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.

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.

Nah that's what FRS, GMRS, APRS and LoRA / Meshtastic are for.

Come on, raise your kids right.

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.

How expensive? In spain you can get 20~30GB for 10 euros, which is more than enough for most people.

I am putting the load bearing dog video on the example shelf right next to the load bearing (disproven) TF2_coconut.jpg

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.

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.

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).

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

Huh I came across some very similar looking phones on a similar looking website just yesterday.

I guess these phones are rebadged?

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!

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.

Get a Kindle and read good books while commuting. You shouldn't feel bad for not looking out the window.

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

for me its because i browse hn and the overwhelming cynicism "tastes" much worse than the entertainment provided

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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...

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.

> 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.

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.

“You must figure out why you smoke in the first place, before you will be able to quit” isn’t a universal truth.

same for iphone, i always have it in a focus mode that hides almost all notifications. so much better

+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.