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Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

scrollguard.app

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Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#161

Post by brailsafe »

mieubrisse wrote: post #145
coffeecoders wrote: post #63

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/

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 sta…

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.

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#162

Post by [deleted] »

mieubrisse wrote: post #145
coffeecoders wrote: post #63

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/

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 sta…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#163

Post by dcsan »

madamelic wrote: post #82
coffeecoders wrote: post #63

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/

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.

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

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#164

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #138
jajko wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quit…

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#165

Post by [deleted] »

mieubrisse wrote: post #145
coffeecoders wrote: post #63

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/

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 sta…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#166

Post by keerthiko »

madamelic wrote: post #82
coffeecoders wrote: post #63

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/

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#167

Post by amatecha »

brailsafe wrote: post #161
mieubrisse wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

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…

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".

Re: Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels

#170

Post by source99 »

I would love to build a small physical device at my home wifi router level that detects these network patterns (certain IP addresses and data patterns). Then blocks those network streams. I think the correct fix is to intermittently block them so that the user gets a small drip and don't realize its broken so they don't try to find a workaround like turning off wifi.
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