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.
Gigacore · 19m ago
Capitalism does not care about 'anti-user moves'. They will do anything and everything to get users spend as much time as possible on their platforms.
bccdee · 49m ago
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.
soupfordummies · 33m ago
I’ve thought this for a while too. Just as maybe you start working out if you want to lose some weight and build muscle, maybe reading a book is the exercise to regain your attention and focus.
The key is not having the phone nearby though. Just right now I’m typing this from bed despite having brought a book to bed.
canpan · 5m ago
I started doing "phoneless walk". For example in the morning before work, go outside, walk in a park for 20m and do not bring my phone.
Not sure why, but not bringing the phone changed my thinking pattern. Even if I did not look at it anyway while having it.
delichon · 42m ago
Sometimes a mother of a newborn baby will let it sleep in another room. Making her less neurotic than me about my phone.
kiddico · 44m ago
Sounds like mindfulness meditation to me.
cjohnson318 · 41m ago
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.
jatins · 14m ago
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
wenc · 31m ago
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.
encrypted_bird · 2m ago
I also use YouTube, but I don't use the internal YouTube subscription function; I just subscribe to each channel's RSS feed and use an RSS notifier browser extension.
I also try to limit how many channels I track to only around a dozen tops (if that), most of which are music artist channels to let me know when they have a new song out.
The few that aren't music channels I just download with yt-dlp and temporarily put them on my NAS to watch with my Emby server. This way, I can watch them from the comfort of my couch and I don't have to deal with ads. :)
akovaski · 14m ago
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.
joshdavham · 15m ago
> 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.
fullshark · 6m ago
This is the world we built, hope you all got your cut.
JKCalhoun · 26m ago
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.
GrifMD · 11m ago
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.
game_the0ry · 58m ago
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.
jen729w · 51m ago
> 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...
soupfordummies · 31m ago
There’s an app idea… just a front end for reels, etc that displays watch count. I think most people that get stuck on it don’t necessarily WANT to be.
superkuh · 49m ago
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.
throwaway0665 · 37m ago
Do you believe in gambling addiction? Behavioral addictions are medically recognized. No need to be so pedantic.
twodave · 12m ago
In general, many addictions are self-diagnosed. Some guidelines include:
* is the behavior unwanted?
* is it frequent?
* is it uncontrollable?
* is it progressive?
* do you choose it to the detriment of more important things?
If you can answer yes to enough of those questions about anything it can be counted as an addiction. I don’t think the author was out of line.
As a recovering addict, I would worry more about dismissing other peoples’ struggles just because they don’t fit your idea of a “real problem.”
Is substance addiction a different animal than behavioral addiction? In some ways, yes. But substance addiction is not the only kind of addiction there is. No, I think normalizing the use of the word removes some of its stigma.
Hnrobert42 · 18m ago
The best definition I have heard for addiction is: the pursuit of an activity or substance in spite of increasing negative consequences. Under that definition, social media addiction qualifies.
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.
The key is not having the phone nearby though. Just right now I’m typing this from bed despite having brought a book to bed.
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.
I also try to limit how many channels I track to only around a dozen tops (if that), most of which are music artist channels to let me know when they have a new song out.
The few that aren't music channels I just download with yt-dlp and temporarily put them on my NAS to watch with my Emby server. This way, I can watch them from the comfort of my couch and I don't have to deal with ads. :)
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.
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.
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.
It also quantifies social status - more followers generally means more status.
It can be scary evil bc it brings out the worst in us.
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...
* is the behavior unwanted?
* is it frequent?
* is it uncontrollable?
* is it progressive?
* do you choose it to the detriment of more important things?
If you can answer yes to enough of those questions about anything it can be counted as an addiction. I don’t think the author was out of line.
As a recovering addict, I would worry more about dismissing other peoples’ struggles just because they don’t fit your idea of a “real problem.”
Is substance addiction a different animal than behavioral addiction? In some ways, yes. But substance addiction is not the only kind of addiction there is. No, I think normalizing the use of the word removes some of its stigma.