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YouTube Addiction

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Re: YouTube Addiction

#61

Post by yladiz »

superkuh wrote: post #53
yladiz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Stop using the medical word addiction in contexts where it's highly inappropriate. The Internet isn't even a single thing. It's just a collection of content. The types of content on it are extremely wildly varying. Internet addiction is not a thing. See how stupid it sounds when you say it like it is? Outside of lampooning how absurd your comment sounds, I don't think it's your place to call if something is a v…

Absolutely. There is also no such thing as internet addiction. When you compare drug based addictions to things people enjoy the difference is clear. The drugs create increased incentive salience even without enjoyment. This is very different from say, watching a video where you actually have to enjoy it intrinsically many times before it alters incentive salience. There's a reason the DSM5 and ICD-10 don't have any…

Please define addiction for me. My point was not to say that all addictions are equal (they are not), and they act differently, but I think it's too simplistic to flippantly state that Internet addiction is not a thing.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#62

Post by mythhouse »

Phemist wrote: post #45
suzumer wrote: post #8

I used to be addicted to youtube, and the most effective method I found to limiting my consumption was using an extension called Unhook. It removes all recommendations and the shorts and trending tabs, so the only videos I can watch are those from channels I'm subscribed to, or videos that I search for.

Some time ago, a nice fellow HN user @boriselec wrote a browser plugin for, in the end, my personal use (as barely anyone uses it), that redirects all video links to their /embed variant. /embed links are meant to be embedded in other pages and do not show any UI clutter. As it happens, they also work perfectly well if (re-)directly opened! Comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23148026 Extension here: h…

> This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#63

Post by 65 »

izzydata wrote: post #9

I've found that I only watch less Youtube over the years as their suggestions got worse for me. Now I feel like I only ever see a handful of the same suggested videos and they are all from years ago.

Yeah. YouTube's algorithm does a really great job of stopping me from watching too much YouTube. For me it's a lot of videos I've either already seen, am not interested but continually get recommended, or are just short, low quality videos.

I would like to be able to watch more YouTube videos, but their recommendations are so bad at this point that I have to find other things to do.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#64

Post by ryandrake »

People are (and should be) questioning the use of the word addiction. One of the components of addiction is: is it causing a harmful, unwanted effect on one's life? OP laid out his:

> I've been struggling with my mental health during the summertime, a time I traditionally have fewer problems. I wasn't recharging like I should. I was waking up tired, napping during the day, and generally not feeling at all prepared when the day started.

Yet, some people do activities excessively, even compulsively, but they're not addicted because it's not causing them any harm. My elderly parents have the TV on 16 hours a day, basically from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. It's CNN and cooking shows and blah blah blah just to have a head on a screen talking in the background. It irritates me, but they're not addicts. Same with my daughter and YouTube. Streamers talking about nothing for hours, but her grades are great, her social life is fine, she's healthy and growing properly, so I can't really object. Some people just like to have blah blah blah as background noise all day, and I've come to just accept that it's not for me.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#65

Post by superkuh »

yladiz wrote: post #61
superkuh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. There is also no such thing as internet addiction. When you compare drug based addictions to things people enjoy the difference is clear. The drugs create increased incentive salience even without enjoyment. This is very different from say, watching a video where you actually have to enjoy it intrinsically many times before it alters incentive salience. There's a reason the DSM5 and ICD-10 don't have any…

Please define addiction for me. My point was not to say that all addictions are equal (they are not), and they act differently, but I think it's too simplistic to flippantly state that Internet addiction is not a thing.

Addiction is when the motivation for a stimuli is divorced from reward from the stimuli and the animal keeps exposing itself to the stimuli regardless. But socially in humans this is acceptable until the addiction begins to have detrimental effects on the person being able to care for themselves. In almost all cases the simuli capable of doing this are drugs that bypass actual perception and internally/chemically tweak the balance for motivation.

There's not even a thing called "Gambling Addiction". Only, "Gambling disorder" and it's the only behavioral "addiction" recognized by the DSM-5.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#66

Post by tommica »

ryandrake wrote: post #64

People are (and should be) questioning the use of the word addiction. One of the components of addiction is: is it causing a harmful, unwanted effect on one's life? OP laid out his: > I've been struggling with my mental health during the summertime, a time I traditionally have fewer problems. I wasn't recharging like I should. I was waking up tired, napping during the day, and generally not feeling at all prepared wh…

Then the question that has to be answered is what unwanted and harmful effect consists of.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#67

Post by greenpeas »

extasia wrote: post #46

Changing my phone to black and white mode helped, I was previously watching 3+hrs of yt a day as was OP. Also making a mental note of how long you spend helps, even if you don't have the willpower to stop then and there. Over time You keep making that same note and eventually build up the fortitude to modify your behaviour / fight your addiction. Good luck to you all.

I did the same thing, I put my phone in Grayscale mode. It seems to help. It's incredible how much more enticing the colored versions of the thumbnails for shorts and videos are. The Grayscale also works as a reminder that I need to pay attention to my Youtube consumption.

However I imagine that I'll have to find a way to temporarily disable Grayscale for taking pictures and some other tasks.

Regarding the shorts, I really wish there were a setting to disable them altogether. They are pure evil.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#68

Post by greenpeas »

SunlightEdge wrote: post #59
extasia wrote: post #46

Changing my phone to black and white mode helped, I was previously watching 3+hrs of yt a day as was OP. Also making a mental note of how long you spend helps, even if you don't have the willpower to stop then and there. Over time You keep making that same note and eventually build up the fortitude to modify your behaviour / fight your addiction. Good luck to you all.

For addictions I've wanted to get rid of I have: 1. Keep a spreadsheet of the hours I have spent on the activity, or 2. Kept a running log of how many days I have not done the activity - goal is usually 28 days

It seems like you've worked out a system. How many addictions/unwanted behaviors did you manage to eradicate this way?

Re: YouTube Addiction

#69

Post by nikhilsimha »

One invaluable hack I found is to use ad block to block the recommendation section of landing page.

That way I don’t habit jump into a YouTube marathon but still search for specific topics when I need to.

I do that with hacker news too.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#70

Post by lairv »

I don't know why the author spends half of the article justifying how can youtube addiction be a thing, it seems to me that social media addiction is now an established thing, which a large proportion of people are subject to

If you own an Android phone there is a "Digital well being" settings which allows you to block applications after a certain amount of time spent every day, it also work for time spent on certain website on chrome, and it contains other features (focus mode, black and white mode) which I've found really useful. There are equivalent browser extension for desktop

Though blocking websites/apps is not a magical solution, in the past I've found myself just disabling the blockers when I really wanted to watch something, I think it only works combined with discipline

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