Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

I'm not sure about wasting. Most of my surfing consists of unearthing gems, and I have to wade through a lot of noise and muck to find those gems, but the gems are there. If I could automate it, I would, but it wouldn't be the same.

A piece of code that crawls the net looking for something I would really enjoy is a hard problem, and I would have to code in my own biases to the program to make it work properly, and this means I couldn't share the program with others since it would be very personal and context specific.

I am aware of confirmation bias and filter bubbles, but it doesn't mean I don't like my own bubbles. It's just plain psychology afterall and we're all human, although I do try to break out of my comfort zone in terms of what content I consume, and regularly scout for different places to get my content besides The Bird Site, Reddit, FaceBuck etc

Another key factor is, that YouTube interleaves really well made educational content with fun and stupid videos (these have their own merit, of course). I think this leads to people hunting for new videos about topics that really interest them, those can be insightful and stimulating. At the same time, the next 20 minute TikTok compilation is one click away, as well as numerous click-farmy videos with no real substance but the appearance of depth and knowledge. This is simply not possible if you, for example, get your knowledge and entertainment from e.g. books. To click a funny video after watching a good video essay or educational content is somehow simpler than putting away your textbook and searching for your favorite comic in your bookshelf.

It's almost like the platforms were designed and optimized to keep you on them ;)

Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively.

If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert.

If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.

So what I've been doing is not entirely quitting Internet stuff, but instead I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all the feeds. Sort of a Marie Kondo thing. I go through every subreddit I'm in, every RSS feed, every account I follow on Twitter, and i strongly consider "is this really providing lots of joy and/or value?" If not, it gets the chop.

I've cut out at least 2/3s of the stuff I was following since the peak, and it's only going down. Now when I doomscroll it's only for a few minutes. I hit the end of new content very very quickly. When that happens I start to look elsewhere. I've been reading a lot more actual books, done more chores, and been more productive overall.

As for the things I unfollowed? They clearly had no value because not only do I not miss them, I can barely even remember what they were.

The modern internet, with ever-refreshing recommendations, is fully intended to be addicting. Possible mitigations: make it very inconvenient to repetitively view social media. Examples:

- Create UBlock rules to remove recommendations, only keeping the search bar on the youtube home page so if you want to watch a video you have to explicitly seek it out

- Redirect an address like reddit.com in /etc/hosts so it is inaccessible

- Seek out more productive forms of social media, and set loose timers for accessing them so you don't get caught in infinite scrolling

- Do not have social media apps on your phone

- Turn off internet when doing productive work if possible. Or employ context switches - one browser for fun, another for work.