Comment by coffeecoders 5 days ago
This is one of those things that should be unnecessary if we all had perfect self-control, but the reality is these apps are engineered explicitly to bypass that.
It feels a bit silly to need guardrails for something as trivial as scrolling.
Shameless personal plug: I wrote about it here. https://nabraj.com/blog/swipe-scroll-repeat-addiction/
In a very loosely analogous way, this reminds me of how I think about car-centric cities. They've built themselves up to make it very difficult to practically participate in society without one, often going so far in that direction that it's so unpleasant and inefficient you're fairly likely to make a mistake at some point and be fined for something. The city then bleeds money maintaining the infrastructure and needs constant construction, so signs are intentionally obscured or speed limits set extremely low despite the roads being wide, and cops are hidden around the corner ready to ticket you. This creates a cycle of heightening anxiety and stress while driving, and discouraging you from going anywhere, making it feel safer to just be isolated in your far-flung house, and thank god you have endless streaming content at your fingertips to make that even more palatable.
Addictive media content, particularly short-form casino-style recommended content sucks time away from you in a way that's deeply meaningless. You have no time for friends or real social stimulation and you sit in bed continuing to scroll because it's easy, and you repeat the cycle until all you're doing is that and being sad and lonely, which makes you want to see people more or have a hobby, but that takes a modicum of effort and you have your phone right there.
There's a correlation between psychologically-manipulative apps and car-centrism: the endless desire for profit -- hyper-domination by capitalism. If the primary motivating factor behind society's actions were "for the greater good", such things would never have become even remotely acceptable. Instead we allow everything, everywhere, to be driven by the desire for greater wealth (usually on the part of a handful of executives, specifically). The more you question "is this motivated by profit" about anything in society or everyday life that is harmful to you, you'll start to notice that the answer is almost always "yes".
I won’t argue with the fact that these systems are designed to defeat your ability to control your habits.
But it is possible, without having to install tech to defeat these systems for you.
I think, as with most bad habits, the easiest way to defeat them is to never start them to begin with.
If you haven’t ever smoked, don’t start. If you haven’t ever gotten hooked on Shorts/Reels, don’t start.
I watch YouTube quite often, but only long form content. I even watch some content that takes me multiple nights to finish (e.g. a 5-hour stream of a great board game). I think the only time I’ve watched a Short was accidentally, or if someone shared one with me (fewer than a handful of times).
It also helps if your friends/family don’t do those things too (e.g. so they don’t keep sharing them with you).
But 100% agree that ideally, platforms would give us control over the types of content that show up.
The best I can do on YouTube is to subscribe to channels that don’t do Shorts, and only use Subscriptions as my feed. This has been quite effective.
I don’t even use Instagram (and definitely not TikTok).
My biggest vices are HN and Board Game Geek, but I feel that’s relatively tame (but I could still have healthier habits even with those).
Self controlling your screen use and media consumption is entirely within your remit.
Companies have no power to force you to use their products/services, and despite the millions they spend trying to hook you, you always have the option to simply stop using their product/service, delete their app and/or stop visiting their website.
You don't have systemic failures in your psychological defense system. We are adaptable creatures.
Using technology to protect us from more technology works right up until the prior technology fails, the latter technology adapts, or you lower your guard and fall back into old routines. Like many things in life, such as eating healthily, exercising regularly, managing finances and relationships well, you need to assess the situation you're in, note the advantages and disadvantages it gives you, assess a plan for action to use it for the good parts only, and stick to it.
I think personal accountability is good and all but I don't think we should ignore the endless efforts made by corporations to optimize every single interaction you have with them to maximize the value you provide them.
I don't think we should have a society that demands constant personal accountability in order to not get suckered by marketing, SEO, algorithmic feed optimization, etc.
> I had an epiphany that faulting myself, and my self-control, is exactly what these sites want you to do.
Yeah, this kind of realization can be surprisingly empowering, because it takes something that seemed like unavoidable natural law and reveals it as an adversarial relationship.
To offer a boring but lower-tech version: Shopping centers which are deliberately designed to make people enter/exit through stores, and the companies that pay to rent that space in particular. So there's nothing awkward about tracking in some water on a rainy day, the company chose that tradeoff.
Yes, exactly! We generally treat spaces with the benefit of the doubt, which I think is smart for mental health. A conference center which doesn't have the bathrooms close to where you'd expect probably is just badly designed rather than actively trying to mess with you. But this breaks down for certain spaces: shopping malls, airports, etc.
I’ll be the contrarian and say that while I find the constant pushing of Shorts in YouTube to be annoying, I don’t have any trouble not watching them. I select “show me fewer shorts “ which helps some and I skip over the rest.
One thing I think a lot of people need to realize and ponder on more... is that these companies have nearly infinite resources, they have entire teams studying the psychology of how to get you to use their apps more (because they primarily chase engagement to sell your attention to advertisers).
Not only do they have well-paid experts working on getting you using their platform more often and for longer, but they also have a scary amount of metadata on hundreds of millions of people... they can pluck a person that behaves just like you out of the ether, compare their engagement trends, and apply the same algorithm to you.
The resource imbalance becomes really difficult to comprehend. It's like you're trying to avoid a pickpocket that has successfully pickpocketed millions of people, and the pickpocket has years of your behavior at their fingertips and can cross-reference it with every pickpocketing attempt they've ever attempted... oh, and they designed everything about the city you're walking in to make it easier to pickpocket you.
100% agreed. I got my undergraduate degree in Media Studies, and one of things I learned was how intentional even the smallest details are in major productions. They spend millions of dollars, and employ full-time specialists for things like wardrobe and makeup, and those are skilled professionals whose job is to convey a narrative through their specific medium (in this case, wardrobe and makeup).
The same applies when you get to the elite levels of any kind of endeavor--they have long since consumed all of the proverbial low-lying fruit, and so they pay skilled professionals a ton of money to carve out marginal advantages. No presumption of intentional action is too paranoid or unreasonable when you get to this point. Assume every word, comma, image, sound, etc. has been carefully chosen for maximal impact, conscious or otherwise.
Case in point: Facebook was once discovered to be keeping track of everything you wrote into the post input... even if you never posted it — they will consume every single piece of data they can
> This is one of those things that should be unnecessary if we all had perfect self-control,
It's like food, easier to have self control not to buy candies in the supermarket than to have self control at home when you know you have candies in the pantry.
I haven't felt the need to watch a reel since I uninstalled IG, before that I ended up scrolling here and there, not much but enough to regret the lost time at the end of the week
Youtube is more problematic. I have it installed for music but you have to actively remember to not get sucked in to shorts. Feeling like legally they should be forced to split out shorts from the main app.
I mostly listen to DJ set recordings and it's basically random luck if the youtube music app has them
It's also not some "oopsie". It's almost certainly not news but these sites want these 'one more' behaviors.
Years ago, I designed a minimalist YouTube player that removed video suggestions and autoplays but used their player, didn't evade ads, etc. I got banned by Google because they disallow any alternative site for YouTube, only embeds are allowed.
Pretty sure I am still banned on all Google APIs too.
In case you want that same functionality now, I use the following three extensions to tame Youtube dark patterns:
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-utube-distractio...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clickbait-remover-f...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapb...
You should never expect to have rights to anyone's server API endpoints, esp outside of their TOS, which is basically what trying to build your own front-end independent of youtube.com is. However, with most browsers, you have all the rights to build extensions that hide divs and change styling and add new elements with data that's already loaded (as long as you're not calling API endpoints that aren't called by the site's source though, you run into the same problems again) which would accomplish everything you were trying to do.
> Thankfully, it's rare because people using ad blockers is apparently rare on the whole.
I wish this were the case. There's quite a number of websites that use Admiral's services to detect adblockers. Admiral got 19m dollars in funding last year, so I imagine the adblock threat is meaty enough.
The insidious nature of ad-supported “free” media where end user is the product delivered to advertisers means that even if you reverse engineer some service and develop a third-party client that totally respects ads and all and simply reduces the addictiveness, tweaks the algo, etc., you are still reducing their revenue because people will see fewer ads if they spend less time on the service and probably have more fulfilling lives.
This business model is poison. Service operator’s interests will never be aligned with the interests of the users unless they are paying customers.
(By contrast, if the users were paying customers, Google would have no problem with your client—it would in fact be saving money on compute & traffic.)
> I got banned by Google because they disallow any alternative site for YouTube, only embeds are allowed.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that seems like a perfectly reasonable policy.
In fact, I would have assumed that's the case before reading your comment.
If it didn't evade ads though, while it's their right to have such a policy with their site, it's still quite a display of the utter contempt they have for their users. Unless they really believe with a straight face that 24 is a healthy optimum for 'YouTube watch hours per day.' Because that's the only number that would cause their brain-hacking to stop.
"You'll consume using our dark-patterned, unhealthy interface which we deeply tuned to maximize addiction and obsession, or you'll GTFO!" -Google.
YouTubes users are content creators and advertisers. The people watching the videos are the product.
Were you using their embedded player or some other method to play the raw streams?
The embed links back to YT which is a major part of why they provide it for off-platform playback.
But if they somehow singled you out for overuse of the embed that seems rather arbitrary
Yep! I was using their embedded player. I thought I was doing everything right but didn't read the ToS because in my mind, ToS is just blocking silly things like "please don't use our product to build nuclear weapons", not "please don't use our product to play videos on another site".
Struck me as very anti-user and BigCorpo.
It was the project that solidified never building on someone else's 'lawn' again.
Hard to exercise willpower when the whole system is tuned up against it.
More time spent implies more ads shown implies proportional conversion.
Also now that we have two big companies vying for attention, the competition is fierce to show "relevant ads" first because both receive intent almost simultaneously.
I got a youtube short of an office chair company in the feed. I wasn't looking for it explicitly. It was organic feed. Almost immediately I got an ad for that same chair in gmail. Because all of our phones are always listening for intents and keywords. This is recursive ad slop.
A very effective partial solution - there is absolutely 0 reason to have any meta app cancers on phones/tablets. Just let them go, leave them for laptop/desktop and you are more than 50% there. This way they lose a lot of their instant addictivity.
Same goes for tiktok and similar other shit forming and then feeding on addictions. Everything becomes much easier afterwards, especially long term.
I removed FB apps quite some years ago when they were draining batteries of phones even when not used, a typical bad engineering that facebook seems to never get rid off (their web had always some issues, stuff doesn't work, feed doesn't load, comments fail or get posted 2x, albums don't upload all photos etc. with just ublock origin on firefox on fiber optic). I just don't need even their messenger, any worthy contacts can be migrated to other apps.
The exception to all above - whatsapp, simply too much used in Europe and literally everywhere else outside of US. But that's much better engineered product from start.
I've started dedicating Chrome profiles for the rare occasion I have to subject myself to Facebook (marketplace mostly).
There you go Meta, you can enjoy the 4 times a year I use your site (and no others).
No doubt they'll track me via many other means that ought to be illegal, but it feels like a good start.
If you get addicted to these feeds, you'll just find other ways to them once they're off your phone.
I take a hybrid approach - keep uninstalled by default most of the time, engage a browser extension for web to keep me in place, and failing all that use an app like this as well.
No I didn't find other ways, desktop is the only gateway for me even after maybe 6 years. I am generally not a very addictive personality generally (at least compared to many peers), don't have mental ticks, insecurities or mental issues that I feel I need to feed by instant dopamine kicks.
But it still saved me a lot of time in long run (and some phone battery too). I don't go to FB much, don't use instagram, tiktoks, tweeter and so on, and happy with that. Quality of actual real life and all that.
I actively log out of them on my main device and use a second device to access them that I like to use substantially less. The device sits next to me every day, and is accessible at any time.
It has substantially reduced my usage.
Enabling a second profile on my android phone and putting Facebook in there instead of in the browser on my primary profile led to an ~90% reduction on the time I spend on Facebook.
However, I do have to check it from time to time for one of my jobs (to monitor our Page and events, and respond to customers), and the occasions when I switch to the second profile can still hook me for 20 minutes of scrolling...
It'd be a lot easier if the companies behind these products gave users (paid or otherwise) literally any mechanism to opt-out. It drives me mad that YouTube provides a "not interested" button, but refuses to respect my explicit wishes, even as a YouTube Premium subscriber. It wouldn't even be quite so bad if they just didn't bother to ask, at least then I could imagine that such a mechanism would be too complicated or something, but they bother to ask--and then they comply for the remainder of my session. Just make it permanent, you absolute ghouls.
> This is one of those things that should be unnecessary if we all had perfect self-control
I'm thankful that I'm weird enough to be actively annoyed by the mere existence of Shorts. No chance of getting addicted.
Don't use Instagram either so.
There's no weakness in identifying an adversarial situation and acting accordingly.
Your adversary is playing to win. Why should you forfeit the contest?
Why is it more surprising that scrolling is addictive versus, say, putting a stick of combusting plant matter in your mouth and inhaling the smoke?
Because you can describe the chemical interactions of nicotine with the human body to a high degree of accuracy, while the psychology of human attention in the 21st century is a subject that is very far from that cut and dry.
That's why we invented a pill that helps with the former, but we might never have one that helps with the latter (although that would be nice)
Nicotine is not very addictive. Cigarettes is about the physical addiction.
Well this half true at best.
There is the additional addiction of the physical action just like addicts can get addicted to the act of using a needle, but this is in addition to the severely addicting nature of the substance itself.
Any drug that affects dopamine has the potential to be highly addictive. Nicotine is one such drug.
I guess your comment is case in point. People still don't understand psychological addiction. Yes, nicotine is addictive, but it's a small component of cigarette addiction. If it was just about that then patches would be 100% effective (in reality their success rate is dismal) and people who never smoked would use patches to get a "hit".
So I guess you could think of it the other way around. If you can believe scrolling is addictive then you should also be able to believe that putting a stick of burning plant matter in your mouth is addictive. Once you open your mind to the reality of psychological addiction you'll see it everywhere.
Probably because scrolling feels harmless, while smoking never really did. The surprise is in the mismatch.
On the contrary, smoking was not only seen as harmless but actually good for you and encouraged!
> This is one of those things that should be unnecessary if we all had perfect self-control
Or if the platform owners had a minimum of scruples or empathy for their fellow human beings, instead of being disgusting money-hungry goblins concerned solely with their own personal wealth.
I had an epiphany that faulting myself, and my self-control, is exactly what these sites want you to do. "Oh, it's just your bad self-discipline"
No, this is full-on war for control of your mind. And the adversary spends millions to hire teams of the world's best psychologists and engineers to deploy technology that never sleeps with the sole purpose of grabbing and keeping your attention.
Once I realized this, I started treating doomscrolling and Youtube rabbit holes not as personal insufficiencies, but as systemic failures in my psychological defense system. I started installing my own tech to keep me safe, and I am much, much happier.
Predictably, companies like Google try to disable the defenses (e.g. with Manifest v3, which was a garbage excuse to disable many defensive extensions). And so the war goes.