[1] YouTube Anti Shorts - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441709-youtube-anti-shorts...
[2] Hide Instagram Feed, Stories, Reels, and Explore Page - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/474087-hide-instagram-feed...
[3] Bypass Instagram Login Redirects - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/420604-bypass-instagram-lo...
Note: I use[1] regularly, Since I don't have an instagram account I don't have a need to use[2] instead I use[3].
My pattern of YouTube watching:
1. On my laptop, 99% searching for specific videos like tutorials/reviews of something. Almost never looking for entertainment.
2. On my phone, 80% looking for entertainment + a few reviews
This is not a non-argument used keep things the same (and bad).
Use a browser that allows you to modify the content in a way that presents the content you want. That's the boundary you have to play with. My computer gives the information I want to your computer. Your computer does what it wants with that information.
If your OS doesn't allow you to use a browser of your choice, then that is the restriction you attack. Not mine.
They do this with Threads as well. If you’re not on there long enough, they’ll pretend there are notifications waiting for you, but it’s just “Posts that might be of interest to you”. They’ll even show this fake data on Instagram to get you to open Threads.
I get that companies are designed to soullessly seek optimization of revenue. But there are humans who work at them and those humans do have free will to be party to it or not.
Exactly, every single manipulative, exploitive, and outright evil act attributed to a 'company' was thought of, planned, executed, and overseen by actual people.
Is it a common millennial thing, or is it just me where those have the opposite effect? Shorts etc. annoy me heavily, and the more they get pushed on me, the less I use something. It’s like those people on WhatsApp sending you a voice message because instead of typing.
For me it was a quick way down from "these are annoying" to "oh, just another short that aligns with my interests".
How would you fix it or improve it?
A potential mitigation could be for governments to make the bad consequences more illegal. And in order to do so they need not be influenced by the algorithm, but unfortunately they are.
In short: The problem with capitalism is class striation. Society is divided into a capital-owning class and a labouring class. Capitalists, as they control the productive capital in our economy, portion out economic profits as they see fit, paying labourers as little as is necessary while retaining for themselves the maximum possible amount. Labourers, owning negligible amounts of capital themselves, are dependent on capitalists for work and have little recourse.
Hence, power consolidates in the hands of capitalists. They have leverage over politicians through lobbyists, over the public through media, and over their employees through the threat of job loss. The labouring class are second-class citizens. Healthcare is inaccessible to many them. They're frequently mired in debt. If they become disabled, they could easily lose their homes and wind up on the street.
In one sense, the solution is obvious: Dissolve the boundary between these classes so that none of these class inequalities exist anymore. Now, how is that done? Who knows. The traditional answer is, "the tensions in the existing system will exacerbate until the workers all organize and force a new status quo upon society," but that doesn't seem to be happening. Then again, if we had a solution, the problem wouldn't exist anymore, would it.
Anyway, what does it mean to "implement" a critique? All I did was point out the problems with capitalism, for which there is plenty of empirical evidence.
If you want to know which policies I support implementing, I'm afraid they're relatively dull and incrementalist, since policy can't reorder the global economy by fiat.
Let's say you are a cart pusher in a free market. After ten years of cart pushing, you land on a trading opportunity and capitalize on it. Then you hire more cart pushers.
Now you have a responsibility. Either keep the business going, or everyone loses their job.
Then others smell profit and eat up your market share. Now you have to stay afloat and the workers suffer.
As the emergent properties build up, we end up with a modern free market society with all the romanticized "class wars" worker abuse and peeing in a bottle drama all because the job market exists.
It is like an ouroboros ironically nibbling on its tail while winking.
In a democracy, elected leaders are not as empowered to satisfy their greed as monarchs are in monarchies. Socialism extends this logic to businesses: An elected business leader would not be able to satisfy their greed to the same extent that a capitalist business owner can.
You can get rid of money and have communism if you want and guarantee that all have what they need. But somewhere beyond need there is want, and the line is awfully fuzzy.
You can have a barter society if you want, where people trade pineapples for shoes, but you are always going to have people who want more shoes or more pineapples than what others have.
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.
Instagram (and YouTube) have engineered their search experiences to be as distracting as possible and to provoke the user into abandoning their search and to follow suggested content.
I can't tell you how many times I set out to find something and literally forget what that intention was, after being induced to click on the tantalizing promise of some other image or video thumbnail.
Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:
The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.
Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.
Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.
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 lengthened my 20 minutes to 40 minutes, with adequate buffer of course, and a known 40 minute loop.
Yea, it definitely starts the day right.
I've always wanted a YouTube which is basically just a searchbar, with results and just the video, so I created a little private webpage with that. It doesn't have anything unless I searched for it. No autoplay, no trending or recommendations, and no comments. The YouTube API is free up to a certain amount of videos (which is very hard to reach for personal usage).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-cheng-991849b6
It feels like giving LinkedIn a dose of its own medicine.
Edit: here's a typical post of Ken's: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ken-cheng-991849b6_i-launched...
It is okay to be bored and let your mind wonder every now and again. It fosters boredom, which in turn fosters creativity. It also boosts the enjoyment of the (lower amount of) media you do consume and stops you becoming numb to it and seeking out more dopamine constantly.
It is clearly having an effect on people's attention span, stunting people's ability to focus, and affecting their performance, not just in work, but in many areas of their lives.
Maybe the city I live in is an isolated case, but most people walking from place to place are looking at their phone while doing it. I see people walking their dog or pushing their baby prams while staring at their phone (this is supposed to be bonding time). When I go to the gym, there's a whole column of people walking on treadmills (even on a sunny day) because this allows them to prop the phone up on the treadmill or hold the phone and watch videos. The 3-5 minute rest between sets on machines, benches and free weight areas is now a video watching period. Sometimes people are just doing a low-weight easy load with the phone resting on their crotch.
Even if people aren't looking at the screen, a lot of the time they have earbuds in listening to something. Is it a war on silence and letting the mind wander?
Why can people not unplug? Surely by now it's proven that short form video content is stunting people's attention span, making it hard for them to read even a page of a book. How are these people going to competently hold down a job or pursue a hobby? What happens in 20 years when people have been conditioned like this for 2,3,4+ decades. Are we going to have a serious breakdown in mental health, early signs of dementia or Alzheimers?
Damn companies like Instagram for taking part in this, as Google, Meta, Reddit, Spotify and whoever else has. Their desire to occupy ever more of our attention and time is leading this charge.
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.
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. :)
It also quantifies social status - more followers generally means more status.
It can be scary evil bc it brings out the worst in us.
Maybe we need to establish a metric called "disengagement".
It factors in loading times, UX, responsiveness and reliability into a single, hard-to-game number: seconds of time the software stole from your day (lower is better.)
By this standard, good software starts instantly, works for you, avoids sending notifications, etc.
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.
Reading and writing has been a way to indulge myself meaningfully. I really don't know effective ways to remind myself that this consumption of useless content is a waste of time and creator of frustration. How do you all manage it?
Thanks God I found out about unhook extension, i disable absolutely everything but the video, and I use freetube to monitor my subscribed channel, so that I don't even need a Google account and the only thing that appear in my 'feed' is video of channel i subscribed to.
And even then, freetube has a setting to remove clickbait title and thumbnail..
It's been years like that and it feel so much better.
I believe there are tools, extensions, to fight back against the addictiveness of these websites but the general population doesn't know about them and once you're hooked you don't even think about it.
Smartphone just make it even worst but it in no way enabled it.
It's been a game changer for me personally and has slashed my screentime.
The great thing about it is that I've saved myself many hours. I use that time for reading and walking and a variety of other activities. Also my attention span and mental health improved drastically.
The first thing to do is turn off almost all notifications.[1] Even if you have Notifications ON for some critical app, Social Media Apps never need to be ON.
However, you will be tempted to open them up - this is where you delete from your phone, but use the desktop.[2] The desktop is more involved and not so casual that you whip up the App to start using it.
Try to use more physical Notebooks.[3] Using a To-Do, or a Note-Taking App on the phone will tempt you to wander off for just a few minutes of innocent and not-so-harmful distractions that balloon into hours of scrolls. A physical notebook and a pen deter you from straying to anything else.
As others have mentioned, try to resort to reading books as a replacement for these Apps.[4] For instance, have a book handy instead of reaching for Instagram.
It is also OK not to carry your phone 24/7. Walking in the park, reading time, talking to friends, dining with friends, etc., can be done without phones. If you must stay connected somehow, a Smartwatch can be a replacement.[5]
Find patterns that work for you. Keep trying and experimenting. Quite a few of these suggestions were a surprise for quite a lot of people, but have worked out brilliantly.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2014/missing-step-productivity-activi...
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/phone/
3. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/
Personally, I want to have the Instagram app on my phone so that I can send/receive dms to certain people
Great if you wanna keep in touch with your friends but don't need any of Instagram's addictive
“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.
I think the feed is good. Were just so early it's not tamed yet. Can imagine in 5 years there will be an agent between the hardware and the apps to block what you dont like.
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.