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.
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.
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 is purely awful. No redeeming value at all.
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'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 guess these phones are rebadged?
1. it's gotta be bad for the eyes on a screen that small 2. the Pixel camera!
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.
Edit: mute button is essential and don't allow any notifications outside important messages/apps
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.
- 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:
yt-thumbnail-view-model { filter: grayscale(); }
h3[title] { text-transform: lowercase; }
.ytd-watch-flexy #secondary { display: none !important; }
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.
Usually I can work around this by toggling "desktop mode" in firefox on android...
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.
- 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.
For those looking to drop a(ny) habit: this seems to be the key
alchemist1e9•1h ago
coldpie•1h ago
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.
wmeredith•37m ago
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.
qmr•29m ago
Come on, raise your kids right.