Also, and slightly tangential, I added this to uBlock today:
www.linkedin.com#hashtag#main[aria-label="Main Feed"] .scaffold-finite-scroll__content
Which makes LinkedIn essentially write-only for content: I can share content I want to, but don't have to read brain-dead takes from other people.
What you are doing is "self-limiting" which is not very effective. The devil on your shoulder will always fight this - "don't tell me what to do!"
The wanting to not doom-scroll should be intrinsic. I know that right now, for obvious reasons, it's easier said than done.
I aggressively curate who I do follow; on Twitter, I mainly use lists. At this point, I'm mostly just interested in AI news. I'm also subscribed to an AI newsletter, but it isn't as tightly scoped as my set of feeds.
I guess I could apply AI to this problem. I'd like a tool a bit like Yahoo Pipes, with email and Twitter integrations, and LLM transformation boxes for summarizing and making decisions.
I should probably look at https://github.com/huginn/huginn
What has worked for me is: one-sec extension [1]. The extension asks you take a deep breath and confirms if I still want to open the app. What I have realized is I don't want to completely do away with time-sink websites, I only want to moderate my behavior of pressing Cmd-T and opening reddit/youtube/twitter in the middle of work. I have increased the length of the pause to 30 second and I am actively forcing myself to actually take the deep breath. Such a pause is enough to knock enough sense into me and return back to work. I think such kind of gentle nudging is better than being overly harsh on yourself.
[1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-sec-website-blo...
1. Open YouTube ReVanced
2. Tap profile picture (top right)
3. Tap Settings
4. Navigate to ReVanced > Layout
5. Tap "Shorts components" at the bottom of the list
6. Enable "Hide Shorts in feed"
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/156lw72/the_be...
I have a little more personal self control, but found his technical implementation pretty neat!
Homeless people can't get access to govt. services if they don't have phone or callbacks in case they next in line to receive benefits. The following guy documents such problems that seem so obvious in retrospect.
https://nitter.privacydev.net/elonmusk/rss
For subreddit you can use redlib which has rss feeds, example https://redlib.zaggy.nl/r/insects.rss
Using this as a source, you can combine a bunch of subreddits you like to follow into a single feed for minimal usage effort.
Since you are processing the feeds by now, it is trivial to filter out crap you dont want, such as Musk news.
a) Make your feeds more worthy and less attention grabbing by blocking anything that isn't one of your specific interests.
b) If you make good use of your time, you'll find doing stuff more interesting than scrolling.
I've written about this too: https://thisisjam.es/reflecting/on-information-diets/
https://amontalenti.com/2024/03/26/the-smartphone-app-audit
If the idea of auditing all your apps seems daunting, you can take a look at how I did it in bulk by using screenshots of my app launcher screen, then OCR and LLMs to help me do an initial pass at categorizing them. That let me do one quick bulk cleanup.
I found that it's better to simply delete apps and keep the total app count on your phone low, rather than use the various parental control / digital minimalism / Freedom.to style app blocking ideas.
Removing browsers from my phone never seemed like an option for me, but even so, removing all the addictive apps really reduces doomscrolling and other mindless scrolling a good bit.
Lately, I also put any newly installed apps in a "Purgatory" app launcher group and if I notice any of them having addictive qualities, I uninstall them. I did this recently with the Bluesky and Discord apps, for example.
As long as there's a logged in session somewhere, I have to have various tricks and extensions on my browser to manage things.
Most have been only varying degrees of successful, often ending up in me just disabling the feature whenever I want to get my fix.
The most successful iteration I've found so far is keeping these apps uninstalled from my phone, and using https://one-sec.app/ to forcibly install a barrier between me and the site.
It's not too much different, and the wait time can be customised. You can still just learn to wait through it, but importantly it also has an "intervention" feature that will block you off after a chosen time period and re-prompt you if you want to stay on.
It's been quite flaky on Instagram on desktop, but it's been very useful for Youtube on mobile (which I keep to play videos in the background sometimes).
Otherwise, Unhook for Youtube on desktop also helps blocking things like the home page and shorts.
I haven't found any extension for LinkedIn that works for blocking the feed (or at least suggested posts), and Facebook ones are sporadic in which work for me or not.
For YouTube there is Unhook [1], which allows you to block shorts. For all other sites I just use custom uBO rules. Both options also work on your phone if you use a browser that can install WebExtensions (Firefox on Android for example).
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en&co=GEN...
If you're using an iPhone, you can use Assistive Access to disable a lot of stuff, making it functionally simiilar to a flip phone:
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/set-...
There's probably an Android equivalent, but I can't speak to that.
"When I went on a trip this past fall and saw a very high percentage of people sucked in to these *short form videos* at any idle moment at the airport and out at public events..."
Assuming it was all short-form videos (I'd bet it was), then it's definitely more psychologically destructive than them reading a book on their phone.
Also your mentioning of several hours a day being "crazy high" is slightly telling of your understanding of the relationship, especially young people have, with their devices.
For younger people raised in this environment, myself included, putting in 6-8+ hours a day into doomscrolling youtube/instagram/tiktok is really not that out of the ordinary;
"13- to 18-year-olds use about eight and a half hours of screen media [per day]"[0]
[0]: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc... page 3
I hear the ancients had their own crude technology for this:
I don't at the slightest feel bad about it.
Tell them I sent you: https://www.chess.com/?ref_id=7467288
Main settings that gave me a starting point:
1. Uninstalled YouTube app and now using only the browser version (on mobile and desktop)
2. Turned off Watch History in https://www.youtube.com/feed/history - "Pause watch history" (you can only pause the watch history and YT will periodically remind you to turn it back on. OH yeah, nice try Google!).
3. Turn off AutoPlay (toggle switch on the video player toolbar)
4. Tweak all the settings in https://www.youtube.com/account_playback - disable info cards and video previews (the setting that makes the videos to play when you hover over thumbnails)
After making these changes, your YT homepage and History page will be empty spaces - no videos at all. It is so refreshing! As a bonus, now YouTube shorts show only short-forms content from the channels you subscribed to. So it is more meaningful than some random junk.
Additional habits that helped me:
1. Subscriptions - I subscribed to specific channels that I want to follow - eg: Dave2D, MKBHD, fav cooking channels, NPR etc. and watch their videos via Subscriptions link
2. Topic-specific playlists - save interesting videos that I want to save for later - e.g: 'Health', 'Good recipes' etc.
3. Related videos - When a video is playing, YT shows a bunch of 'related videos' on the right. Most of these videos were not really related to the video, instead they are just trigger content. So I do two things here:
- select the 'Do not recommend channel' from the vertical "..." menu in each video.
- if the related video is genuinely interesting to me, choose the menu option 'Add to watch later'
This was a big shift from a "push" to a "pull" model and has effectively stopped my doom scrolling habit in just a couple of weeks. I feel like I am watching YT on my own terms now.
(Final 'graph especially.)
Addresses your first point.
For the second: communication.
OneSec [1] is the only one that worked for me. It's quick enough that I'm not tempted to disable it, yet annoying enough that makes me think twice if I really want to open app X for the third time today.
Also it's just a polite nudge, rather than a full block, or condescending messages saying "you've hit your time limit for today" (that make you feel bad and make you want to immediately disable the thing in the first place).
Wish parental controls were designed with the same principles.
https://www.tomshardware.com/ (tech - computers, 3D printers, raspberry pi, somewhat consumer sales oriented)
https://phys.org/ (academia summaries)
https://arxiv-sanity-lite.com/ (arXiv papers recommended)
https://www.pewresearch.org/ (mostly interesting survey factoids, does covers politics, other negative inducement)