Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

What works for me is removing the antecedent completely by charging my phone in another room at night.

Now the battle is easier: Decide once a day to put it there, and track how many days you succeed.

For me that's a lot easier than having it in my pocket, where the Internet is always a couple lazy taps away. Now I at least have to walk to it if I want it, and that often "breaks the spell."

I finish work and chores hours earlier when my phone is charging in another room, without consciously doing anything else differently.

It really makes me want a 1980s-style cellphone with no screen and big physical buttons.

Reading on an e-ink device has kept me somewhat sane over the past 12 months.

It's still very tempting to just "hop on reddit and see what's there" or "I'll just check bluesky for..." Then it's 2 hours later and you're angry and despondent.

I've found that having no social media apps on my phone has helped. It also helps to stick to just Firefox+ublock on Android and resist every time a site tries to install an app.

Try to steer clear of any sites with infinite scrolling and recognize the dark patterns that try to suck you in. One thing that was eye-opening was to visit reddit and see which of the stories in /r/all were "amygdala-bait"; rage, indignation, hate, fear, superiority, they're all bait on the hook to reel you in.

People on reddit write fake stories that push as many buttons as possible; an obviously wrong/evil antagonist, the ridiculous situations that only get more and more extreme to try to attract notice, the righteous moral superiority over the antagonist and their minions, etc etc.

Realizing that the result is the same, whether it's a fake story or "news", it's all amgydala-bait.

I recommend getting a Library card and reading. Read anything you like, but read!

There is a big opportunity for someone to make a all encompassing blocker. I am yet to find one. I think everyone is struggling with this in some way.

Anytime I get setup with a blocker it helps heaps. But I always slip back in. Every source of useful information (Reddit, YouTube) comes with toxic clickbait that you cannot disable.

I realized that my addiction is to the point that I cannot reason my way out of it. There needs to be a physical barrier.

A tangible example is sitting eating breakfast and the phone is sitting there and I so badly want to check cnn.com to see what is kicking off in politics.

Today I decided not to check it, and my imagination ran wild and I got really motivated about work. If I checked the phone though this wouldn't have happened and I would have ruined my whole morning searching for little dopamine hits.

Social media kills your imagination and injects someone else thoughts into your head. You want to let yourself think about things that you enjoy and motivate you INTRINSICALLY, not someone else because then you just keep needed to rely on their enthusiasm.

Does everyone really mean doom scrolling when they talk about these issues? For me personally, it's definitely about dopamine and not about negative emotions, yet everyone uses the phrase doom scrolling - am I the odd one out?

For example, if I'm feeling stressed/anxious, I'll scroll/browse/distract myself to avoid the negative feelings. I'm not seeking them like doom scrolling says.

Ugh. I don't necessarily do "doom" scrolling, but lately I have gotten drawn into wasting time on these various stupid "shorts" or "reels" or whatever, mostly on FB. It's weird too... for ages I was vehement about never, ever clicking on any of that crap on FB or Youtube (and I barely use Instagram at all and don't even have TikTok). But one day, somehow, I got suckered in by a thumbnail of a cute dog or something, and lately I've been finding myself wasting an hour or more at a time, idly watching stupid videos of low value crapola. :-(

This is a habit I feel like I absolutely have to shed. Luckily, a lot of the impetus to do that will go away when I ditch FB, which I'm going to do as soon as I get my new personal website/blog set up.

I wonder if there's a "minimum viable connectivity threshold" in modern life - you literally cannot function below a certain baseline of digital access. You could model the failure of "delete everything" strategies as hitting against this hard constraint: banking, authentication, and basic services simply assume browser availability.

Maybe the key insight here is the pivot from prohibition to differential friction. By architecturing high activation energy for distractions (black UI, location blocks) while maintaining low friction for utilities, you've essentially created a "price spread" between productive and unproductive uses of the same capability.

I suspect we're seeing an inevitable arms race: platforms driving activation energy toward zero (think TikTok's frictionless feed) versus commitment devices manufacturing artificial friction. Perhaps the sustainable equilibrium isn't digital abstinence but rather carefully engineered friction differentials that respect our inescapable need for connectivity.

None of those ways are sustainable. Not only because there are good reasons to use those apps, but also because there are times when forcing yourself to work isn't going to work. I mean, if I am sick, tired, and just not feeling like working, I would go out of my way to beat the system I installed.

What has worked for me is: one-sec extension [1]. The extension asks you take a deep breath and confirms if I still want to open the app. What I have realized is I don't want to completely do away with time-sink websites, I only want to moderate my behavior of pressing Cmd-T and opening reddit/youtube/twitter in the middle of work. I have increased the length of the pause to 30 second and I am actively forcing myself to actually take the deep breath. Such a pause is enough to knock enough sense into me and return back to work. I think such kind of gentle nudging is better than being overly harsh on yourself.

[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-sec-website-blo...

The struggle is real. I wrote about this a while back: https://renegadeotter.com/2023/08/24/getting-your-focus-back...

What you are doing is "self-limiting" which is not very effective. The devil on your shoulder will always fight this - "don't tell me what to do!"

The wanting to not doom-scroll should be intrinsic. I know that right now, for obvious reasons, it's easier said than done.

I think about this all the time. I have tried a few different strats:

* ScreenZen on IOS breaks up screen time into discrete sections rather than a lump sum (e.g. 10 segments of 10 minutes each) making it much easier to know each time I've used a segment ("okay, that was ten minutes, do I want to go again?").

* Utilizing focus modes aggressively. DND and Sleep mode can be used aggressively to limit notification spam. While I'm at it I regularly go through my notification list and prune any app that has no pressing need to notify (or demote it to the daily summary).

* physical separation: my friend put me on to this, which is if I can do something without my phone, I'll consider it. Yesterday I drove to the store and back without my phone. Not feeling that weight in your pocket and not having it there to fill your time is a powerful experience. I have considered paying the Apple Watch cell subscription (which I always considered useless) because it means I will be reachable without being scrollable.

* I'm going to try that Foqos app posted here yesterday, I like the idea of physical blocking mechanisms so we can take the upgrades of phones, like GPS and chatGPT while leaving the poisonous bits at home.

This is one of the y biggest personal initiatives ever since I took my screen time stats and calculated I was losing about a day a week to my phone. My life is getting 14% shorter, given to trash I don't really enjoy.

It's not exactly Doom Scrolling, but something I do on my work laptop while at work: I seem to have adopted some kind of tic nerveux during my work as developer that manifests when I get sidetracked for just a couple of seconds. I automatically will start to open my non-work browser/mail or other non-work apps and get completely distracted again. Other in-browser blockers have never seemed to work, but since a couple of days the Focus feature has been released for Raycast on Mac. I find that the system wide animations and the 3 second button delay to pause the session actually work really well. Hope this helps someone.

Recently my coworker asked me if I could recommend any physical alarm clocks. He said that phone alarm causes him to pick up the phone the first thing in the morning and he wants to break away from this habit. I guess at some point the society as a whole will start fighting back.

I went through similar time sinks of micro-optimizing my devices to try to game myself into not getting distracted. What finally worked for me:

- realizing I traded one waste-of-time activity (doom scrolling) for another (device/app fiddling to prevent the former)

- realizing that the clock is ticking towards ultimate death and therefore time is precious

- recognizing when I'm looking for a distraction and, rather than automatically giving into it, asking myself one question:

"Do I want to be thoughtful and disciplined with how I spend my time, or not?"

And then being honest with myself, listening to my answer, and respecting the outcome of my choice.

For me, I want to be a disciplined person. When I'm not, I let myself down. Happiness for me is not letting myself down.

Here's my current status:

* Facebook

  1. Step one was to delete the app, though there was a bit more friction, I still found myself opening Facebook in (ios) Safari
  2. Announce to friends and family I was deleting my account (yup I'm that person).
  3. Delete account
  4. Success!

  1. Delete account, Elon did me a favor here by blocking access without an account.
  2. Delete second account,
  3. Links into twitter are still a problem, but I spend possible 2 minutes on the site per week tops.
  4. NEXT STEP: Block www.twitter.com, www.x.com, etc. from all devices personal and work via /etc/hosts, pihole, custom dns, etc.  

  1. FAILURE

  1. Delete app,
  2. NEXT STEP: block instagram.com from all devices
 

  1. Block news.google.com from all devices,
  2. NEXT STEP (WIP): Block all news sites from all devices

  1. UGH

A little over a year ago I gave away my flagship samsung phablet and bought one of their flip phones, in an attempt to change my habits by consciously making myself doubtful/anxious about the longevity of the flip phone's infamous hinge. The idea was that the little front screen would do everything that a semi-dumb phone replacement could (notifications, camera, calls, timers, calculator, calendar), but I'd also have a 'real smartphone' whenever I needed one - it's just that with this one, using it came at a cost. Every time I'd go to use the big screen I'd remember there was an anxious moment that stood in the way, and the paranoia would make me just anxious enough to question whether I really needed to do what I was about to do.

It's been about 15 months, and I haven't really had to compromise or sacrifice anything: I haven't uninstalled any social media apps, my banking apps are all still there, I have contactless payments on hand, etc.. However, I can say with absolute certainty that my habits have changed _drastically_. Interestingly, I'm not even hesitant to use the phone when I need to, I use it all the time - but when I use it I now use it intentionally, and very briefly; gone are the days of catching myself somehow scrolling through instagram just because 5 minutes ago I opened a whatsapp notification from my mum. It's like night and day, and what's more I feel like I barely had to try.

This is obviously sample of one anecdata, but I'm genuinely surprised at how successful it's been. A real 'life hack'.

(And no I don't have any samsung coupon codes nor do I particularly care for them as a company. Worth mentioning though - the hinge on the zf5 is still really solid 15 months in)

We're primates, we see and tactilely use physical objects.

Use your strength. Put different things in different objects. Now you rationally reason about them.

It's really too bad that you can't disable YouTube shorts. I like watching YouTube videos on my phone, but the shorts is too tempting and I find myself wasting so much time with totally useless content. I'll probably have to remove YouTube entirely.

The only thing that ever really sucked me in like that was Tumblr. The stigma-less repost culture where most of what you encounter is reposted made it feel like I was building something by being on there and reposting things. It really just tickled the right part of my brain. My wife and I would spend literal hours every night scrolling Tumblr.

I've never really gotten anything near that level of enjoyment from another social network.

I still go on from time to time but knowing my friends are never going to see my feed kind of discourages major time investment.

The only thing that has worked for me is to uninstall all of the social media apps. I still use some of their mobile web interfaces, but the friction of mobile web is enough to stop a doom scrolling loop.

Recommend olauncher, a text-based launcher, in lieu of default:

1. No icons -> less temptation to open another app

2. Faster because you only have to type part of the name, eg typing 'po' opens Spotify (for me)

3. Probably less resource-intensive since we're just rendering text

I am so f-in glad I deleted facebook like 10 years ago and never hoped onto anything else. I only hate that I visit HN every few minutes, when I get bored at cagie.

But apart from that, just don't use social media. It's really as simple as it sounds. The only hard thing is to find something to fill the free'd up time with.

In my experience, working on the triggers had the biggest impact. Yes deleting the apps helps a lot, but so did removing the things that made me reach for my phone in the first place: notifications and badges. My phone is in do not disturb mode 90% of the time. In any case, I only allow notifications from WhatsApp and my bank. There are no feeds anywhere; not even the weather. I aggressively disable anything that calls for my attention. I add distance between me and the apps I check mindlessly, like Gmail. All that's left is Hacker News, and Reddit with no subreddits on my front page. Removing the default feed from these websites helped a lot.

Basically, picking up my phone is not rewarding anymore. I'm many steps removed from anything fun. It's enough to not think about it.

I wrote up my own version of this idea in "The smartphone app audit."

https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit

If the idea of auditing all your apps seems daunting, you can take a look at how I did it in bulk by using screenshots of my app launcher screen, then OCR and LLMs to help me do an initial pass at categorizing them. That let me do one quick bulk cleanup.

I found that it's better to simply delete apps and keep the total app count on your phone low, rather than use the various parental control / digital minimalism / Freedom.to style app blocking ideas.

Removing browsers from my phone never seemed like an option for me, but even so, removing all the addictive apps really reduces doomscrolling and other mindless scrolling a good bit.

Lately, I also put any newly installed apps in a "Purgatory" app launcher group and if I notice any of them having addictive qualities, I uninstall them. I did this recently with the Bluesky and Discord apps, for example.

Quitting is easy. I just remember the Before Times and how peaceful my life was when I gave zero fucks about outrage headlines that I couldn't do anything about even if I wanted to.

Fascinated by everyone’s take on what the “doom” in doomscrolling means to them. One of those weird phenomena where someone is saying this word and someone else knows exactly what they’re talking about when they say it, but the two parties have different definitions of the word that just happen to exist peacefully with one another.

"- Delete content apps" This is key.

"- Delete the browser from the phone." This is hard because the browser has other uses. I've found similar results by just signing out of any social media accounts on my phone.

Reddit is useable without being signed in, but just barely. It's certainly not as addicting as it is with an account. Twitter doesnt let me see anything without an account. Same with TikTok. I went ahead and deleted my accounts entirely but you can also just make the password hard to type and remove it from any password managers so its difficult to sign in.

This has pretty much cut my Reddit time from an hour+ a day into 5-10 minutes a day.

I wonder if we can have a continuum of "doom scrolling".

For instance digital crack (tiktok )<->X/facebook<->hackernews<->wikipedia<->"soft" novels<->poetry<->james joyce<->legal texts

At some point any information stream can become susceptible to self-reinforcing doom scrolling. Reading novels is probably better than tiktok but could easily become unhealthy. I mostly weaned myself off of traditional social media but find it very easy to have a quick glance at hacker news and notice hours have gone by.

This post randomly gave me an idea for an infinite scrolling site that may help break the cycle while still being fun.

Imagine a TikTok / YT style video scrolling but after each video you have to swipe progressively more times to get to the next video.

By the time you are swiping like 30 times to slowly inch to the next video maybe people would naturally stop.

My current solution is the freedom app. I have all social media blocked during work hours and after 10:30 at night. I am mostly susceptible to reddit, twitter, instagram reels. I track some issues on reddit & twitter that I am genuinely interested in and impacted by. Freedom will block on the phone and laptop.

Last time this didn't work because I kept turning off the freedom app. (Sigh.) This time I seem to be holding the line though. I'm getting more done and feel better.

I've tried various forms of this.

As long as there's a logged in session somewhere, I have to have various tricks and extensions on my browser to manage things.

Most have been only varying degrees of successful, often ending up in me just disabling the feature whenever I want to get my fix.

The most successful iteration I've found so far is keeping these apps uninstalled from my phone, and using https://one-sec.app/ to forcibly install a barrier between me and the site.

It's not too much different, and the wait time can be customised. You can still just learn to wait through it, but importantly it also has an "intervention" feature that will block you off after a chosen time period and re-prompt you if you want to stay on.

It's been quite flaky on Instagram on desktop, but it's been very useful for Youtube on mobile (which I keep to play videos in the background sometimes).

Otherwise, Unhook for Youtube on desktop also helps blocking things like the home page and shorts.

I haven't found any extension for LinkedIn that works for blocking the feed (or at least suggested posts), and Facebook ones are sporadic in which work for me or not.

Deleting apps doesn't work for me because there are topics I actually want to follow on places like X (e.g. ML / AI news). As soon as I reinstall, it will easily suck you in again with some distracting emotionalised / partisan current event.

There is an app called ScreenZen that was immediately effective in breaking my habit. It made me use social media much more consciously.

My go-to "social media" page has been GoodReads for a while, and I don't see a problem with it – not only because it is rewarding reading books, but because it doesn't have dark distraction patterns and is much more like the mid 2000s internet. Half my family is doing the reading challenges now.

I replaced doomscrolling, a passive and empire-led activity, with active playing chess. I play correspondence games so a minute or two of engagement, per active match, fits me just right any fit time of the day.

I don't at the slightest feel bad about it.

Tell them I sent you: https://www.chess.com/?ref_id=7467288

Pihole is a simple effective solution for blocking right at the source, your incoming network connection. No need to faff around with different apps on different computers, etc. It will block on your entire network.

If you want to double (or triple) up on it, add the sites to your hosts file and send them to localhost and add them to your ad blocker and block the html tag. Now you've blocked all the sites in question 3 different ways.

I blocked a lot of social media sites on my home network to help ease my addiction some. Especially Reddit. I found the mornings I was on Reddit before getting out of bed my mood suffered. I still need to have them available to communicate with some people and for research. But now, in order to use those sites, I either need to leave the house or disconnect from the wifi.

Functionally, this seems to have helped a lot and usually the only time I end up on social media is when I am killing time waiting while out or when I really really want to look at something specific, and only on my mobile device. It seems that making it slightly more inconvenient worked on me without me having to give them up entirely.

Does Doom Scrolling apply to resources like GoodReads or IMDB? I think of it as endemic to feed-based social media, where you have an endless stream of algorithmically selected content. Maybe there's a way to engage with those sites like that, and I just haven't discovered it myself. Anyway, it's his project, I'm not saying he can't do whatever he wants, but for me, that'd be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I've been trying to switch from scrolling to reading my Kindle.

I aggressively curate who I do follow; on Twitter, I mainly use lists. At this point, I'm mostly just interested in AI news. I'm also subscribed to an AI newsletter, but it isn't as tightly scoped as my set of feeds.

I guess I could apply AI to this problem. I'd like a tool a bit like Yahoo Pipes, with email and Twitter integrations, and LLM transformation boxes for summarizing and making decisions.

I should probably look at https://github.com/huginn/huginn

I've done something similar recently..

I have always deleted apps off my phone but still suffered from access via web.

My solution for X is to logout. This is enough since un-authed has no content and the login screen is enough to stop me.

Then for Youtube/Reddit I blocked on personal and work laptops by adding to /etc/hosts file. If I still had access to un-authed Youtube/Reddit homepage I would still find a way to enjoy it. Also Unhook is too easy to disable for me.

Then for my iPhone I have added both Reddit and Youtube to restricted sites via the iOS settings.

Works well so far.

If you are on Android you might not want to delete Google Play Store. It provides services which many apps depend on. I have made use of a couple of old 8Gb Android phones and I found that was about the minimum.

If you factory reset and just allow enough time for Play Store to update, I found if you are quick you can switch off auto update on all the other apps (which are installed as stubs only) and end up with enough storage to be useful, yet one which can run other apps successfully.

My strategy is to do a lot of "Not interested" curation about any negative content, like ragebait, thirstbait, politics, etc.

This leaves mostly meditation and health advice, spiritual and religious uplifting content, cute animals videos, sweet things to share with friends, etc.

I can totally relate to this feeling of frustration with doom scrolling - I was in the same boat a few months ago, especially with YouTube. Fortunately, I managed to break free from the cycle by tweaking a few settings in YT itself (no special browser extensions needed). These are the changes that helped me:

Main settings that gave me a starting point:

1. Uninstalled YouTube app and now using only the browser version (on mobile and desktop)

2. Turned off Watch History in https://www.youtube.com/feed/history - "Pause watch history" (you can only pause the watch history and YT will periodically remind you to turn it back on. OH yeah, nice try Google!).

3. Turn off AutoPlay (toggle switch on the video player toolbar)

4. Tweak all the settings in https://www.youtube.com/account_playback - disable info cards and video previews (the setting that makes the videos to play when you hover over thumbnails)

After making these changes, your YT homepage and History page will be empty spaces - no videos at all. It is so refreshing! As a bonus, now YouTube shorts show only short-forms content from the channels you subscribed to. So it is more meaningful than some random junk.

Additional habits that helped me:

1. Subscriptions - I subscribed to specific channels that I want to follow - eg: Dave2D, MKBHD, fav cooking channels, NPR etc. and watch their videos via Subscriptions link

2. Topic-specific playlists - save interesting videos that I want to save for later - e.g: 'Health', 'Good recipes' etc.

3. Related videos - When a video is playing, YT shows a bunch of 'related videos' on the right. Most of these videos were not really related to the video, instead they are just trigger content. So I do two things here:

     - select the 'Do not recommend channel' from the vertical "..." menu in each video.
     
    - if the related video is genuinely interesting to me, choose the menu option 'Add to watch later'

This was a big shift from a "push" to a "pull" model and has effectively stopped my doom scrolling habit in just a couple of weeks. I feel like I am watching YT on my own terms now.

The Lightphone is all about making the phone a tool, minus infinite feeds. I've preordered a v3 and am very much looking forward to its arrival. My Android can live on my desk for 2fa apps, etc. If I want to consume the internet, I'll do it using nice screens and a real keyboard. Doing anything via a mobile is less good generally, just more convenient perhaps.

I'm currently reading Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism". Something about his approach that I really appreciate is that he doesn't just recommend abstention and ways to disconnect from social media.

His approach is on the one hand to focus on other rewarding offline activities that are creative or which help grow deep in-person relationships. And on the other hand, to engage with technology in specific ways when that usage is justified by being the best way to solve a particular need.

For an example of the latter, one suggested practise is to always keep your phone on do-not-disturb (except for certain important contacts who may genuinely need to phone you in an emergency) and then to triage any notifications only at specific limited times of the day. Avoid the buzzes and pings, but carry on conversations when you aren't trying to focus on something else.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is LeechBlock for Firefox. With it, you can set up site block lists that will either never allow access or allow access after a period of time (60 seconds default) and on a schedule.

I have found this helps because when the motivation is that dopamine hit, the delayed start generally gives me enough time to think, "I should be doing something better with my time."

Edit: of course you can reconfigure and delete LeechBlock, but if you are committed to reduced scrolling it helps. (Obviously I haven't been able to do it with hackernews yet.)

I really want a modern BlackBerry where I can make phone calls, send messages, check emails, use maps, use NFC payments, and occasionally play brick breaker. I don’t need the entire internet in my pocket. I can sit down at a computer when I want that access. I just need a good communication tool that’s lightweight and has a battery that lasts for days.

I had reasonable success deleting Safari from my iPhone. I still need to hit weblinks sometimes, but iOS does a reasonable job at providing a basic web browser for those (no URL bar so I can't then waste time on it).

Of apps, I am currently using ScreenZen, which links into ScreenTime to provide a warning message and delay before I browse a customisable list of websites/apps. (HN is on it...) It seems to work better than OneSec, though it isn't perfect.

[update] Another thing I find useful is to regularly measure my screen time, and have a manageable goal for how long I spend. That's more productive than hoping to go "off-grid" forever.

as a former sysadmin, dont mix work and personal profiles on same machine. treat your machine as not your property, please, unless you have a byod policy - it is simply bad practice. i understand the realities of super federated logins and am not innocent of some of this behavior, but if anyone interested cares to go digging, they probably can figure out exactly what you’re up to on a work device and that’s just not a situation I think people should be willingly entering into when you can just maintain separate, semi-isolated devices and accounts. if for some reason someone is making or encouraging you to use personal profiles for work stuff, treat that as a red flag.

My thing about doom scrolling is that if I’m scrolling for very long it likely means I’m not running into much worthwhile content…

At that point I’m just annoyed and I quit.

I wonder, are people doom scrolling for a long time seeing a lot of content they LIKE?

We need an app that starts a user defined timer when I open a doom scrolling app. Unless the timer reaches 0, I cannot use the app. So for example, in order to browse reddit, I need to wait a minute. Delayed gratification.

Read this while procrastinating.

How many others would classify hackernews as doomscrolling?

The nature of programming means that there are a lot of small gaps while you work, for example as the code is compiling and deploying. These short breaks are not enough to pick up any long-term activity, so therefore the small bites of social media end up looking very appetising.

Other times you need to search for specific information. When you already have 25 tabs open, it doesn't seem that bad to open tab number 26.

The best solution that I've found was to work on cafés and libraries: places where I can easily let my eyes wander between blocks of focused work.

For Android folks, my friend built an app to limit / restrict the apps and websites your phone has access to. It's essentially like workplace fleet management, but for yourself.

I have a little more personal self control, but found his technical implementation pretty neat!

https://limitphone.com/

I've adopted the habit of always having an e-book on my phone, and when I crave a distraction, I read a few pages instead of opening reddit etc. It's been great.

Delete safari from your home screen…it helps a lot.

I am struggling with this myself at the moment, but I find that just doing something else entirely - away from my phone or laptop - is way more effective than deleting apps. Activities like buying groceries, cooking, going for a walk etc all create a sensation when I'm done with them, that I enjoy a lot more than what I feel after an hour of scrolling.

Im trying a ”new” thing, in fact something I abandoned years ago. Namely rss.

I made some scrapers for the sites i follow that lacks full rss feeds, and can now enjoy distraction free focused reading again, without inflammatory comment sections.

However, I’m here commenting so I guess im still under the spell. :-/

X (Twitter) is best used as an RSS. Instead of going to the app and the feed, just make some bookmarks folder with the people you want to follow and read their feeds directly.

Occasionally rabbit-hole threads to find new interesting accounts to follow.

I'm increasingly annoyed that we can't have nice things without exposing ourselves to attentional strip-mining.

I really want to be able to see my close friends' Instagram posts and read interesting tweets from ~50 people I've chosen to follow in my field. There are no technical blockers to letting me do these; they aren't even much technical work. It would be a material life improvements for me (and I believe for everyone). But I'm not allowed to use the subsets of consumer tech which would enrich my life without exposing myself to the Reels button, the For You feed, and an avalanche of black magic attention hacking. I am bad at moderating my use and I have a low tolerance for doomscrolling, so I don't let myself use these products. As a result I'm cut off from the genuinely life improving subsets of social media which could be so easily made available.

We just accept that _of course_ you have to be willing to get your frontal lobe mined if you want to see what your friends have been doing. _Of course_ you have to be willing to scroll an infinite feed of AI-generated slop if you want to read opinions from people you respect.

I'm perfectly happy to see ads, I'm happy to pay money, I'm happy to come to any fair economic arrangement; but I value my attention highly and I can't pay the attentional price demanded of me, so I don't get to use these products.

People on this site might say "just don't use Reels / For You Feed" and maybe they're right. But for me and the vast majority of people that's not an option, it's my individual willpower pitted against an army of designers, PMs and data scientists every hour of the day.

I am happier without social media than I was with it; but I would be much happier still with the genuinely enriching subset of social media which is there for the offering. As social media becomes a bigger and bigger part of modern life it feels more like essential infrastructure which we _should_ be able to access in ways which work for us. The Fediverse is a great step though I haven't gone as far as to built a custom frontend which works for me (I think it's a big untapped market).

Youtube is the clear winner here. They let you turn personalization off - at which point the Recommended tab disappears, Youtube Shorts don't work, and I can still see new videos from people I subscribe to and follow links to videos when I need to watch them. It's a fantastic compromise and I live in fear of some PM (maybe reading this thread) inevitably realizing they could squeeze a few more minutes of sweet attention juice out of me by taking it away.

Moderation is a high form of discipline. Keep the apps, learn to limit usage. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Keep food in the house, learn not to pig out on the sweets. Works in other areas of life where removing access is not an option.

I can relate on so many levels, tried so many techniques and tactics and often returned back.

Now I have similar system in place, however I kept the Chrome installed because of the bank authentications just like you said. But I'm using the Wellbeing app (Pixel) to block all the social media domains so even if out of habit I start typing twitter, it does not load.

The daily game I play is rotaboxes that's super relaxing and exactly, has an end.

I really enjoy reading someone else who is going through the same struggles overcomes them. Good luck sticking to them.

Deleting Chrome on Android is difficult but you can go one better than disabling it.

  adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 com.android.chrome

iPhone has this nice accessibility feature where you can greyscale the screen, this along with putting the phone away in a distance that I would have to get up and walk to it made a huge difference in frequency of usage.

deleting instagram isn't feasible for me. I like to use it to connect with most of my friends, but then also get distracted by their short form content scrolling

Remember when reading Hacker News was considered a time-waster?

Weird — it seems that "doomscrolling" is used here just to describe regular social media addiction.

For me, "doom" scrolling is what you do when there's actual doom. When there's a terror attack and you don't know if you your close ones are safe, when there's a coup, when another war in one of your countries starts. You're horrified as hell, but you can't actually do anything useful, so you are glued to the "scroll": news, hearsay, and all the images and videos that you really should not be looking at for the sake of your own mental health.

I use the strategy of not having any social media on my phone.

If I want to doom scroll, I have to open up the laptop.

Doom scrolling is when you endlessly scroll negative news and communities.

I would love to see more phones with PureOS, and distros based on PureOS. A non-Android FOSS OS that I can fully customize.

What's great about Linux distros is they are designed for different purposes, and they can decide what apps they ship by curating the list of ones in their repository. App delivery is secure, there's no random malware, there aren't a billion different nearly-identical apps with [probably] nefarious purposes, no barrage of capitalist free services designed to addict you. Just basic apps that let you be productive, without bloat, without malware, without BS.

I don't know why we aren't all using that right now. The PC is definitive proof that an open hardware platform can support any number of OSes. Let the user choose.

Things that worked for me:

1. Disabling all YouTube thumbnails, making the YouTube home page layout as a vertical list instead of a grid, only allowing YouTube in Incognito mode, requiring a log in each time I want to use it

2. Unfollowing/muting most people on social media such as Instagram and Twitter. Only allowed in Incognito mode so I have to log in to use.

3. Blocked all subreddits except for one, which is AskNYC for me, via custom CSS.

4. Built an RSS reader to serve a web page rendering of the content.

5. I'm working on my own content recommendation algorithm. I'm trying out things like get a random Wikipedia article -> search the YouTube API for the article title -> return videos. Which makes YouTube content feel less brain dead and more educational.

What's doom scrolling for you is user engagement for the company, and by their definition you're not wasting your time, you're increasing their revenue by seeing and clicking on ads. That's the only thing that really matters to them.

a lot of these posts usually deal with people that can work, have a life, are free human beings

what if you are not a free human being? scrolling the only source of entertainment till death

I used to have an issue with smoking too much weed during the day (I still do).

The only thing that helped was the KitchenSafe / kSafe.

I put my phone in the kSafe during pomodoro sized chunks. If there is an emergency, I can still do calls from my apple watch/ipad. I keep my ipad in my closet so i don't use it for doom scrolling.

It is funny because I random found out that the ksafe got popular from a sharktank episode where the inventor was advocating for controlling binge eating lol.... I found that funny because I've only heard it propose to quit smoking/vaping nicotine/weed.

Still figuring out the interface for other things. When I am at work, social pressures help. Still figuring out a way to prevent myself from opening incognito on my mac laptop and opening hackernews / reddit.

Not sure why doom scrolling is a thing when joy scrolling is what’s popular

Under "later modifications" he mentions an app for web site access limits and a "new browser", but doesn't say which. I guess this is not meant to help others?

Try Inoreader. It can ingest and deduplicate most feeds oit there, ibcluding things like facebook groups, reddit and hacker news.

The paid version also can desuplicate across the sources, which is really nice.

Then just block every other source.

And I thought that it was related to Doom. Disappointing. (tongue in cheek)

Brick has been very useful: https://getbrick.app/

Also, and slightly tangential, I added this to uBlock today:

www.linkedin.com#hashtag#main[aria-label="Main Feed"] .scaffold-finite-scroll__content

Which makes LinkedIn essentially write-only for content: I can share content I want to, but don't have to read brain-dead takes from other people.

Carrying a book is another helpful solution.

Seems like solving the symptoms, not the cause, which is likely some deeper dissatisfaction

Idk... reading on a phone experience is so awful, I never really wanted to read anything there anyways. Every now and then I need to fight one or the other proprietary jail on the phone to get essential services to work. Like Google Play sometimes wants me to give it my email. So, I had to reset it to get around it. I don't read mail on the phone anyways. I have to have it to receive messages from son's school, the worthless but mandatory 2FA for work, GPS, bank...

I just don't understand how this can be such an enticing experience. I couldn't bring myself to read the news on my phone even when that was the only device I had for a few weeks.

So... maybe a solution is to try a better device / medium?

Also, being used to Linux, using Android feels really awful because of programs trying to control what you can do instead of the other way around. It could be really infuriating. Also, everything is mildly broken / really trashy quality in terms of UI interaction (things move on their own when they shouldn't, UI element partially drawn offscreen, very variable response time, absolutely garbage keyboard).

So... maybe another solution is to get used to Linux, and just the taste of freedom will deter you from using smartphones?

Hmm meanwhile... I had a facebook tab in my browser...

... i switched back to it and noticed my login expired. Didn't bother to log back in.

Yes I'm bragging. Yes, I'm also commenting on HN :)

What are you guys reading from your infinite scroll suppliers? Are you really that dumb to cease reading (e)books for observing some stories written by no-names? And do you consider your pictures' ability to move as a superiority? How can you know at least anything about the world, the Nature and the agressive nature of the Government, how are you supposed to obtain this knowledge from your infinite scrolling devices?