Instagram took the most addicting thing about facebook - the images and visuals - and it became an instant addiction for many people.

It also quantifies social status - more followers generally means more status.

It can be scary evil bc it brings out the worst in us.

> if any clock in your house was off by six seconds, you wouldn’t spend any amount of time thinking about that

Excuse-me.

I'm so glad I never got in to Instagram. And I'm grateful that YouTube Shorts show up as unique pages in your browser history. Every once in a rare while I'll be tempted there, and it's enough for me to see just how many videos I've just scrolled through to scare me off.

Imagine if Reels had a watched count at the bottom of the screen...

Reading is good for this.

Sit down with a novel and leave your phone on the other side of the room. Read. If you get distracted or lost in thought, that's fine—just don't stand up. Stay where you are. When you're done being distracted, go back to the book.

It really makes a difference.

Imagine if a person wrote a serious article on computer hardware but kept calling the RAM the hard drive and talking about the problem of bit decay without power in hard drives. That's how these articles sound when they keep misusing the word addiction in inapropriate contexts to emphasize their point. It really makes one wonder what else they're getting wrong. At best it's like the people who are "so OCD" because they do some completely normal thing. When a medical term is used inappropriately the framing can lead to even more dangerous outcomes than the social issue being addressed because medicalization of behavior leads to use of force.

It really is insane. I deleted Instagram too, but so many other apps have the exact same formula, like YouTube and Reddit. All you can do is repeatedly delete these apps, and journal or read to keep them at bay. I bought a notebook for tricky Spanish verbs, and I've got another one for Jazz music theory. I am terrible at Spanish AND Jazz, but it helps me stay off my phone, and when I am doomscrolling, I make an effort to change course, look up something I'm really curious about and write it down. Hope that helps literally anyone.

Something that makes me lean anti-Google and anti-Meta is how they make it impossible to disable the addicting features like shorts and reels. This is inarguably an anti-user move because the only people who want to use such an option are those who recognize they have a problem wasting time on those features. In my own small sphere this is the most visible "evil" thing that these companies do.

I'm in my late 40s and have Instagram on desktop. I watch reels from time to time. The clips I watch are definitely >6 seconds (more like 30s to 1.5 minutes -- there are very few clips under 10 seconds on my feed). And agree with emily, Instagram on desktop isn't as addictive. I scroll for 10-15 minutes and I'm done.

Also, Instagram's Reels algorithm isn't that smart. I watch maybe 20% of reels to completion (I skip 80% of reels after 2 seconds). The Reels algorithm shows me a bunch of stuff that it thinks would interest me, but really don't. I don't understand why, because I do follow a lot of content creators. I'm also quite reptilian -- if I see a weird animal or a dam bursting or a powerwashing scene, I will watch it. But Instagram doesn't seem to pick up on that.

Now I've heard TikTok's algorithm is much smarter and thus more addictive than Instagram's. I promised myself that I will never be on TikTok.

YouTube subscriptions are my main form of entertainment. I justify it because I learn so much useful stuff from them.

YouTube Shorts? I don't bother at all -- despite my having curated my subscriptions carefully, the recommended shorts are so boring that I never click on them.

Weirdly, Instagram never hooked me. I guess I only followed people that didn't post, ha ha.

As per boredom (I'm 60, so, yeah, grew up without smart phones), best thing that can happen to your creativity. All my good ideas come from stretches of boredom (driving long distances for example). I love boredom.

When computers came firmly into my life, it was solitaire games I had to actively delete from my machine. So many wasted hours (I thought).

Note: we 60 year olds wasted plenty of time watching shit television content long before smart phones (and computer solitaire) came to be.

I have only just slightly made a little peace with this time-wasting habit. I've come to see that there is time of decompression that I sort of seem to need in the evening. As I say, it used to be TV where I would find solace in "vegging out". Lately it's YouTube.

Perhaps we can accept this but find better ways to veg out? I personally think YouTube is superior to the crap TV (and, god, commercials) of old. But drumming, playing guitar, reading ... these are better still.

> in some future some laws might pass (in europe?) to force apps like instagram to give you an option to turn off reels

I'm convinced that laws like this will eventually exist.

More broadly, I think there should be laws that force social media apps to allow you to turn off 'algorithmic' recommendations in favor of basic recommendations like 'most recent posts' and 'most popular videos today'. LinkedIn actually has a setting like this and it has greatly improved its UX for me. And one of the reasons I like HN so much is specifically because it doesn't try to personalize my feed.

I recently had a few nights where I stayed up way too late watching YouTube shorts, which are about 1 minute each, on my desktop. I'd notice that an hour had passed, tune back into YouTube, then another hour had passed.

Now that I've recognized the pattern, I've decided to stop scrolling through shorts; watching a short without scrolling is fine. I also setup a systemd service to pause media and lock my screen every 30 minutes after bedtime. The screen lock may be overkill, but I have a bad record of digging too deep into subjects at night, so I think it will still be beneficial.

What I find weird about social media is that using it never really "feels good". I can go back to when FB was the addictive app back in 2015 or Insta/Tiktoks now, you'll find something funny here and there but beyond that it leaves you feeling worse than when you started using it. It might also be a side effect of getting old but Twitter and LinkedIn feel particularly triggering with so much rage bait

I feel very much the same way as the author about TikTok. I browse it far too often. I've implemented app based screen time limitations in iOS specifically for Reddit and TikTok but it's so easy to override. Deleting the apps for a few days works, but only for so long.

This is the world we built, hope you all got your cut.

I really think the new AI panic is not as important as the original social media/algorithmic feed addiction panic. In fact some of the core problems with AI is that it’ll be used to generate slop for the algorithmic feed.

“The feed” is the tech world’s original sin, always will be. I wish there was someone around Mark Zuckerberg that would tell him that he needs to lead a movement to close the Pandora’s Box he’s opened. Be like Oppenheimer, Mark. You’ve become the destroyer of cognitive power worldwide, you should lead the movement to end it.

Everything else we’re trying is lipstick on a pig.