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Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

#61

Post by velcrovan »

Giving up or blocking social media is much less interesting than being self-aware and looking for ways to get your social media dopamine from things that feel genuinely constructive or interesting. I found “Against Waldenponding” (https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding) to be, if not 100% correct and credible, at least a very novel and persuasive argument that you probably owe it to yourself to be on social media more, not less, and its up to you to not be stupid about it.

My personal guidelines (not rules) for Being Online have evolved to something like this:

1. Make things, and talk about the things you make.

2. Contribute ideas that, as far as you can see, would be missing from the world if you specifically didn’t offer them.

3. Spend a lot of time reading other people.

4. Throw points at people you agree with. Upvotes and twitter likes are free. Use dollars, too.

5. If you can’t think of anything to say, go make something tangible worth talking about.

6. Keep your feed weighted towards people who seem to follow these guidelines.

7. Be aware that, absent any truly original ideas, anything you would post with the motive of “being right online” is usually basic and shitty. Filter outbound material with prejudice.

Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

#63

Post by anigbrowl »

Making myself use the API for access. I'm very interested in the dynamics of social media, sometimes to a much greater degree than the actual content. Things like identifying trolling behavior or which way a split forum is trending can be studied without getting caught up in the particular words or personal exchanges. When I'm looking at those phenomena it can still be helpful to look at the content, but I build a craptacular-but-sufficient front end instead of using the platform offering.

I don't do this for HN, but for a couple of the bigger platforms where I'm fascinated by the activity but get cranky if I participate too much.

Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

#64

Post by slickdork »

hh3k0 wrote: post #56
slickdork wrote: post #18

I did two things recently cause I've wasted just about half my life on reddit: - Blocked reddit at a dns level across my entire network via pihole (I run a personal vlan so the rest of the house network wasn't affected). - Disable my internet completely on this vlan after working hours via a schedule in pfsense. I get around the reddit block sometimes by enabling a VPN, which is only a few button clicks. But since th…

Personally, I found Leechblock to provide adequate extra steps for what you're describing. I agree with your point, what generally needs to be done is adding some sort of brain-teasing inconvenience. Adding some sort of "roadblock" against your brain going auto-pilot is what always helped me making more conscious decisions.

I tried leechblock as well and it works well, but I ended up getting around it too easy. Setting up a barrier at the network level worked better for my brain.

Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

#65

Post by KerryJones »

aronowb14 wrote: post #33
KerryJones wrote: post #10

I use ideas taken from behavioral psychology book, Nudge, but in reverse. For instance, I use an extension that adds a 2 second delay to every Facebook page load. The added friction is small but it very quickly gets me frustrated and I just stop.

This is quite interesting, what’s the extension called?

Here's one of them: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/delayed-gratificat...

I don't think 15 seconds is necessary, I like 1-2 seconds (the extension is on a different computer than I'm on -- this one just as a News Feed Eradicator to stop FB).

Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

#66

Post by b3morales »

raspyberr wrote: post #48
james-bcn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no cool tricks to improving yourself. This is bullshit. There are lots of simple tricks you can employ to improve yourself. For example: >If you want to stop eating sugar If you want to stop eating sugar, throw it all away, and when you go to the supermarket go when you have just eaten, and avoid buying sugar and sugary products. This gets recommended a lot, but because it is good - Atomic Habits by James…

So the cool trick to not eating sugar is... not eating any sugar.

No, it is two steps before that: re-arranging your day-to-day so that there is no sugar to eat.

Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

#67

Post by fikama »

KerryJones wrote: post #10

I use ideas taken from behavioral psychology book, Nudge, but in reverse. For instance, I use an extension that adds a 2 second delay to every Facebook page load. The added friction is small but it very quickly gets me frustrated and I just stop.

This is something new for me I have never read or thought of it. That's a bit evil, but it could work through its viciousness

Re: Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?

#70

Post by morgunkorn »

I uninstalled all the apps from all social media platforms and only use the web version. This takes out a lot of the usability (and trackability). Making the whole experience slightly worse helps me reduce the time I spend on them.

I also removed Facebook and its other brands from the equation, and since those websites are unusable when unlogged, it's even easier to remove the temptation to dwell on them.

For Twitter, I also went to the settings of each person I follow and deactivated the displaying of their retweets, so my timeline (in the chronological mode) consists exclusively of content written by the people I follow.

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