense in a world where a huge portion of the population are hopelessly addicted.
Phones and computers are not the issue. You can have a smartphone, never install social media on it, untick all the notifications, put it in monochrome mode, and lock it down completely. That's how my phone is, and I spend on average less than 10 minutes per day using it.
People need to change their approach to boredom. If you're waiting in a queue, walking somewhere or on public transport, you need to find a way to fill that boredom without using the easy option. That easy option hooks you in, and before you know it you spend 4 hours a day on a phone. Just daydream, think about a project or an idea in your head. It's good for your brain.
If you want to try my phone setup:
- Android phone
- Permanently in monochrome mode, black wallpaper, white icons, minimalistic launcher (app drawer only)
- Zero social media, games, media apps. For hardcore dopamine resistance, uninstall music and podcasts as well. Boredom can be a good thing, and you don't need to fill your day with constant dopamine hits
- Disable built-in versions (like YouTube) in settings. Turn off Google discovery if you use that app
- All notifications disabled except communication (phone, email, message)
- For communication, unsubscribe from any non-urgent emails as soon as you receive them
- Bedtime mode, starting and ending at least 1 hour either side of sleep. Don't use your phone in the first or last hour of the day at all (you won't be using it at this point)
With this setup you get the benefit of a smartphone (useful utilities like maps, translation, web searches, digital tickets), without any further reason to check it. I don't really believe in the idea of going for a dumb (feature) phone because you lose useful utilities.
If you try and persist with this sort of setup for a month, even if you begin giving in after this point, you'll remember how much better things were and that will always provide an easy way back into it should the habit lapse.
Computers are tools for us to do things our brains aren't capable of. They are not things to hijack our lives, otherwise we may as well be simulations.
Not sure what the economic impact would be if everybody left social media, video games, and YouTube en masse tomorrow, considering how much growth the US (and therefore world) economy has seen from a handful of companies that provide the digital drugs.
The advice about deleting youtube history and setting and auto-delete cadence (though every 3 months looked like the most frequent possibility for me) is good and I wasn't aware of it. I don't have social media, but I do have a personal gmail email address, which links to youtube making it hard to avoid spending time on my phone watching youtube videos.
In the 5 years since giving up a smartphone I started a new generation Linux Distro from 0, started a security consulting company, made hires, traveled the world, and learned several completely new skills, while having a fairly active family and social life.
Having so much more time to do actually useful things means I am present when relaxing, and focused when working, and get a lot more out of both portions of my life.
Anyone telling you that you need a smartphone to survive in the modern world is an apologist gaslighting you. Use cash, and offline tablet or nothing at all, and be digitally invisible and 100% present in the real world.
Related but if you want a less algorithmic YouTube experience, I'd recommend the Play app on Apple platforms. It uses each channels RSS feed to rebuild YouTube in a much nicer and less distracting native app.
Unlike a lot of people on this site I really enjoy the YouTube algorithm to discovery new topics/videos, but it can definitely become a rabbit hole.
For YouTube addicts I recommend uninstalling the app, using the website, and installing the Unhook browser extension for Chrome/Firefox/Edge. It can remove recommendations, shorts and a bunch of other stuff.
I second this. I had a tendency to get stuck watching YouTube videos before I hid all algorithmic recommendations and the Home page with Unhook. I can finally use YouTube without getting distracted, and there's no way I'm going back.
I just wish I had an addon like this for, well, everything. The browser is such a great platform because you can have this much control over your experience--no such luck with mobile apps.
Wonderful extension, but at times my dopamine-addicted brain keeps disabling it on an impulse instead of doing something creative or productive on my PC. I looked into making it impossible to disable this extension through registry editor, but so far none of the settings in Windows seem to stick.
Another tip for getting more out of youtube, is if your topic of interest is potentially not dependent on current events, you get higher signal to noise ratio searching for videos from 10+ years ago exclusively. Earlier the better.
Youtube was so much better when you didn't see the uploaders face and there wasn't incentive to pad video duration.
Switch the fucking thing off. You are not that important. Things can wait.
The world turned many revolutions without such a thing.
You dont profit, your boss and companies do, you pay with your health, money and more.
Your kids dont get smarter, you spawn even dumber kids in the future.
the cable company asked me to accept their generous 50pct monthly discount provided I would not cancel the subscription service but I said I am trying to watch less tv, and that was that
A big problem I find is that if you are a family and have kids you basically have to keep up and that means turning on notifications for messages and emails and then of course that leads to opening the phone, reading email, checking HN (obviously) and then posting a comment on it! urghh
My high schooler is in theatre and they post critical updates via Instagram. It drives me crazy.
And don't get me started on all the custom apps cluttering my phone that these schools and sports leagues get sold on for sharing flyers and other info (Parent Square, Peach Jar, Playmetrics, Mojo, etc.) I guess it's a feature that most of those apps are not well designed and they don't suck you into addictive engagement loops like the big social media platforms.
I don't have kids, so I can't 100% relate, but have you dug into the notifications settings on your phone? They're extremely flexible. I've set mine up so any non-chat notification gets batched into a group that shows at 5 AM and 5 PM. This lets me check on whatever happened the previous evening while I'm having breakfast, and whatever happened during the day after I get home from work. Once I've flipped through all the notifications and done whatever other time wasting things, it goes back in my pocket and largely does not disturb me for another 12 hours.
Maybe something like that could work. If you find there are notifications that are disturbing you, but they really could have waited until the evening, toss 'em in the batch bucket. Eventually you'll tune out all the low-importance stuff and get your life back. Or find some other cadence that works for you. It takes some effort to tune these systems, but I think it's worth it.
I followed the instructions here to cripple my phone using Apple Configurator: https://stopa.io/post/297
Now the browser doesn't work and I can't install new apps. I also turn on "Do Not Disturb" almost all the time, which allows through notifications from exactly 3 people.
I was super-disappointed, attending my recent state townhall meeting, that the only way to participate was scanning a QR code to fill out a survey. After asking for a paper copy (which was never produced), I decided to participate in my own manner:
I stood up and heckled my clown state representatives, for almost an hour, providing audience-appreciated commentary to what I perceive as our failed political system (US bipartisan).
To their toothless grocery sales tax reduction legislation (which'll never pass), I suggested my fellow constituents just shop across the state line, in one of the many nearby grocery stores — just STOP giving our state this money, then maybe they'll consider legislative changes.
Perhaps this fell upon deaf ears, but I wasn't the only audience member frustrated with our legislators' back-patting/inaction. I will vote/shop with my money, elsewhere. I wrote my state officials a letter afterwards, offering common-sense suggestions — hoping this geriatric remembers my participation (he turns 80 soon... just retire already, Congressman!).
I hate this, I think to myself as I lay on the couch and then type what I think onto the keys of my mobile phone’s screen.
It’s not that I hate how the author feels or what he thinks. I hate that he feels he has to think all of this and that the phone is that great an impediment. I hate that I feel like the same way as him and that he’s expressing it so clear.
I’m projecting.
This is all so dumb. They’re just phones for crying out loud. We should all be ashamed of ourselves. I’ve been putting salt on top of boredom to make time taste better. What have I done.
I agree with the author, but can’t agree with his stance that self-restricting is not effective. I use tools like Screen Time heavily with a setup that is not bypassable on a weak moment (I don’t know the PIN).
Nowadays when waiting for something I might take my iPhone 15 Pro out of my pocket and unlock its boring-ass greyscale screen. There are no new notifications from any apps whatsoever, because I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb all the time.
I’ll first peek over the Mail app: no red notification badge. Still, I’ll sometimes compulsively open it and check my inbox. There is no new mail, there is almost never any new mail aside from Google sign-in notifications. (I unsubscribed from all marketing emails).
Then I might check WhatsApp. Nobody important texted me. If they did I’d receive a notification. I didn’t receive a notification in the past few hours. There are no infinite content feeds on my phone. Even my web browser only allows a specified set of websites.
Sometimes when waiting for something, and if I ran out of books I pre-downloaded for free from Internet Archive, I’ll open the Maps app and go all around Antarctica trying to find scientific bases. It can be kinda fun. Especially when you don’t have any social media or unrestricted internet on your phone.
I have ADHD.
Before implementing Screen Time restrictions on my phone, I was glued to the screen all day and night long. These restrictions were the difference between functioning and not.
ooh deleting and pausing off youtube's watch history is nice, no more getting sucked into videos of someone beating dark souls by only pressing the Z button or whatever other bullshit Google has realized I will waste hours on.
I may be on the outside here but I am all for using the phone or any more mobile computer. Humans are not designed to sit at desks all day and having a good computer with me all day is something I want. Its just that I want it to read books and take notes or sketch to free my mind. Not slurp down rage bait wrapped up with some shop at target. Supporting computers by inviting in the marketing money was a big fuckup.
You don't treat the symptoms; you treat the cause. dumbphones, minimalist phones, and crippled smartphones are as effective as a smoker throwing away a full pack, only to buy a new one when stressed or drunk. If you use doomscrolling as an escape, you will inevitably fall back to it when life hits. While a few may manage to change their habits with a restricted device if the stars align for long enough, it won't work for most. You need to first figure out why you do it.
This isn't universal but will tremendously help quitting. There will still be the nicotine issue, but it will help clear the other factors that can be as powerful as the physical addiction.
The cause why you started smoking might have gone away but you are still addicted to the substance. We don't have the same chemical addiction with doom scrolling.
Very occidental perspective. There are places where you need your phone practically 24/7, no affordance of escape. I can give an example of my day, which is basically completely phone centered, the only words I utter in a day is some digits to the taxi driver to verify my identity (when i can afford a ride that is).
Edit: mute button is essential and don't allow any notifications outside important messages/apps
Is this out of convenience or necessity? Do you have redundant devices so that if your primary glass slab is unusable for some reason, you're still able to make it home at the end of the day? Are you in some new role and lifestyle that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, or suffering from a disability for which the cell phone is your only means of achieving independence?
The human race has survived for about 2 million years without a 24/7 tether. Our environment is the safest and most human-shaped it's ever been, you don't need to have constant anxiety about true emergency situations resolved by cell phone connections, those are unimaginably rare.
It's totally feasible to go without a cell phone once in a while, just try it! Check your emails once a day, 5 days a week. Set up an auto-responder saying you're unavailable and can check messages at [time]. Navigate with your memory and the many signs that are posted, or with a paper map for aid. Write down things you need to remember with a pen and a piece of paper. Leave the phone behind and just go for a walk in a park with nothing but your surroundings and your thoughts. The world will keep turning for 30 minutes regardless of whether you're keeping tabs on it through the phone.
I think they're referring to (the especially common in Asia) scenario where all payments/ authentication/ local services are handled via smartphone applications? You can definitely go for a walk without it but you might not be able to get on transit, buy from shops, read a menu at a restaurant or so on.
Which is fucked, and it pisses me off when halfwits imply that the US is "behind" because we haven't funnelled our whole society into a fucking phone app (yet).
Interesting blog post. A few thoughts on smartphones, presence and whatnot:
- I've lusted over the fantasy of having a pocket knowledge machine / tricorder-like thing since long before PDAs and later smartphones. Okay, still no full tricorder, but boy, are smartphones ever useful. I really like having a pocket GPS, music/audiobook player, translation device, library, basic sensor package, gaming machine, backup for my most important data, password/document manager and general purpose computing device in my pocket.
- I was a child before the web was a thing but I very much grew up on computers and the web and I have seen and/or experienced all sorts of addictive, gamified and otherwise nasty things those technologies brought with it (or enabled). I'm rather happy to have a bit of context from a time before those technologies and I'm also happy about having grown out of most of my computer-related bad habits and behaviours before the web and those technologies were what they are today.
- I made a decision to get off most social media with the exception of a few forum-like things at the point where I felt that it was no longer mostly about expanding real-world connections. Must have been around 10-12 years ago, I think.
- In my personal definition of "social media", I've included most messengers and certainly the way many people seem to use them. This abstinence can cause quite a bit of social friction and peer-pressure and I'm not entirely sure if I could (or would want to) "resist" had I not first grown up without any messenger and later with (occasionally excessive use of) IRC, ICQ and many that came after.
- If I feel the need to publish something, I'll do it via some long-term channel (blog, newspaper, journal, conference, ...).
- Even without being on social media, it's still relatively easy to keep up with current (app-/web-)culture enough to not get laughed out the room or viewed as a hopeless old fart by younger people (which is important to me because I work with them pretty much daily).
- Even without being on social media, it's still quite easy to keep up with the news and important developments in whatever field might interest you.
- Often, I read "my government / bank / other organization made me have an app / a smartphone". In those cases, I often ask myself it it's a matter of convenience or if those voices come from some context that really does not have any other options. Because I really hope there are no countries where you can't get/use any bank account without an app and I even more sincerely hope that most countries make it illegal to require mobile apps (or even internet access) for any important government service as the only option.
I think the most surprising thing about it, at least in the US - is that mobile bandwidth is THE most expensive. I imagine that's inverted or opposite elsewhere
For perspective, I pay USD $17.33 a month for unlimited 5G data - in the UK, in GBP, so really £13. Low quality home broadband costs more than that, and is slower, but with better latency.
I've tested the unlimited claim, and they really do let you download terabytes. All my local LLMs are downloaded over mobile data.
So yes, in my experience it's inverted over here. Mobile bandwidth is the cheapest if you can get a good deal and you're in an uncongested area with a good signal. Unfortunately that's not a combination I've found to be reliable anywhere I go, especially over the last 6 months. But the price is good!
I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.
When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".
But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile. I know they can guess based on resolution and such, but there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop. You can't rely on every single website not being run by jerks, but you should be able to buy a phone from a company that cares more about its customers than random jerks.
On Android at least, you can toggle "desktop view" in any browser. The UX is crap on some websites, but you can make things work enough to not need the app.
For example I use Opera to browse `facebook.com/messages`. It's a bad UX for writing (somehow it "swallows" some of the written text when you type too fast, or select text and try to overwrite it), but this makes me use it less. Won't ever install FB app on my phone.
For the first time ever I ran into a web app blocking Desktop Mode on Chrome for Android somehow. (ChowNow) I've seen sites detect it but issue a warning, but this was a full functionality-block.
I was literally using it fine one day, then the next they started saying I need to use the desktop website for menu editing as it's "more optimized."
Dinguses, if I'm manually turning on Desktop Mode I know it's not gonna be "optimized." Just let me get my menu edits pushed goddamnit!
That sounds like an accessibility issue.
Especially if viewport scaling is disabled.
People with vision impairments need to be able to zoom.
Safari has this setting, but the half dozen times I've tried it, it doesn't work. I suspect you're right that it's because sites just look at the resolution.
The war on web users is ugly.
Surely you don't mean to block our popups, right?
Surely you didn't mean to block our auto-playing video, right?
Surely you would rather use our lousy app rather than the desktop web site you explicitly requested, right?
etc.
You can see results of fingerprinting here: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
That's because trying to detect desktop/mobile is itself gross and hacky, as well as hard to work with as a dev. Just doing resolution-based stuff is easier, more reliable, and usually a better experience when devs aren't lazy enough to just leave things out in the smaller views.
Most browser apps have an option for this, no? Chrome and Vivaldi have it for sure.
They do, but a bunch of sites fingerprint you as mobile anyway, and continue to serve the mobile UX
Yes, I use chrome desktop on my phone all the time to browse reddit.
I hope for the sake of UX that you're browsing old.reddit that way.
You mean Desktop view? Which exists on every browser?
If you want full fooling, install a UA changer on your Firefox mobile, and you're laughing.
The phone vendors want you downloading and using apps.
Yep! The dickbar in Apple's iPhone Safari app to install an app for the website I'm currently viewing is one of the reasons I no longer use Safari on my iPhone. The fact that there's not even a setting to turn that off is grating, because I have increasingly found that for a lot of websites, given a choice between the website and the app, I vastly prefer the website. Not always, sometimes I prefer the app, but there are some really shitty apps trying to pass themselves off as website replacements.
Also Wikipedia. I don't remember if I particularly disliked the first-party app, but I vastly prefer Wikipedia in a web browser.
There are several useful apps available for iOS that work as Safari extensions handling that kind of stuff. Banish is very useful, as well as Hush. In addition Opener allows you to chose if links shall open the respective app or just stay in the browser.
I appreciate your input and if that were the sole reason I switched browsers that might be enough, but how unreasonable is it that you have to get a 3rd party extension from the App Store to turn off an annoyance that Apple clearly thinks is a feature? Like if they’re going to retain the dickbar, it should be a checkbox in Safari’s settings to turn it off.
Also Wikipedia
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there should be a setting to lie and simulate a desktop.
Apple has started down this road. All iPads now use desktop user agents.
> The phone vendors should support not telling the websites you're on mobile.
The browser vendors already do. What do you want to change?
Presumably better spoofing, so the websites can't tell from obvious tells like resolution.
Firefox on Android seems pretty good on desktop-mode, though: its resolution seems desktop-like, and sites rarely give me the mobile treatment.
I'd like to see more effective anti-fingerprinting. I know it's just an arms race though.
It's almost like one of the leading browser developers is also in the advertising business. (To be clear I completely agree, fingerprinting is evil.)
Tbh the link problem is common for everyone. I sent a tiktok link to a non tech friend and they couldn’t view it because they didn’t have an account. So I used a downloaded tool to send the video directly. All of the major social media sites are locking out users who aren’t signed in with the app. So you usually just screenshot or use an external tool to rip the content.
I simply reply, "I can't see that because it requires an account". Often people give up and don't send me anything... which I'm also fine with, since it's mostly "funny videos"
I don't have any social media accounts - I use rapidsave or faceb.com to download what they linked and send it right back to them every time, as a standalone video rather than a link.
Eventually they realize that's the better way to share it, ask me how I did that, and start doing it themselves.
RE: TikTok. I get links sent frequently and I can view on the web. They make it very difficult though! Muted and autoplay by default and hard to find the unmute button under a web of popups. I think the site isn't responsive either so desktop site on mobile. Also - for some videos at least on TikTok you can download the video via the share button! So not always necessary to use a third party tool.
> I always felt that I'm spending too much time in front of a computer, but it was at least somewhat meaningful because I had opportunities to create: write code, blog, and so on.
Yeah, we can waste a lot of time in front of the PC, but it at least can be used for creativity and productivity.
[Smart]phones are almost pure consumption.
> [Smart]phones are almost pure consumption.
This might depend on one's age/generation. There are tons of internet-connected people today growing up without ever owning (or knowing how to use) a PC at all. They do everything on their phone, including the creative stuff. I didn't believe it either until I saw my friend's high-school age kid writing an entire 15 page writing assignment on her phone. Us PC people are kind of dinosaurs.
15 pages on a virtual keyboard? So that would have been, what, 100 pages on a computer?
I agree with the parent comment. Smartphones (and tablets) are useless for anything productive. They are entirely consumption machines. If somebody is able to do their job or studies entirely on a smartphone and tablet, it says more about their job and studies than anything.
What vexes me to this day is that you still can't really use something like VS Code on an iPad (you can do it in a browser in a limited way). A tablet, with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard would be a perfect hybrid for creative and productive work. I haven't really found a 2-in-1 that provides the same standard.
> I didn't believe it either until I saw my friend's high-school age kid writing an entire 15 page writing assignment on her phone
Hard to imagine, as for me any text longer that 1-2 sentences is a pain on mobile, but maybe indeed it is a matter of conditioning.
They might do that, but if they were educated in PC usage and proficient at it, they would probably do it faster.
And many of them face issues when joining the workforce.
While you xan be productive, procrastination is right at the corner even on a PC.
For instance some people making music like to have a dedicated, offline computer to do so in lrder to not be tempted to open the web browser for 2 minutes that transformz itself into hours. Same for some writers who try to seek dedicated environments focused on writing and limiting their exposure to the internet.
Cannot relate. Aside from creating things for computers (code) I do a lot more creation-related stuff with my phone.
I mean, it's covered in cameras and microphones and shit. I can measure things with it. In a pinch, it's a level. Photos for reference at the hardware store. Filming content for most any purpose short of outright pro-level work, great on a phone. Tuner for my instruments, metronome if I want that, good for sheet music (iPad's best, but a phone will do in a pinch, and I'm not gonna carry a laptop around and unfold it and stuff). It fits in my pocket and I always have it, which means it's the only "notebook" I've been able to stick with for writing down ideas. Working with MIDI? Phone or tablet. In the workshop? Phone or tablet. Cooking? Phone or tablet. Working on my car? Phone. Working on the garden or any handyman-stuff around the house? Phone. A laptop would be a downgrade in every case, I don't really have any use for one aside from writing code.
I messed around with stuff like MSPaint as a kid, like everyone else, but these days I'd do that in Procreate on the iPad (and that is in fact what I use for drawing). Even the Pocket version on a phone would be better.
Unless I'm making things for computers an I-device is at least as good, and usually better, for creation-related stuff. Phones are worse for long-form writing, mostly due to the tiny screen, but a tablet's better for that than a laptop, given an external keyboard, because you can place the screen somewhere other than right on top of the keyboard, for better ergonomics.
The phone size is too limiting for a lot of work, and since most work involves writing in some form, it's a pain in the ass.
A lot of the things you listed are utilities, which I'd agree the phone is great for. If any of the things you've listed are a key feature of your job, for you it works. For the endless office hordes who write emails, code, documents etc. for a living, their only using a smartphone would suggest their job is largely superfluous to me.
A tablet is a happy medium, and a tablet with connectable keyboard is perfect. I wish VS Code (the full version) worked on an iPad. It's that extra bit of real estate.
"Sorry, I don't have [app/website name]. Could you send a screenshot?"
The only other response is to fill your phone with 128 GB of every different social media app that exists.
Not much to add other than I switched to this exact model in 2020 and have had the same pleasant outcome for 5 years now. I’m much more productive and can execute deep work for weeks on end. I remained in the zone on my current project for 4 consecutive weeks. I attribute this to having no distractions. The outcomes produced from remaining in the zone for so long are objectively measurable and high level.
Do you browse hacker news on your phone? Genuine question, I don't use social media but I do spend a lot of time on HN on my phone.
Yes though only 15 minutes a day max at regular break points in the day. Breakfast, lunch usually.
I have one of those parental limit things set for it from 5 years ago. I used to run into the 15 minute limit every day but now I rarely see it pop up.
Deep work isn't just about focus, it's about staying long enough in that state for the compounding effect to kick in, and it sounds like you've nailed that
I did all of this and it has served me well — as far as distractions and unwanted comms go. The problem is, now whenever I get that isolated spam (still happens daily or few times a week — just a little) it gets on my nerves, almost like a rage. Because it feels like a violation. For others I see, they don’t even register it.
I feel similarly whenever I carefully set notifications for apps, turning off everything but the most essential ones (like “your driver is arriving” from Uber) and then the corporation uses the only remaining notification channel to send me marketing engagement notifications like “20% off your next 3 rides!!”
I get pretty upset at this. I have a 1 strike policy for most apps. Now even Uber just doesn't get any notifications at all on my phone.
Same for email spam. If I didn’t opt in or if I unsubscribed and still get emails, or if unsubscribing requires more than 2 clicks, every single one gets reporter to Google as spam. If there’s no unsubscribe link I report it to the FTC.
I do it out of principle. If everyone took an absolutist hard line on these things, the world would be a tiny bit better.
Apps and phones are just so much better for surveillance which I know, duh. Most users simply don't give it any thought and install apps left and right permissions included. The smaller screen real estate is also better for surveillance - smaller number of things on screen equals more granular information on what you're doing precisely.
Extra toe-stubbing wishes for those that are pushing this paradigm into desktop - it's bewildering to me when I hear non-technical folks tell me that an app on desktop needs to come from an app store. Or when web design is being "simplified" and dumbed down really on desktop to facilitate surveillance.
Toe-stubbing-every-morning wishes to a lot of people for contributing to this reality.
I have been trying to reduce my usage. I still cannot find a way to resist pulling out the phone to: - perform a quick search (browser or ai) - listen to podcasts - listen to audiobook - check the data of the last running or gym session.
Are there alternatives that are as friendly? Or being friendly is the danger here?
I had to combine two apps to really nail it. I should say that currently I'm in Android.
The first is an app called Bloom (theres another called Brick thats similar) that allows you to lock app access behind a physical NFC card. You lock the app and to unlock you must scan the card.
The second is an app called "freedom" that blocks access to specific websites or apps on a schedule.
I setup Freedom to block the distracting apps and websites during specific hours, then used Bloom to block Freedom, this prevents me from just disabling Freedom when I'm bored. I keep the NFC tag in my car.
Now I use a full featured smartphone that does what I want, and if I actually need access to social media or blocked sites I go to the car to unlock Bloom. I still have all the options, they're just a little more inconvenient.
The added friction of having to physically get up means I usually just don't bother, and Freedoms scheduling and category based blocks mean I can be pretty flexible about what I block and when.
Disable fingerprint unlock, add a long password, airplane mode unless you actively want to check something, &c. Add as many barriers as possible so that by the time you get through you either forgot why you came for or realised it's not that important
I don't think there are alternatives to what modern phones can do, unless you want to carry multiple dumb devices around (ebook + GPS + mp3 player for example)
I do carry my ereader with me, because I can read it without glasses (astigmatism) which is hard to do with an lcd panel. Using gps is rarer than using a phone. And it’s even rarer to listen to music on the go (I do have a small mp3 player with 512gb of storage, but it only comes when I have a bag)
Just a small data point/anecdote: I think the calls to install native apps are actually decreasing now. I don't get spammed for that nearly as much as 2014-2018 or so. Even banks seem to be getting comfortable with making mobile optimized websites now.
But like I said, just my perspective, I don't have any hard data points.
> Even banks seem to be getting comfortable with making mobile optimized websites now
At the cost of making an actually useful website for those of us not on mobile. My bank insists on making their website/online banking platform work as if it was their mobile app. The flow of bank transfers, paying bills, writing to your banking adviser is now entirely confusing and feels unsafe. Even a 14" laptop has plenty of space to show you detailed overviews, but no, assume that the user is on a tiny ass screen and show them mostly white-space.
TBH I've come around on it and I kinda prefer the Fischer Price phone UIs over the sites with random smatterings of 7px microfont, .ASPX pages redirecting eighteen times, and functions hidden two levels deep in floating overflow navs (which don't properly track hover state and disappear when you try getting into a deeper level).
But it's really a pick-your-poison situation. All of it sucks on some level haha.
Somewhat off-topic, but since it might be useful to you and others:
> if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
I'm signed in to both my Firefox on Android and on desktop, and I can hit the share button while viewing a website and then tap my desktop Firefox under "Send to device". Saves a bunch of steps there.
I'm assuming other browsers can do the same.
You did everything right (set boundaries, kept things intentional) and still the internet crept in through the cracks like water under a poorly sealed door
Most of those mobile application nags can be removed by enabling the corresponding filter list in uBlock Origin settings. If you're not using Firefox on the phone, both Vivaldi and Brave have this subscription in their settings (I think it might even be enabled out of the box).
> When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go.
From my social circle, the only such annoying links I get are from Instagram.
I have a deep, almost visceral hatred for the current incarnation of social media, so I go out of my way to not create accounts on those things.
For Instagram and similar shit, I could find some nice downloader bots on Telegram. They typically require you to join some spam channels, but you can join and archive those so you never see that they exist.
>> For Instagram and similar shit, I could find some nice downloader bots on Telegram. They typically require you to join some spam channels, but you can join and archive those so you never see that they exist.
Why is this better than just joining Instagram with a 'ghost' account only used to view things you've been sent. No following or viewing otherwise. Is it just self-control (which I fully understand if it is)?
Meta is trigger-happy with the bans. As for me, things on social media may as well not exist if I can’t view them without an account.
Because I think social media is inherently evil, and by creating and account (even a dummy one as you described) I would still be feeding a beast that I would rather see dead.
It does help with self control - I intentionally hamstring my ability to see Instagram (and other social media) content by following a slightly cumbersome procedure on Telegram that also makes it impossible for me to search or view any related content. But that is a second-order benefit.
>If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
You're too kind. These kinds of nagging parasites should be force fed excrement until they choke on it.
> And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
Usually I can work around this by toggling "desktop mode" in firefox on android...
Also on Android you can use Firefox Nightly with uBlock Origin. Go to settings and enable all the Social and Annoyances lists. This should suppress many prompts to download an app.
I found the one thing that kept me off of my phone was using a degoogled pixel 4XL with Graphene OS on it. So much you can't do on the stock version using F-Droid app store. I really enjoyed until I needed to start downloading a few banking apps that didn't work on it.
So I'm back, but limit what I have on my phone now and its like you said, a constant struggle NOT to download and install something.
> The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or *visit them in-browser.*
Tiktok having a borderline unusable web app has done wonders for me. I'll end up on it because someone sent me a link, I can watch that ONE video, a single time, before normally I get a spot-the-boat style captcha or an "install the app" modal. Even trying to get past that point, it feels like the site is somehow falling apart at the seams as you navigate around. I know the concept is "well people will install the app then" but that's also annoyingly frictionful.
They unintentionally made the most literal social media experience: some one sends me media, I watch it once, I leave before the site crumbles to pieces like an ancient tomb that was only held together by a load-bearing dog video.
I like Reddit, I pay for an app on iOS to have a reasonable experience. The mobile web experience otherwise is terrible.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
I'm firmly convinced we will, eventually, look back at algorithmic social media with the same revulsion as we now look at leaded gasoline or ubiquitous cigarretes. No less harmful.
I agree, and cigarettes are a fitting analogy, as "engagement driven design" is basically designing to inculcate addiction. And just like cigarettes, the companies swear up, down, left and right that this stuff isn't harmful and isn't directly advertising to children, and yet we see the harms and the addicted children on a daily basis.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
100%. I've been sleeping poorly recently. Made the decision to leave my phone in another room. Immediately started falling asleep within 30mins (instead of 2-3 hours) and felt much better. After a couple of weeks I brought the phone back in. Instinctually, before I even knew what I was doing, I was picking it up. A few mins would pass, I was still awake, I'll watch some Reels. It was completely unintentional. As an ex-smoker I can confidently say this stuff is much more addictive and much harder to quit. And just like the cigarette companies, the engineers and data scientists know what they're doing. It's evil.
The arc of social media is truly breathtakingly awful. At this point it’s hard for me to see any value in it at all.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
I generally only use the old.reddit.com via a browser on my phone.
It is amazing to me how dogshit the reddit mobile experience is. Some comments load, others don't. Will the child comments load? Who knows. Is this ordered in any way? How about 5 links you don't care about instead of the discussion thread you clicked on.
old.reddit.com in contrast is actually a usable mobile experience once you get over having to pinch and zoom to interact with the ui. Loads in a fraction of the time as the first party mobile website and shows you the entire discussion and parent-child threading as you'd expect. No nondeterministic behavior.
They used to have i.reddit.com, and spez promised to never reduce the mobile experience, but we can see how well that turned out.
I miss i.reddit so bad. Blazing fast, no new tech, exactly what I needed.
It was a solved problem with apps like Reddit is Fun from the time I got my first smartphone (it ran Android 2.2), but the fun had to end with locked APIs.
Which app is this, if you don't mind divulging?
Yeah, after Reddit killed Apollo on iOS I just stopped using it on mobile.
Instagram has had broken web notifications for a month or so. You click the notifications and nothing happens; the post doesn’t open. The first days I thought someone had messed something up but after a month I’m not so sure. And there obviously is no way of telling them (and have a human read the report).
> You click the notifications and nothing happens; the post doesn’t open.
Glad I'm not the only one.
At least the same(?) update finally fixed the browser back button and you don't have to scroll all the way down again after hitting it.
Instagram is the worst. I started on there because I got back in photography and people said I absolutely needed to be on it.
Notifications has been broken off and on for months now. Before you would see there were message on your post. Click on post? Nothing. First it would load the image and show zero comments. Then it wouldn't load the image and just a blank screen. Now its the same problem in the notifications menu. Can't click on the comment, won't bring up the notice, nothing happens.
Its 2025 and its the worst UI experience I've had on any social media app and its not even close. I just keep wondering how this can be this bad for this long without anything changing.
> started on there because I got back in photography and people said I absolutely needed to be on it.
That can't be true anymore, Instagram is a black hole for artists
This might be the most poetic description of TikTok's web experience I've ever read
This is exactly my experience as well, and partially why I only use tiktok and facebook from a browser.
Instagram works just a bit better but roughly the same. And that helps keep me off.
I am putting the load bearing dog video on the example shelf right next to the load bearing (disproven) TF2_coconut.jpg
I believe that short form video coupled with infinite scroll mesmerizes humans. It keeps them in a trance by using suspense. The brain absolutely must know how the video plays out whether that be waiting for the punchline, a fight to break our or a fact to be delivered. Once the brain has locked eyes on the video the user must put significant energy into making a conscious decision to look away.
Even OpenAI's latest Sora app leans into this format and the videos there are literally the poorest quality on the Internet. 99.999% of them are eight seconds of unintelligent, unintelligible, low grade digitally created excrement.
There should be a law against it.
Big Tech knows this. They have teams of people with doctorates making apps engaging.
It's a slot machine. Everything social media and e-commerce is a slot machine. Each scroll is a pull of the arm, hoping that the algorithmic gods will smile kindly on you and give you some sweet content or deal.
Read "Supernormal Stimuli" by Barret [1] for an exploration of the psychology of this "mesmerizing" effect - at least in general, if not specifically in short-form video and infinite scroll.
Whether the artificial stimulus comes in the form of junk food, entertainment, social connection, sex, we've seen time and time again that trillion-dollar megacorps employing thousands of the greatest minds of our generation have been able to invent substitutes that are more compelling than evolution has prepared the human brain to be able to deal with.
It does seem like video shorts are especially easy to exploit.
[1]: https://www.harvard.com/book/9780393068481
Thank you for this recommendation.
dopamine reward feedback loop. Video scrolling is an insidious form of it because the feedback time is so short that you end up hooked on it for hours, feeling bad afterwards; seriously potent stuff.
It’s insane. And once you’ve got a habit for it it’s so hard to stop. Without thinking about it you end up back on there scrolling slop. I’ve started to look at using the Screen Time feature on iOS, but it’s hard when some apps have a dual function like YouTube I use for music but also has Shorts.
Maybe consider getting a different, dedicated program for music (line Spotify)? Sometimes doing thinks just to work around your brain is the right thing to do.
aka a drug
We need an infinite video scroll tax
What gets me is that it's not an accident
I guess I'm fortunate enough to find shorts unbearable. I occasionally watch some from creators I like, but tbh I find a great majority of them really annoying. The vertical frame, the silly endings after 30s of crap. God. It's so bad.
I'm really glad that for whatever reason my brain has completely rejected short-form content. It seems to be a serious problem for a lot of people. I don't understand it the same way I don't understand heroin addictions. My mind is just screaming "STOP DOING IT" and cannot get passed that concept very far.
You're on HN, though. In some sense, reeling in people like you has been a solved problem for decades, since forums were invented.
I apologize for what is doubtless egregious projection on my part.
I am like you in the sense that I seem "immune" to TikTok/Reels, especially relative to my wife, who can definitely get sucked into it for 30-60 minutes. However, I'm easily-snared by things like "the last year of drama in the NixOS community". I can easily spend an hour I don't have reading forum threads in which people are accusing moderators of abusing their position in a forum about a piece of technology I don't use.
So in some sense the tech industry didn't need to "innovate" in order to suck me in. I was getting sucked into reading about web forum drama 20 years ago.
HN is too boring though. Often I come here and there is nothing clickbait enough to get me to read it and I go elsewhere. It's great.
OTOH HN is all about the comments. And without reading you don’t know which ones are good.
I often spend way more time on those.
Each one 3-5 lines. Hundreds of comments in a near endless list.
I don’t think HN is that different compared to other social media
There's also the very real trap of traditional forum comments being ranked higher in your brain's algorithm for "relevance" since you can explain it as reading alternative perspectives. There's real FOMO in reading news without having comments for me sometimes, because what if there's a perspective that I'm completely missing here?
Of course, long term I know time spent this way is mostly wasted for the value I get out of it.
HN is yet another infinite scroll feed.
It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.
Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.
If HN was boring, it wouldn't have a "noprocrast" setting.
This forum is addicting to a lot of people. There are also clickbait titles (though less than elsewhere), heated debates, even flamewars in the comments.
I disagree. Debate, karma, religious tech wars, replies. All fun. I spent so much time here in the early days that I noticed my personality change. I'd been debating online so much for a few years that it was seeping into the real world me. I couldn't let people be 'wrong' without correcting them and, even if you're right, that's an annoying person to be around (I see the irony of this comment).
You just prefer text as your dopamine injection medium rather than video.
If the world was addicted to reading, it would be actually great. It offers rewards beyond instant gratification.
I'm not convinced bite-sized back and forth like Twitter and HN comments count as "reading", not in the sense you meant it anyway.
It's better then the one way para social relationships or w/e they're called
Eh people can develop those with pseudonymous accounts too. There's a reason why people bemoan the death of early twitter "communities" and whatnot. There are plenty reddit celebrity accounts as well.
People do project their general behaviour patterns on social media regardless of the form, though some forms are more malleable to that than others.
It's 2025, no one is mourning Twitter.
That neither addresses the core of what I'm saying nor is factually accurate, as I know many people mourning the loss of heyday Twitter.
Oh shit, I wasn't expecting you to be serious about it.
Well, in that case, I need some sources. For example, I'm not convinced that people project on social media to the extent that you're implying they do. It's a statement that needs support (which you didn't provided).
I am confident that you are able to find those sources, then we'll be able to talk about it on a common ground!
You need sources for the fact that there are celebrity Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit accounts? You can easily find many of these, just some google searching is required. Not accounts owned by celebrities mind you (of which there are also many), pseudonymous accounts that have become celebrities over the years.
As for evidence for people actually miss old Twitter, sorry I can't prove to you I have friends who mention that multiple times a month. You can take it for what it is (someone sharing their experience) or you can assume that I'm making this up for the sake of a throwaway internet conversation. Your choice.
I find it incredibly more distracting when someone nearby or in the household is watching tiktok or similar within earshot than if they are watching a longer-form video or television program. Seemingly because I can "tune-out" the long form program but every time the video switches with tiktok, my brain "activates" and gets distracted to check if it needs to pay attention or not.
for me its because i browse hn and the overwhelming cynicism "tastes" much worse than the entertainment provided
You don’t enjoy the short-form comments on this forum?
The trick of short form video isn’t the content itself but the channel flipping, hunting hook action. Changing the channel is fun when you actually land on something-good in the sea of garbage. And sometimes that something-good is a an endless handkerchief. One that you can keep pulling out good somethings with. Now you feel extra special like you’ve found something novel as you’ve completed the hunt and are satiated. And you keep that endless handkerchief you found. Soon you will have found many novel endless handkerchiefs. You mount them on your profile page like boar heads on a hunters wall. This pride is tied to happiness and you know how to hunt for more.
I highly recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal[0]. It is the book that effortlessly detailed how to build short form video networks (as well as other addicting software over the last 10+ years). The people who built this stuff read it and the people who want to stop the addictions should read it.
[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/881418283
I find the shorts on youtube super addictive, but the algo is too repetitive. I once watched a drumming video to then end, not I get heaps of drumming. It's cool, but I'm just not that into drumming.
I've been trying to correct the algo but giving a down thumb to videos I don't want to watch but its not learning.
Speaking of using custom CSS with YouTube, I do the following for my experience:
- Completely hide the recommended tab
- Make every thumbnail grayscale (to mitigate eye-catching thumbnails)
- Make every video title lowercase (to mitigate eye-catching titles)
Here's my code, although I have to update it every once and a while when YouTube changes:
It's amazing how much a couple small changes can make on your browsing experience. The companies that own these products have a huge incentive to make every element purposefully addictive. I've also patched the iOS Instagram app to remove all Reels (using FLEXtool & Sideloadly), so I can keep up with my friends without falling into the traps. As developers, we have the ability to target these manipulative tactics and remove them, and I encourage you to do this as much as possible.Can you explain how you patched the iOS IG app? Seems massively useful if it's not too much of a pain. Please share!
If you disable History, it automatically removes Recommendations across your devices.
The issue for me is that I really want History (sometimes I need to go back to a video I know I watched 3 weeks ago). It's bs that they need history disabled to also disable recommendations.
What do you get instead of recommendations? Random junk or just nothing?
I find YouTube recommendations very useful. I only get what I'm interested in or adjacent topics, no junk, no ragebait.
I heavily use android's focus mode to keep myself from being too distracted. Originally I tried using app timers, but I found myself just constantly bumping them to the point where I wasn't getting a benefit. Whenever I notice an app being noisy with notifications (even if I appreciate them when I'm not busy), I add it into the list of distracting apps. I have a daily focus timer that enabled when I get to work and ends when I (generally) leave work. This keeps me focused during the day, but I also occasionally enable this when I want to focus on other things, or if I find myself spending too much time on random apps. Because of the way that the breaks work, I have to keep asking for 5/15/30min and I'm very aware of how much time I'm wasting. I also enable flip-to-shh mode, which disables all notifications when my phone is face down on a surface. I realize that focus mode and flip-to-shh can seem extreme, but I noticed this works well worked for me.
https://blog.google/products/android/android-focus-mode/
+1 to focus mode; at least on Samsung-flavored Android, you can set a recurring schedule so that focus mode (or any mode) automatically kicks in on certain days/times, which I use to block notifications from and access to certain apps during peak working hours.
Another feature I really like that also might be unique to Samsung-flavored Android--it's been a decade since I've had a device running Vanilla android, lol--is the overall daily screentime tracker. It's purely observational, so there's no penalty for going over, but unlike the app time limits that you can snooze there isn't a way to subtract time that you actually spent, which helps keep me accountable. Mainly I like having a widget that tracks the day's stats on my home screen, because being able to go "oof, did I really spend 45 minutes on <app> today already?" is a strong motivator for me to shape up.
As a bonus, you can also _exclude_ certain apps from the time limit tracker, which I like because it nudges me towards more constructive habits. Stuff like my notes app and Waze don't count towards the timer, nor does my e-reader of choice, which means I'm more likely to read a few pages of a book if I have time to kill since it's "free" against my daily screen goal.
I wanted to develop an alternative to App Timer on Android. I need something more like "App Timeouts". App Timers are per 24 hours, so as soon I hit X amount of minutes, I'm blocked from using it until midnight and then it resets.
What do I mean about App Timeout?
I want to say "Once I reach 20min on this app, block me from using it for 2 hours". Then it resets after 2 hours from that point. Both of those times being configurable of course.
The problem with the built-in Android App Timers now is I end up setting it to something large, like 1 hour or more because I'm thinking about how much time I want for a full day, but then I just sit there in 1 sitting swiping for that whole amount of time. And this usually happens after midnight so I know that I'm going to be blocked for my next day until after midnight again and the cycle continues.
I'd rather something force me to use it in shorter bits of time. So at midnight I can allow myself to get into an Instagram hole for 10 or 20min, but at least I know when I wake up it's been reset. I think doing this will train me to use the app for shorter amounts of time in general (or at least I think so and I want to test that theory).
I don't even know if this is possible in Android. How can one app block another. Maybe by allowing it to overlay over other apps or something?
Lock Me Out does exactly what you are describing: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teqtic.loc...
oh nice! that looks perfect. Will try it out
same for iphone, i always have it in a focus mode that hides almost all notifications. so much better
The opposing viewpoint is that smartphones do fill a need of the modern world, and that is that most people have been separated from their families due to the logistics of finding paying work.
Some of my relatives in the 90s, things weren't much better without smartphones. You had long distance calling and TV, or otherwise you were alone. One of my relatives attempted suicide when she was very young, you can guess why.
But yes, it obviously makes sense to use smartphones intelligently. Meta products and Tik Tok are poison for the mind. And unless you're at home it's a good idea to just shut the smartphone off.
> The opposing viewpoint is that smartphones do fill a need of the modern world, and that is that most people have been separated from their families due to the logistics of finding paying work.
I agree. Tech-minimalists seem to forget that not everybody lives in some heavenly small mountain-side commune.
The article says a lot of things about being 'present', 'mindful', 'nurturing relationships' and 'enjoying the world'.
I don't want to be present. In fact, I want the complete opposite. I want to be literally anywhere else 99.99% of the time.
If I look at my phone and get to look at nice things, talk to incredible people and imagine lots of wish-fulfillment scenarios, I can pretend for a while that not everything is absolute dogshit 24/7.
What am I supposed to enjoy, exactly?
Yep, same. For those of us living in heavily polluted industrial shitholes, in undeveloped countries, with absolutely nothing of value to do outside and no easy way to get out of the city in a reasonable amount of time, the internet is an absolute godsend. I'm pretty sure I would be an alcoholic, or wouldn't be alive at all if it wasn't available.
Smart phones are the best and the worst glued together. None of the past solutions came with a crack dealer nudging you to ruin your life and waste your time every few seconds.
Thanks for bringing this up, it's a great alternative POV.
I think what is meant is that if the phone is acting not only as an "escape" but also as a way of avoiding dealing with things or even changing them, then it is, in fact, harming you from the possibility of improving your condition.
Not for me to judge who is in that position or not, but I would definitely say many people use it as an avoidance rather than having to deal with hard stuff. Change is hard, always was, even before phones.
Playing the victim card is always easier: my life sucks, there's nothing I can do, at least my phone keeps me happier. In many cases, there is always something you can do if you are willing to put the effort. But then again, not for me to judge. Some people are in really tough places.
While completely believing what you write, hasn't it ever occured to you to try to change those things for the better? Using such a sleazy device as a phone to escape reality around you is... bad on many levels you surely are well aware of.
Its easier than ever before to move away regardless where you are, change jobs, reinvent yourself, to form relationships (I know this is much deeper topic but tools for meeting people are really ubiquous, and the rest is just a number game and some self-improvement effort), and at least do your damnest to (re)define rest of your life. Yesterday was the best time, today is second best.
> What am I supposed to enjoy, exactly?
I've spent recently 2 weeks backpacking around some pretty remote parts of Indonesia. Cheap trip, most of the cost were tickets, the rest were just coral/wreck dives. The only westerners I've met (and there were relatively many) have all exactly same bug as me - its absolutely stunning and life-redefining experience. Its not easy or pleasant some times (since you go deep into 3rd world countries with only basic infrastructure, even phone signal can be rare, internet much more so), and properly amazing at others, and the only thing you think of when coming back is how and when to do it again, more, more remote.
One of many suggestions how to make one's life much better and give it some proper motivation. Plus as said it changes you for the better, this I can guarantee 100%. There is tons of beauty in the world, just ignore the noise, politics, and people and companies gaming you for your data making humanity worse off one step at a time.
Reinventing yourself only goes so far before you bump into the political and economic reality of today.
Especially since I'm not a westerner. It's not great out here.
> There is tons of beauty in the world, just ignore the noise, politics, and people and companies gaming you for your data making humanity worse off one step at a time.
It would be easier if said politics and people didn't want people like me or my (online) friends suffering and/or dead. I avoid going outside as much as possible.
I'm not doing too badly economically, honestly. I'm extremely lucky to be able to gild my cage. Doesn't really make me happy, but I guess this is as good as it gets.
I'm the only middle-aged person I know that doesn't use/carry a smart phone (I also don't use email).
>One of my relatives attempted suicide when she was very young, you can guess why.
This misses that even more young ladies are attempting, today, albeit for entirely different reasons. I'll let you guess why.
If you don't use e-mail, what do you use for electronic one to one communication or do you write letters and sent them by post?
>Write letters and send them by post.
Lots of memes/postcards. I also have a part-time secretary (only for scheduling/mailing).
If I need to "sign up" somewhere, I use a burner/temporary email.
Free-est man alive.
That's great and that's what I aspire, but as it's so easy and quick typing and sending a mail I just send it like that. I remember the days before when I hand wrote the occasional letter and delivered it myself or sent it by post.
Would you consider handwriting a letter and then fax2email it also an option, if not why not? Writing a letter can be much more intentional, but the sending process could be automated.
I remember I bought a german book with bundled talks/essays at the Goetheanum bookshop last year about how to relate to the digital revolution. Distracted by the internet I haven't had time yet to read the book. "Das Ende des Menschen? Wege durch und aus dem Transhumanismus" (The End of Man? Ways Through and Out of Transhumanism), edited by Ariane Eichenberg and Christiane Haid.
Often I'll include a stamped postcard, addressed to my PO Box, because I think there is something important about paying for the privilege to communicate with somebody off-line [the stamp]. It forces your message to be more concise/worthwhile.
There is also something sweet about having a built-in delay for the message to "gestate" — perhaps if politically-related, your point is even further reinforced as "prescient," as the pre-dated postmark attests (upon delayed arrival). Perhaps you're wrong and wasted a stamp.
----
Mostly I agree with (I believe) P.G.'s premise that email is nothing more than a to-do list that anybody can add on to. I do not wish to ever be immediately reachable, again, and this is an expensive freedom/lifestyle.
I am simply too angry to have access to a system [email] where I can immediately tell anybody in the world how I feel about something [and did for a quarter-century]. If something really bothers me, it has to be worth a postage stamp (I usually write postcards, but also have thousands of FOREVER Stamps™).
It's not a competition between eras to see which is worse, my point is only that smartphones fill a need for isolated adults. That can be true and they can still pose a problem for teenagers, it's two separate issues.
I find most of the debate on smartphone use tends to fall on the extreme. Why not find a happy middle ground and recognize that they do have valid uses?
The most addicted family-as-a-whole to the screens I know of live literally 100m from each other (3 generations). Suffice to say this is far from their only addiction. What you describe is certainly true for some people, but I am having hard time believing this is majority. I live long term far away from family and an occasional whatsapp video call is covering our digital meeting needs.
Most people are simply too weak mentally to resist various self-forming addictions and don't care about these topics at all.
It isn't so much about the smartphone replacing family as it is about phones giving us something to do in our homes in lieu of the presence of other people.
Even a family that lives close to each other is separated in space by different homes and will often find themselves alone. But their situation will be much better than someone with no family around. They have the option to see each other, many don't.
I think the more detailed point is that we're largely atomized these days into separate physical spaces where we're often alone, or confined to a small number of people. Smartphones and computers make it a hell of a lot easier to break through that problem.
I have a similar great+simple system for curbing consumptive screen-time, i.e. I don't keep any of those apps on the phone, I block all of those websites on phone/laptop web-browser using an extension like Leech-Block and Un-Hook (YT). Some things that I allow are - YT long-form videos from subscriptions only, Hacker-News, and Linked-In.
THE biggest impediment for me has been stuff like getting sick. When I am sick, I just cannot lie there and do nothing. And it is TOO difficult to do stuff like read books or go out and talk to people or whatnot, it's too much effort. I HAVE to get back on consumptive screen-time. And then it devolves into something uglier - an ugly spiral, of gluttony & consumption, and I keep at it even beyond getting better.
Then it takes days or weeks of laziness and excuses to get back on track. And not just sickness but anything of that level. Anything that just kinda derails my life for a bit. I really need to find a middle-ground solution for the worst-case scenarios. I'm still working on it. I think I should be able to figure it out. It took me a while to figure out my best-case system as well.
I just use an old phone. App developers are lazy and very quick to pull support for devices that are even a little old. A large number of apps won't even install or start, or complain to you to try to shame you into buying a new phone. Use developers' laziness to your advantage.
Ditto! I try reading some silly things, play some old silly games (e.g. Warcraft, not arcades), or just watch some YouTube. But I don’t watch YouTube in my daily life, so I’m not addicted to it.
For me reading books works well when I’m sick in bed. You probably need to force yourself for a while but it’s worth it. That being said i was a voracious reader in the past so it might not tickle your toes in the same way
I keep my phones in the other room on silent all day, don't use anything with an algorithmic infinite feed, don't use social media, and blocked all the news websites I could.
It's amazing to me how many people can't seem to walk down the street these days without staring at their phones the entire time.
I think they're addictive, bad for your mental health and acuity, and bad for society. And it's amazing how much time I'll spend even just checking the two small hobby discords I'm in just cause I've been so tuned towards picking up the phone when bored.
Leaving it in the other room on a speaker is nice cause it at least forces me to get up, and since I keep it on the speaker I don't often sit with it anymore. Which means I do other stuff like read, and clean, and work on things, or just sit and stare at the wall and let my brain breathe.
I still use maps (without location though), check out which helicopters and ships I'm looking at, weather, email, search, and Spanish flashcards through Anki. Which I think are nice activities.
What deck are you using? I’ve been wanting to supplement my Spanish learning with an Anki deck for a while now.
I've been using two decks, adding 20 new cards a day.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1631165043 - This is 5000 common Spanish words. Be warned, the pictures appear to have been pulled by some sort of automated process and some are risque. That being said, I learn words and then see or hear them fairly quickly while watching baseball en español, o leyendo las noticias o los librose.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/638411848 - Spanish conjugation. Super hard at first, especially since it starts with the most unique verbs. But patterns emerge, and incredibly useful.
Those two are the only... "formal" work if you can call it that that I'm doing. The rest is writing to friends and notes at work, watching baseball and tv (and with subtitles and audio where possible), reading the news sometimes (still difficult, but has added benefit that I read less news), setting interfaces to Spanish.
My Spanish is really coming along at this point, and it's very cool. Wishing you good luck in your endeavor!! The most important thing is to just stick with it.
Thanks for sharing! Good luck to you as well.
Ha ha, what is Hacker News?
Yea, I check Hacker News most days once or twice.
On my work computer only. There's a fair amount of professional relevance. I don't think I've clicked the "next page" button in a decade though.
So that sits firmly in the "healthy" category for me.
On top of what's suggested in the post, I found the following helpful:
- having a "phone box", the small uncomfortable shoe bench now has a shelf above it for phones, phones shall only be used on that bench
- only my partner knows the "screen time" password on iOS
- putting away my laptop and using a desktop computer instead
My current problem is listening to podcasts, I don't have a convenient way to listen to them without my phone.
I downloaded all of hardcore history and added the podcast to my iPod. Fun fact: the iPod is why it's called a podcast!
I had a side gig that involved me driving every day for at least one hour, but usually more. I listened to all kinds of podcasts and audio books. But at some point, I realised I cannot process that much of information. That’s how I stopped, perhaps we humans aren’t designed to process that much daily.
It feels validating that other people have a similar experience. I simply can't take in that much information. It eventually starts making me feel terrible.
The big issue is that I'm not very good at moderating my intake. I'm a crack addict for information and one small dose will turn into a bender.
I think it's fine if you accept it as entertainment and nothing more. That's why I don't get how people listen to audiobooks on 3x. The goal isn't to ingest as much as you can--the goal is to enjoy it and maybe learn something useful here and there.
Get a secondary "podcast only" phone
I have an old phone I've repurposed as a media player. It has a 500 GB SD card and Oluancher to give it a really convenient way to only show the apps I want.
I've got a somewhat weekly 6 hour round-trip commute where it get a lot of use.
RIP mp3 players
I think best thing I did with my phone is turning sound off, it doesn't make sound except my alarm, it doesn't vibrate either. Granted I don't have kids/don't work in a place that has on-call.
For computer I'm almost 100% on there all the time whether at work or at home, I can't handle silence. The present thing is funny, when the internet goes out I'm in the present like oh man what do I do.
I think going out and being in nature is good for being present. Watching the ocean/large body of water, huge field, being in a forest, etc...
It is funny how your mind operates where you're always in some state, it's 9 AM I gotta be at work, it's this time I have to do this next... that's what I aim for is not huge wealth (although that'd be nice stealth anyway) but freedom with my own time. Right now from dumb choices I'm burdened with debt so my main reason to continue living is just working to pay bills. Not saying that in a bad way I just realized that, trying to get passion back in something. And my cat gotta care for him.
> While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing
For those looking to drop a(ny) habit: this seems to be the key
Why disabling youtube recommendation? It is literally the only recommendation engine that works, just don't watch shite (at least from your account) and you will never be recommended of that. Other smartphone services are irrepairely wrong, but youtube is a search engine for what you dream. Everything you are searching in google or mentioning somewhere on youtube forum will be added to your "interests". Regular search is broken but the recommendation "search" is the best service I ever had, it is like an oldschool librarian who knows what book will interest you.
because it flips the content consumption model on its head. instead of "i want to watch a video about X" -> search for video about X -> watch, the loop becomes open youtube -> see interesting recommendation -> watch. you are no longer using youtube as a tool to consume videos, it is using you, increasing time spent on the site/app and therefore generating more ad revenue.
How youtube can use me if I spend all my time outdoors and yt is just a radio? There are some ways to see it without ads even wihout deepening the profile with the credit card.
My point is that there is no better software to get acknowledged about the different Xs than yt. My point is to go cold turkey about any other recqmmendation services because they can not serve my interests when I work with my hands, or walking, or driving. I have listened some 3.5 hours podcast about Math and I am sure there is no other way to consume such a podcasts other way than I recommend here.
I believe the point he was trying to make is that he doesn't want to be recommended things he wants to watch. He wants his YouTube use to be be focused and intentional, and not let himself get sucked into an endless stream of engaging content.
This is why I often use/watch via http://www.ytch.tv (hn/u).
Check out Channels 1/6/7/25/35/40
And my point is that your words is about any other recommendation engine. Youtube is very different, there is no better information source to shape oneself what is really good to be interested in. Except of maybe book search websites.
The author wants to find content when he is looking for something specific. He does not want his attention grabbed by something he wasn't looking for, no matter how educational it may be.
Multiple people have clearly explained this to you in several comment threads and you're still insisting it makes no sense. At this point the only question is why you don't want to understand.
Well, what is enough good to grab one's attention? If not Youtube, something/somebody else has to provide this function for the person. The impact Youtube does on me is like having fucking Aristotle as a teacher. Tell me please what is better.
> It is literally the only recommendation engine that works.
do you really find this to be true? i find it’s incredibly wrong like 90+ percent of the time. i am not close to interested in most of its recs. i’ve tried for years to tell it what i like and its just wrong so often. i’ve even tried entirely new accounts.
i mean, sure every once in a while im like “whoa, that’s a great rec” but thats pretty rare. it’s definitely better than spotify and the like etc… they’re wrong almost always, but a miss rate of more than 9 times out of 10 is so bad.
recommendations from people is so much more accurate.
when i get a music recommendation from someone who works at the record store the positive hit rate is so high, same with movies and music recommendations from friends, etc… if it works for you that’s great but my feed is overflowing with video after video where i’m like “why in tf do you think i’d want to watch this?”
> when i get a music recommendation from someone who works at the record store the positive hit rate is so high, same with movies and music recommendations from friends, etc…
That tells me you are a simple person so yt gives you a simple recommendations. Music content in yt is poor, your music taste can be improved in different places. Movies are just a stupid time consuming, if you like to watch them, why to complain about bad recommendations?
> recommendations from people is so much more accurate.
You are happy to have well-educated friends probably.
> a miss rate of more than 9 times out of 10 is so bad.
For me its top 10 slots are 100% about the persons I appreciate, so to get to the point is time when 9 of 10 are bad I need to watch everything what the persons have published for the time I have been offline. 90%/10% is just the usual Pareto, it's ok.
> i’ve tried for years to tell it what i like and its just wrong so often
It doesn't take years. Just open all youtube links featured on HN and start playing those from your account without even seing/listening. You will see the changes immediately. Next step is to just stop watching any channel with 1M subs and any videos with 1M watches. Soon yt will ask you in some modal window: do you want to see the content from the smaller channels? Press the "yes" answer and you will unleash the real power of yt without clickbait headers, with no arrows on previews etc. Join small channels and treat them like Reddit subforums. This totally works for me, I participate in more discussions on yt than on HN.
I'd say YT recommendations are more than 90% right for me. It almost always recommends me stuff I'm interested in, related to things I've watched. It seems to have the best recommendation engine of all the social media I use, hands down.
I just have to be careful, when I watch something I don't want YT to think I liked, to remove it from my watch history.
Spend every day for a year watching the highest quality YouTube content and it won't get you as far as spending every day for a month directly engaging with content yourself, or some other use of the same time. It's fun, engaging, and easy enough to turn into something you can argue "but it's not slop, it's <x>!". At the end of the day though... it's still 95% entertainment.
I spend a lot of time "protecting" my YouTube recommendations (clearing garbage videos from my history, blocking certain channels, opening links from friends separately) but I still try to immensely limit the amount of time I spend on the site, and the recommendations go directly against that.
You still seing it wrong. Youtube is the best radio possible, it never disappoints me while my outdoor activity. There are no reason to "watch" 99% of hours of content, nothing is interesting in seing talking heads.
Negative measures such as clearing history, putting dislikes and using "not recommend" just doesn't work because from my experience the only negative metrics which works is just refusing to watch shite. Youtube actively uses spaced repetition approach so consider any time you are being recommended to shite as active shaping your recommendation engine. Don't even touch that square with the cursor. Try teaching your recommendation blackbox in positive ways - watch some channels when you are not watching and listening, subscribe to small channels, write comments with no less than 8 words and actively use such nouns which you are welcome to be recommended to.
I also avoid spending much (if any) time listening to the radio/podcasts/etc these days for the same reasons.
> Negative measures such as clearing history, putting dislikes and using "not recommend" just doesn't work because from my experience the only negative metrics which works is just refusing to watch shite.
Clearing history certainly works, just make sure there is absolutely not a single unwanted video in your history or the algorithm will go on a tirade thinking "I REALLY bet I can get this person interested in Lego videos because they watched one 4 weeks ago and I have a ton of Lego content they've not even touched yet". The instant you clear the final offender the recommendations change like night/day.
I'm not sure dislikes/"Not interested" actually do anything. "Don't recommend channel" also definitely works, though there may be a limit to how long they are saved and it's better to just aim the algorithm.
The only thing the algorithm is really good for is finding videos it thinks will suck up your time. The curation is ultimately down to how much work you put into it, which isn't all that unique to YouTube. Putting similar effort into curating any large body of content will also get you more content than you have time to consume, but still doesn't help you actually gain much from engaging with it anyways.
I haven't really try cleaning all the history but I have 2 points of why I consider cleaning the history as futile.
1. Youtube obviously grabs some info not only from Youtube but it also grabs all history from Google search and most of all some random words from Gmail, cleaning that all just for the sake of experiment might be not handy.
2. If some video has got deleted it obviously disappears from history. But there is a man I really fond of, his channels are regularly get banned after a month of activity, than the man finds a new channel with new author/interviewer. Somehow I am among the first ones to get recommended about new interviews with the man.
> "I REALLY bet I can get this person interested in Lego videos because they watched one 4 weeks ago and I have a ton of Lego content they've not even touched yet"
I can share another anecdote. Ten years ago there were a music video "Wintergatan - Marble Machine". I used to watched it dozens of times almost every day. Now if I scroll the feed to the end (Yt is not a doomscrolling) I have 90% probability of receiving the Marble Machine in the very last line. I have not touched it even once in the last several years but it knows I used to love it earlier. BTW it doesn't remember what I loved 15 years ago when most of the videos required Adobe Flash.
> The only thing the algorithm is really good for is finding videos it thinks will suck up your time.
Isn't that how a really great teachers teach? Forget about the teacher's interest, the teacher exists until the fellow pupil is interested.
> The curation is ultimately down to how much work you put into it, which isn't all that unique to YouTube.
That's a lie because FB and other rivals have nothing except the engine (no useful content). Just consume it responsively. The only reason to not use yt's algo is when you are so fond of your work that you have the chair glued to your arse and every second spent to someone's wise thoughts means a lost penny. So pity I have typed a lot of text but noone has asked me to share all my hacks to shape the algo towards one's satisfaction.
I concur. The YouTube algorithm actually appears to work, and doesn't feel like it's trying to steer me away from my interests. My only issue is that it will suggest "current event" type content that is years old sometimes.
Youtube does that for some channels or persons which are so favorable for me that I use to watch all of their videos.
My recommendation about human interests and yt consuming is not to close yourself in your shell, but actively explore what are there any interesting. I become cold turkey to any other recommendation services since I have unleashed the power of Yt.
A few years ago I traded my huge Google Pixel 6 for a 3 inch Uniherz Jelly.
It's not perfect, as I still spend a lot of time on Reddit and HN on the tiny screen while commuting, but it's moved the needle for me.
I've debated getting that phone heavily. My reasons not to:
1. it's gotta be bad for the eyes on a screen that small 2. the Pixel camera!
A small iPhone has pretty good cameras, e.g. 12 or 13 mini.
Huh I came across some very similar looking phones on a similar looking website just yesterday.
I guess these phones are rebadged?
Just curious, do you have to do anything to get Reddit fitting on that screen properly? I almost imagine it would need a reader mode kinda thing
Get a Kindle and read good books while commuting. You shouldn't feel bad for not looking out the window.
I researched this phone, and while being cool (I like the idea), it’s not practical for me to hunt it, it’s not trivial to buy in my area. However, I have a similar idea to others: an old tiny iPhone (4S or 5S if you can survive with the obsolete system, FaceTime and iMessage works there last time I checked, a year or two ago), or SE 1st gen (I use it as my second phone to my 12 mini), which is perfectly usable (Safari is stuck at whatever version it has from iOS 15). It’s not very practical everyday phone, but it works for most tasks, including navigation with maps. So if you’re hunting a small distraction free phone, an obsolete iPhone is a pretty decent thing to buy, and is usually cheap. I bet getting a new battery might be more expensive than the phone itself, unless you’re up to the task (it’s not complicated, if you have the basic instruments). I know it’s the opposite of an open phone with an easily swappable battery, but it’s a decent step into the direction. And I found an old iPhone being very usable for very basic tasks. If I had a Pro Max, I’d surely wasted much more time on it. I know because I had one before.
I've been running dumbified version of iOS for a few months now, and I'm very happy with it.
I removed every 'fun' app except for a few exceptions:
- ChatGPT, but mostly in voice mode, and with other people - as a party trick.
- Whisper Memos (https://whispermemos.com/), I record voice memos and they end up in my email, so I can continue with that idea when I'm on a computer (whether that is a prompt for AI, or a todo.)
- Bevel (https://www.bevel.health/), to track sleep factors, such as whether I wore a nasal strip
- Overcast (https://overcast.fm/), for playing podcasts.
- Liftosaur (http://liftosaur.com/), for tracking gym
- Basics like Banking, EV charging, Maps, Parking, Messages, Weather, Authenticator, Reminders, etc.
I removed App Store as well as Safari, so these apps is all I can do on my iPhone.
In the beginning, I set up a Screen Time code so I wouldn't be able to cheat. But in a few weeks I got used to it. So App Store and Safari are enabled again, but I never use them. (Maybe Safari is disabled. I have no idea to be honest.)
The biggest downside is I never know where my phone is. However, I'll gladly accept this downside.
30 minutes per day on your iPhone each day is insane. I spend 2.5 hrs according to my phone, and that's about 50% necessity and 50% nonsense like Twitter.
May I ask what you do that requires doing it on the phone?
If "necessity" means work-related: On my work-issued iPhone, I call and (briefly) text with people, triage some e-mail, have a look at calendars, take some in-situ photo/video, refer to a few notes, and so on. I don't have the screen time feature turned on but I guess I'm also below 30 minutes on that phone on most days. The exception being traditional voice calls which occasionally can go on for (much) longer than those 30 minutes, depending on what's happening. However, most of my more regular, scheduled conversations happen in real-life or in Zoom, Webex or other such platforms and not on a mobile phone.
The only work-related thing that I can think of OTOH which really required me to use a mobile device is hardware that requires an app to work (which is fortunately still rare).
Surprised that no one else has highlighted this. In 2025, this is an outlier worth talking about
It's especially amazing because it's so easy to fuck up. Read a few articles on the web. Scroll social media on a lunch break. Watch a video or two on YouTube. Listen to some music. Take care of some banking stuff. Suddenly you're at an hour or two and you've barely noticed. To keep it to 30mins you have to be so intentional.
I find that I don’t mindlessly scroll on my desktop, so it’s not a panacea, but the newsfeed eradicator is useful for removing recommendation feeds from a desktop browser: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-feed-eradicato....
Also, here’s a (mostly just for fun) project I did related to this: https://github.com/andrew-noble/doomscroll-detector
A few things that made a noticeable difference for me:
- A do not disturb mode that is noticeable: no wallpaper, no clock (black on black), no notifications, battery saving mode. If I'm around others, my phone is in that mode.
- No social media apps, and stay logged out of the mobile website. Don't remember the password.
- No email app. I thought it would be a problem, but I've been logged out of Gmail for over a month. I forget to check email. It's great!
- A wrist watch. Get the time, not the notifications.
- Something to keep busy, but only for medium periods. I like reading articles queued in Instapaper.
- Ad block rules and other delays for the things you really struggle to stop doing.
- Ad block rules to remove the distracting elements of websites you must use. Remove the feeds wherever you can, or redirect the feed page to the notifications page.
- Turn off ad blocking. I never use the internet on my iPad because the unfiltered internet is unbearable. I see a cookie banner I can't skip and it takes me right out of it.
- Keep your phone in your backpack or in a separate room.
- Paper books
I want a small Android phone. I know this won't solve my addiction, but it will reduce it.
I have an Xperia X Compact phone that I bought in a used shop in Japan for $50. I think you can buy it online too. It's pretty small, runs kinda slow so I don't use any demanding apps. Mostly just use it for directions, studying flashcards, and messaging people. It's sad they don't make phones this small anymore.
You might be interested in looking into an android phone with an eink screen - I find it to be a good deal less stimulating. I think a lot of people use the boox palma.
I recently tried to put my phone into black & white mode via iPhone accessibility shortcut (triple click on power button)
This did not seem to work for me. I would forget about it and after a while just left it on color.
Now I use a shortcut on the action button. By default my iPhone is black and white, pressing the action button gives me color for two minutes.
The crucial step is that after this time it is automatically switching back to black and white. Even when the phone is locked.
This now seems to actually help. And as a side effect I also enjoy looking at a few things in black and white. A new experience.
All these great ideas for how to prevent you from doing something, they all need to allow me to bypass it when I want to, but they also need to automatically switch back to the “locked” mode.
This needs to be seamless so that the “yes I am sure I want to read this” bypass does not become a new, meaningless habit.
What is also interesting is that apparently, for me, a hard lock-out, a hard disable, is not good enough. Instead, reducing the joy (black & white filter) seems to work much better and does not motivate me to work around the restriction.
I doubt I would be happy with a dumb phone either. So this is a good middle ground.
One other thing I’ve always hoped to see is a kind of scheduled check in with me, where I am asked / reminded to get out of my Netflix / Reddit / YouTube tunnel vision.
Hardware and software to do that is tricky. iOS locked down too much.
But there are today quite capable and cheap Esp32 based smart watches (~$25) and I am trying to figure out how to integrate one of these into my life purely for tunnelvision-interrupting “are you really sure you want to do this right now?” notifications.
I feel privileged to have had a childhood before smartphones. At least I can remember how we used to be.
All of these measures are not because of how it is today but because I am afraid of where we will be a few years from now. Endlessly engaging generated AI content.
Better try to build some boundaries while I still can.
I have a distinct moment in my memory of when I stopped being a voracious reader, and started spending more time online: when I got an iPod touch.
To reverse the trend, I’m trying to read physical books or ebooks on a dedicated ereader as much as possible. No one seems to care, they are on their phones.
When I do use social media, I try to use a computer where I have much more control over what’s happening. So far I’ve read a ton more books this year.
Great article, I'm a cofounder of Clearspace and think about this a lot.
> I'm an adult, I know how to circumvent these limits, and I will if motivation is low.
It's impossible to build systems that perfectly prevent you from doing this, but it is possible to build systems that can perfectly deter you from doing it. You could set up one - for example - that texts your spouse if you delete it. Or charges your bank account. Or whatever other doomsday device you want to rig up.
> Time limits don't affect the underlying addiction. You don't quit smoking by only smoking certain hours of the day.
Yeah but if you could encode cigarettes to ween you off of them by force, that'd be a big help. Also cigarettes don't have any real utility, so cold turkey is a reasonable strategy. Unfortunately the social media platforms have real utility, so a guardrail strategy makes more sense.
> The companies that build these apps have tens of thousands of really smart people (and billions of dollars) trying to get me hooked and keep me engaged. The only way to win this game isn't by trying to beat them (I certainly can't), but by not playing.
When it's all said and done, someone is going to build the right set of digital environment modification tooling that does beat them. It has to be possible, the internet is intrinsically customizable
I have found vast improvements on my mood and focus by not bringing my phone with me to classes and work. Not checking it in the mornings (analog alarm clock!) or during the day has significantly improved my focus and how deep I go while working. And I just feel better. Not being bogged down by whatever is going on in the digital world while I am trying to churn as many good thoughts out of my brain is really quite freeing.
> I'm an adult, I know how to circumvent these limits, and I will if motivation is low.
That point can be easily fixed as there are various online timelock services where you can put in your security code or password that will not reveal it to you within a certain timeframe [0][1].
[0]: https://lockmeout.online/ [1]: https://password-locker.com/
I use my phone on average 5m per week. This week is bigger, due to lots of medical things. I've spent 3m on it today as of 6pm.
No social media. No videos. No Music. I don't click on links in texts except the one that will show me where my taxi is.
At restaurants people around me sit together with food going cold on plates whilst staring at their phones. People walk around and into me whilst staring at their phones. I saw someone nearly step on a nesting Bush Stone Curlew, despite the protests from the bird's mate, because they were staring at their phone.
I do not believe we are cognitively capable of dealing with interruptions that demand our attention every 30 seconds. I know that despite a long list of life threatening illnesses I am the least anxious person I know, and I think that everyone else is stressing because they are staring at their phone.
* Anecdote, one person's experience. YMMV
https://untrap.app/ for YouTube customisation has been a lifesaver for me. It can even be added to Safari as an extension, for £2.99.
Also UBlock Origin for blocking specific elements on the screen is a lifesaver for reading articles or tutorials.
I am still trying to turn the clock and read books (on paper), at least before bed. Decrement the screen. I must be lazy. Going back to the screen to do nothing is so much easier.
> If we assume people sleep roughly 8 hours per day
I'd strongly question that assumption. Based on what I've heard from friends (and also personal experience), I think there is quite a large number if people who spend too much time on the phone, but also still want to do activities/work on projects, etc - all in addition to work, family life and chores.
The result is that the time is taken from the activity that appears most "compressible" at first glance, which is sleep.
When I got in the habit of putting my phone in a KitchenSafe at 9:30PM every night my sleep (according to my watch sleep tracker) increased by a full hour. From 10:30 I'd get into bed and peruse Reddit or Twitter on my phone, often past midnight. Now I just read a book for 30 minutes until I'm too tired and doze off.
> Now I just read a book for 30 minutes until I'm too tired and doze off.
Hard books are the real soma: I have all these books that I want to read because I want to understand and know what's in them, but there are so many charts, graphs, maps, equations and simply complex-ass thoughts that they're hell to get through during leisure time without waking up falling out of your chair.
That's perfect night table insomnia reading. Either they put you to sleep just by a couple glances at the page you left off at; or you in fact have real insomnia, and that's going to be your wings to get you through them. Added bonus: sometimes you fall asleep and have complex dreams, and understanding that argument ends up like when you're debugging in your sleep.
I feel like these articles come up all the time now. The advice is always the same (it's not rocket science), but people are either slowly defeated by their addiction, or they just don't really follow the advice in the first place.
Media (not phone or computer) addiction is the socially acceptable addiction of our time, just like alcohol formerly was. Most of this consumption is completely pointless, depressive and degrades your mental ability to stave off boredom and be creative. So many current problems in the world are caused (alongside inequality and many other causes) with our society-wide acceptance of this media addiction.
Right now, my colleague opposite me is using their phone to dick around on Facebook. They will spend 1 hour to 1.5 hours on it at work today (equivalent to 12% of their salary), with it sat there vibrating on the table every 3 minutes (you need 25 minutes of uninterrupted concentration to get into a flow state). You can see the Pavlov dog mechanism kick in every time it vibrates. This colleague makes tons of mistakes, distracts me and others, and this is deemed acceptable because everybody is in the same position.
It is wild to me that media technology companies achieve the valuations that they do, and only makes sense in a world where a huge portion of the population are hopelessly addicted.
Phones and computers are not the issue. You can have a smartphone, never install social media on it, untick all the notifications, put it in monochrome mode, and lock it down completely. That's how my phone is, and I spend on average less than 10 minutes per day using it.
People need to change their approach to boredom. If you're waiting in a queue, walking somewhere or on public transport, you need to find a way to fill that boredom without using the easy option. That easy option hooks you in, and before you know it you spend 4 hours a day on a phone. Just daydream, think about a project or an idea in your head. It's good for your brain.
If you want to try my phone setup:
- Android phone
- Permanently in monochrome mode, black wallpaper, white icons, minimalistic launcher (app drawer only)
- Zero social media, games, media apps. For hardcore dopamine resistance, uninstall music and podcasts as well. Boredom can be a good thing, and you don't need to fill your day with constant dopamine hits
- Disable built-in versions (like YouTube) in settings. Turn off Google discovery if you use that app
- All notifications disabled except communication (phone, email, message)
- For communication, unsubscribe from any non-urgent emails as soon as you receive them
- Bedtime mode, starting and ending at least 1 hour either side of sleep. Don't use your phone in the first or last hour of the day at all (you won't be using it at this point)
With this setup you get the benefit of a smartphone (useful utilities like maps, translation, web searches, digital tickets), without any further reason to check it. I don't really believe in the idea of going for a dumb (feature) phone because you lose useful utilities.
If you try and persist with this sort of setup for a month, even if you begin giving in after this point, you'll remember how much better things were and that will always provide an easy way back into it should the habit lapse.
Computers are tools for us to do things our brains aren't capable of. They are not things to hijack our lives, otherwise we may as well be simulations.
Not sure what the economic impact would be if everybody left social media, video games, and YouTube en masse tomorrow, considering how much growth the US (and therefore world) economy has seen from a handful of companies that provide the digital drugs.
The advice about deleting youtube history and setting and auto-delete cadence (though every 3 months looked like the most frequent possibility for me) is good and I wasn't aware of it. I don't have social media, but I do have a personal gmail email address, which links to youtube making it hard to avoid spending time on my phone watching youtube videos.
In the 5 years since giving up a smartphone I started a new generation Linux Distro from 0, started a security consulting company, made hires, traveled the world, and learned several completely new skills, while having a fairly active family and social life.
Having so much more time to do actually useful things means I am present when relaxing, and focused when working, and get a lot more out of both portions of my life.
Anyone telling you that you need a smartphone to survive in the modern world is an apologist gaslighting you. Use cash, and offline tablet or nothing at all, and be digitally invisible and 100% present in the real world.
> "Use cash, and offline tablet or nothing at all,"
Why would I have to use cash if I gave up my smartphone?
Well at the point you give up your phone you are already inches away from having near zero location data brokers can purchase, if you also use cash.
Pretty great privacy win on top of the mental health wins.
Related but if you want a less algorithmic YouTube experience, I'd recommend the Play app on Apple platforms. It uses each channels RSS feed to rebuild YouTube in a much nicer and less distracting native app.
Unlike a lot of people on this site I really enjoy the YouTube algorithm to discovery new topics/videos, but it can definitely become a rabbit hole.
For YouTube addicts I recommend uninstalling the app, using the website, and installing the Unhook browser extension for Chrome/Firefox/Edge. It can remove recommendations, shorts and a bunch of other stuff.
https://unhook.app/
I second this. I had a tendency to get stuck watching YouTube videos before I hid all algorithmic recommendations and the Home page with Unhook. I can finally use YouTube without getting distracted, and there's no way I'm going back.
I just wish I had an addon like this for, well, everything. The browser is such a great platform because you can have this much control over your experience--no such luck with mobile apps.
Wonderful extension, but at times my dopamine-addicted brain keeps disabling it on an impulse instead of doing something creative or productive on my PC. I looked into making it impossible to disable this extension through registry editor, but so far none of the settings in Windows seem to stick.
That algorithm is like a friend who never shuts up but somehow always knows your guilty pleasures
Another tip for getting more out of youtube, is if your topic of interest is potentially not dependent on current events, you get higher signal to noise ratio searching for videos from 10+ years ago exclusively. Earlier the better.
Youtube was so much better when you didn't see the uploaders face and there wasn't incentive to pad video duration.
Switch the fucking thing off. You are not that important. Things can wait. The world turned many revolutions without such a thing. You dont profit, your boss and companies do, you pay with your health, money and more. Your kids dont get smarter, you spawn even dumber kids in the future.
the cable company asked me to accept their generous 50pct monthly discount provided I would not cancel the subscription service but I said I am trying to watch less tv, and that was that
A big problem I find is that if you are a family and have kids you basically have to keep up and that means turning on notifications for messages and emails and then of course that leads to opening the phone, reading email, checking HN (obviously) and then posting a comment on it! urghh
My high schooler is in theatre and they post critical updates via Instagram. It drives me crazy.
And don't get me started on all the custom apps cluttering my phone that these schools and sports leagues get sold on for sharing flyers and other info (Parent Square, Peach Jar, Playmetrics, Mojo, etc.) I guess it's a feature that most of those apps are not well designed and they don't suck you into addictive engagement loops like the big social media platforms.
I don't have kids, so I can't 100% relate, but have you dug into the notifications settings on your phone? They're extremely flexible. I've set mine up so any non-chat notification gets batched into a group that shows at 5 AM and 5 PM. This lets me check on whatever happened the previous evening while I'm having breakfast, and whatever happened during the day after I get home from work. Once I've flipped through all the notifications and done whatever other time wasting things, it goes back in my pocket and largely does not disturb me for another 12 hours.
Maybe something like that could work. If you find there are notifications that are disturbing you, but they really could have waited until the evening, toss 'em in the batch bucket. Eventually you'll tune out all the low-importance stuff and get your life back. Or find some other cadence that works for you. It takes some effort to tune these systems, but I think it's worth it.
I'm surprised that no one else I know uses this feature. It's helped me a lot.
I followed the instructions here to cripple my phone using Apple Configurator: https://stopa.io/post/297
Now the browser doesn't work and I can't install new apps. I also turn on "Do Not Disturb" almost all the time, which allows through notifications from exactly 3 people.
I’m a big fan of the “Reduce Interruptions” focus mode.
I was super-disappointed, attending my recent state townhall meeting, that the only way to participate was scanning a QR code to fill out a survey. After asking for a paper copy (which was never produced), I decided to participate in my own manner:
I stood up and heckled my clown state representatives, for almost an hour, providing audience-appreciated commentary to what I perceive as our failed political system (US bipartisan).
To their toothless grocery sales tax reduction legislation (which'll never pass), I suggested my fellow constituents just shop across the state line, in one of the many nearby grocery stores — just STOP giving our state this money, then maybe they'll consider legislative changes.
Perhaps this fell upon deaf ears, but I wasn't the only audience member frustrated with our legislators' back-patting/inaction. I will vote/shop with my money, elsewhere. I wrote my state officials a letter afterwards, offering common-sense suggestions — hoping this geriatric remembers my participation (he turns 80 soon... just retire already, Congressman!).
What does this have to do with the post?
Needing a cell phone app to participate in democracy (via a QR code).
Nah that's what FRS, GMRS, APRS and LoRA / Meshtastic are for.
Come on, raise your kids right.
I hate this, I think to myself as I lay on the couch and then type what I think onto the keys of my mobile phone’s screen.
It’s not that I hate how the author feels or what he thinks. I hate that he feels he has to think all of this and that the phone is that great an impediment. I hate that I feel like the same way as him and that he’s expressing it so clear. I’m projecting.
This is all so dumb. They’re just phones for crying out loud. We should all be ashamed of ourselves. I’ve been putting salt on top of boredom to make time taste better. What have I done.
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> I care about living an intentional and meaningful life, nurturing relationships, having nuanced conversations, and enjoying the world around me.
These.. are all possible with a smartphone?
I agree with the author, but can’t agree with his stance that self-restricting is not effective. I use tools like Screen Time heavily with a setup that is not bypassable on a weak moment (I don’t know the PIN).
Nowadays when waiting for something I might take my iPhone 15 Pro out of my pocket and unlock its boring-ass greyscale screen. There are no new notifications from any apps whatsoever, because I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb all the time.
I’ll first peek over the Mail app: no red notification badge. Still, I’ll sometimes compulsively open it and check my inbox. There is no new mail, there is almost never any new mail aside from Google sign-in notifications. (I unsubscribed from all marketing emails).
Then I might check WhatsApp. Nobody important texted me. If they did I’d receive a notification. I didn’t receive a notification in the past few hours. There are no infinite content feeds on my phone. Even my web browser only allows a specified set of websites.
Sometimes when waiting for something, and if I ran out of books I pre-downloaded for free from Internet Archive, I’ll open the Maps app and go all around Antarctica trying to find scientific bases. It can be kinda fun. Especially when you don’t have any social media or unrestricted internet on your phone.
I have ADHD.
Before implementing Screen Time restrictions on my phone, I was glued to the screen all day and night long. These restrictions were the difference between functioning and not.
ooh deleting and pausing off youtube's watch history is nice, no more getting sucked into videos of someone beating dark souls by only pressing the Z button or whatever other bullshit Google has realized I will waste hours on.
I use SocialFocus for iOS/macOS to block recommended videos, etc. It’s incredibly useful.
I may be on the outside here but I am all for using the phone or any more mobile computer. Humans are not designed to sit at desks all day and having a good computer with me all day is something I want. Its just that I want it to read books and take notes or sketch to free my mind. Not slurp down rage bait wrapped up with some shop at target. Supporting computers by inviting in the marketing money was a big fuckup.
there is video playing in every house i visit
You don't treat the symptoms; you treat the cause. dumbphones, minimalist phones, and crippled smartphones are as effective as a smoker throwing away a full pack, only to buy a new one when stressed or drunk. If you use doomscrolling as an escape, you will inevitably fall back to it when life hits. While a few may manage to change their habits with a restricted device if the stars align for long enough, it won't work for most. You need to first figure out why you do it.
“You must figure out why you smoke in the first place, before you will be able to quit” isn’t a universal truth.
This isn't universal but will tremendously help quitting. There will still be the nicotine issue, but it will help clear the other factors that can be as powerful as the physical addiction.
Or it could be - you figure out why you smoke in the first place, and have to accept that you can never quit
Because you know why you are smoking because you are addicted to nicotine.
so the symptom is the cause
The cause why you started smoking might have gone away but you are still addicted to the substance. We don't have the same chemical addiction with doom scrolling.
hey man, it was your analogy
And it still stands.
Very occidental perspective. There are places where you need your phone practically 24/7, no affordance of escape. I can give an example of my day, which is basically completely phone centered, the only words I utter in a day is some digits to the taxi driver to verify my identity (when i can afford a ride that is).
Edit: mute button is essential and don't allow any notifications outside important messages/apps
Is this out of convenience or necessity? Do you have redundant devices so that if your primary glass slab is unusable for some reason, you're still able to make it home at the end of the day? Are you in some new role and lifestyle that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, or suffering from a disability for which the cell phone is your only means of achieving independence?
The human race has survived for about 2 million years without a 24/7 tether. Our environment is the safest and most human-shaped it's ever been, you don't need to have constant anxiety about true emergency situations resolved by cell phone connections, those are unimaginably rare.
It's totally feasible to go without a cell phone once in a while, just try it! Check your emails once a day, 5 days a week. Set up an auto-responder saying you're unavailable and can check messages at [time]. Navigate with your memory and the many signs that are posted, or with a paper map for aid. Write down things you need to remember with a pen and a piece of paper. Leave the phone behind and just go for a walk in a park with nothing but your surroundings and your thoughts. The world will keep turning for 30 minutes regardless of whether you're keeping tabs on it through the phone.
I think they're referring to (the especially common in Asia) scenario where all payments/ authentication/ local services are handled via smartphone applications? You can definitely go for a walk without it but you might not be able to get on transit, buy from shops, read a menu at a restaurant or so on.
Which is fucked, and it pisses me off when halfwits imply that the US is "behind" because we haven't funnelled our whole society into a fucking phone app (yet).
Interesting blog post. A few thoughts on smartphones, presence and whatnot:
- I've lusted over the fantasy of having a pocket knowledge machine / tricorder-like thing since long before PDAs and later smartphones. Okay, still no full tricorder, but boy, are smartphones ever useful. I really like having a pocket GPS, music/audiobook player, translation device, library, basic sensor package, gaming machine, backup for my most important data, password/document manager and general purpose computing device in my pocket.
- I was a child before the web was a thing but I very much grew up on computers and the web and I have seen and/or experienced all sorts of addictive, gamified and otherwise nasty things those technologies brought with it (or enabled). I'm rather happy to have a bit of context from a time before those technologies and I'm also happy about having grown out of most of my computer-related bad habits and behaviours before the web and those technologies were what they are today.
- I made a decision to get off most social media with the exception of a few forum-like things at the point where I felt that it was no longer mostly about expanding real-world connections. Must have been around 10-12 years ago, I think.
- In my personal definition of "social media", I've included most messengers and certainly the way many people seem to use them. This abstinence can cause quite a bit of social friction and peer-pressure and I'm not entirely sure if I could (or would want to) "resist" had I not first grown up without any messenger and later with (occasionally excessive use of) IRC, ICQ and many that came after.
- If I feel the need to publish something, I'll do it via some long-term channel (blog, newspaper, journal, conference, ...).
- Even without being on social media, it's still relatively easy to keep up with current (app-/web-)culture enough to not get laughed out the room or viewed as a hopeless old fart by younger people (which is important to me because I work with them pretty much daily).
- Even without being on social media, it's still quite easy to keep up with the news and important developments in whatever field might interest you.
- Often, I read "my government / bank / other organization made me have an app / a smartphone". In those cases, I often ask myself it it's a matter of convenience or if those voices come from some context that really does not have any other options. Because I really hope there are no countries where you can't get/use any bank account without an app and I even more sincerely hope that most countries make it illegal to require mobile apps (or even internet access) for any important government service as the only option.
I think the most surprising thing about it, at least in the US - is that mobile bandwidth is THE most expensive. I imagine that's inverted or opposite elsewhere
For perspective, I pay USD $17.33 a month for unlimited 5G data - in the UK, in GBP, so really £13. Low quality home broadband costs more than that, and is slower, but with better latency.
I've tested the unlimited claim, and they really do let you download terabytes. All my local LLMs are downloaded over mobile data.
So yes, in my experience it's inverted over here. Mobile bandwidth is the cheapest if you can get a good deal and you're in an uncongested area with a good signal. Unfortunately that's not a combination I've found to be reliable anywhere I go, especially over the last 6 months. But the price is good!
I wonder how the telcos make money though. 4G/LTE/5G towers everywhere is a huge investment, even the maintenance.
How expensive? In spain you can get 20~30GB for 10 euros, which is more than enough for most people.
10GB for $30.
https://cabletvinfo.com/internet-services/cricket-wireless-p...
or 20GB for $35, with no talk or text.
https://www.usmobile.com/blog/explore-cricket-wireless-simpl...
edit: linking weird sites because I don't know how accessible US telecom site pricing is in Europe, but they are correct.
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> 13 Oct, 2025
Ugh. D M Y date format does not use a comma.
I spend two hours per day commuting in a subway.
If I am "being present" I will just stare at a ground. (Or read a book, but how is that more present?)
I'm good.
at least when you are reading a book, you are getting far more interesting uses of your brain (if it's a good book), compared to mindless scrolling