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YouTube addiction, one month sober

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Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#71

Post by mmorearty »

I've had good results recently by deleting all my social media apps from my phone, BUT allowing myself to use them through Mobile Safari. And I did not bookmark them; e.g. for Instagram I type "in" and then Enter.

This gives me some friction, without having to go cold turkey. All the popular social media sites have mobile websites that are "good enough", but slightly clunkier than the apps, and also they can't send me notifications.

My phone screentime per day has dropped by about 1/3rd.

Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#73

Post by cowsup »

farleykr wrote: post #35

One thing that made a huge difference for me was turning of my watch history. If you do that you get a message on the homepage saying that it can't recommend videos until you turn on your watch history. Not very visually pleasing but it keeps me from scrolling through recommendations and now I only watch videos when a channel I follow puts out new content or when I choose to specifically search for something.

Another benefit is that the mobile app’s “Shorts” menu also stops working if watch history is disabled. Sometimes the app takes me there on launch, and now I’m greeted with a message saying I can’t explore an endless feed unless my watch history is active. Fine with me!

Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#75

Post by lynx23 »

luplex wrote: post #22
data_ders wrote: post #11

I’m so addicted to the internet that when I block social media, I find I get quite the similar fix from work Slack. Like browsing channels I have no business being a part of and constantly checking for validation of my comments via emoji reactions. Does anyone know of ways to be a successful work-from-home knowledge worker while also locking down Slack to not be another slot machine?? Does anyone else feel conflicted…

Start meditating, improve your sleep and work out. I find this improves my willpower whenever I do it.

You forgot to mention celebacy :-)

"Workout improves your willpower" sounds a lot like a 90 year old thing.

Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#76

Post by alphazard »

The problem I see with YouTube is that I always start on low-regret content like lectures, or a news clip about a current event I want a summary of. Or a video that a friend said was funny (that's good signal).

But then rather than recommending more content along the same lines (which I would probably bookmark but not be encouraged to click), there is a short low quality video that somehow slides under the radar of "not worth my time". And then this chains together, and what started out as a low-regret interaction has spiraled into a high-regret one.

uBlock rules for the shorts, recommendations, etc. basically solved this problem for me. I think there is a ton of potential with the alternative YouTube frontends too. We have access to an unprecedented amount of information, it's just hidden behind malicious interfaces.

Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#77

Post by PascLeRasc »

RajT88 wrote: post #32
lm28469 wrote: post #14

Youtube killed my addiction themselves, they removed any kind of recommendation to my account since I opted out of all tracking, now when I go to youtube.com I get an empty page, unless I know exactly what I want to watch I don't even bother

This! I know they think they are punishing you, but after a while I came to appreciate it.

Same thing with the ads every 5 minutes always interrupting a complex part of the woodworking video I'm half watching. Thanks for the reminder to focus on real work, State Farm.

Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#78

Post by ElevenLathe »

SamBam wrote: post #63
bombcar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid and work-from-home normalized screen time. The same thing has happened in the past (an old Wodehouse school-story has a kid being yelled at for reading "trash" (David Copperfield) during class instead of the Latin he was supposed to be working on.

I think that suggesting it's no different from people thinking that reading books was going to rot people's minds ignores the very real increases in teen depression, loneliness, and suicides over the past decade, as well as increases in adult depression and isolation, and the credible research that says that social media and screens are probably strongly contributing to it.

Also, maybe Dickens really is worse for the brain than Latin grammar?

Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#79

Post by autoexec »

pxc wrote: post #29
srvaroa wrote: post #8

I haven't needed to be so drastic, but removed the YT app from my phone. There is a fair amount of good content that I find very worth consuming from YT (mainly educational videos) and would not like to miss. But, the mobile app makes a very strong effort to push you to shorts, which is the real danger. Shorts are proficiently engineered to just suck my brain into a doom scrolling comma. I tried removing shorts from…

NewPipe lets you watch shorts but completely lacks the shorts-type UI, so it's not addictive. Also has no ads and lets you play things in the background or with the phone screen off.

having recommendations and auto-play disabled is great too. I only see youtube videos that I choose to see and never see anything else unless I'm searching for something

Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober

#80

Post by ipaddr »

SamBam wrote: post #63
bombcar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid and work-from-home normalized screen time. The same thing has happened in the past (an old Wodehouse school-story has a kid being yelled at for reading "trash" (David Copperfield) during class instead of the Latin he was supposed to be working on.

I think that suggesting it's no different from people thinking that reading books was going to rot people's minds ignores the very real increases in teen depression, loneliness, and suicides over the past decade, as well as increases in adult depression and isolation, and the credible research that says that social media and screens are probably strongly contributing to it.

Does that mean we should ignore teen depression, loneliness and suicides that happened in every 10 period before and pretend screentime is the cause.

Social isolation starts with kids not being allowed to play unsupervised. Don't hear too many cries to increase unsupervised time we hear the opposite. A screen might be the one thing to help that.

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