Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making the Internet Boring

cemrehancavdar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#31

Post by Bang2Bay »

input_sh wrote: post #20
zdw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or only use the subscriptions page, and never visit the home page. Getting only the stuff you've curated is way better than the algorithm.

I'm one of those that instinctively types the letter "y", presses the down arrow, then enter, and goes straight to the subscriptions page. Unfortunately, I now have to scroll through the "most relevant" section, then through shorts, and only then do I reach the videos in the chronological order. What I also hate is how when a channel I usually engage with uploads a video I have no interest in, then it's stuck on top…

you can reduce shorts for a period of 3 weeks or so,

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#33

Post by surya_waters »

Internet is so much noisier these days. Even hackernews has become much noisier in the past year or so. These days i only visit hackernews every couple of days or so towards the end of the day, and use youtube occasionally after work and on weekends. I have shifted to more analogue media like paper books and vinyl.

Self Plug : If someone is interested, I built a plugin for youtube called Flowtube - Distraction free youtube on chromestore http://tiny.cc/w4s9101. It blocks all comments, recommendations, sidebar and homepage.

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#34

Post by walt_grata »

_ink_ wrote: post #18

I also need a solution for my addiction. I was thinking of blocking all addictive apps in my main (phone) account and set up a kids account for myself where all the drugs are installed. Then I need to ask myself for screen time. I hope this is annoying enough to not switch accounts constantly. If that doesn't work, I need to give another person the control over the screen time.

I deleted almost every app on my phone. I use reddit a bit and hn, but that's all the social stuff i do. Hell i use a pixel and disabled YouTube. It's a bit of a challenge at fist, but much much better after you adjust

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#35

Post by krupan »

Using newpipe instead of YouTube helps a lot. It makes YouTube pretty boring. Plus you can just download the few useful videos that you use for reference over and over and only browse through those

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#36

Post by hankbond »

Related, I just did an experiment to see if I could do away with color for syntax highlighting and I was pleasantly surprised that it was not a total failure! For grayscale-on-the-computer this may help if you enable that for focused work sessions.

https://hank.bond/posts/highlighting-my-code-based-on-how-mu...

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#37

Post by ryandrake »

burningChrome wrote: post #8
ViktorRay wrote: post #2

Some more good advice: Turn off your YouTube watch history. This disables video suggestions when you open the website or the app.

On my smartphone I'm not using Google Play Services so when I open the app, all I get is the search box. I told a friend this and told him this flips the script on the Algo. Now instead of YT telling you what to watch, YOU are in control of what YOU want to watch. We have to start breaking this cycle somehow. This is a great way to do it.

In general, we need to take back ownership of our computers and be the decision makers about what runs on them, and what we are doing with them. An OS vendor or app developer should not have a say in what gets run on your computer. An OS vendor or app developer should not even be "suggesting" or "notifying" you into their software. You should be the root process.

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#38

Post by jasode »

Gecko4072 wrote: post #30
jasode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, and you can learn anything from words an images. A lot of info on Youtube is not available in alternative forms such as books or blogs with just words and images. E.g. A random person uploads a video on how he repaired my particular washing machine by isolating the relay that broke. It's not in blog form because the guy is not an HTML expert or WordPress user. Instead, he simply used his smartphone to record a 10…

How did that person who uploaded the YouTube video figure it out? They didn't have a video to watch. So why couldn't you? I'd say it's more of specific hypothetical, and I don't understand how one couldn't read about a fuse on a forum or in a manual and diagnose with a DMM. Sure, YouTube is convenient because we are all out of time, all the time. It's also a further reflection of how helpless we have become with rega…

>How did that person who uploaded the YouTube video figure it out? They didn't have a video to watch.

He spent a month trying different repairs (replacing pump, etc) that didn't work and then finally stumbled onto the electrical relay as the root cause. This is the deep link to the video I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gm_2qISYvk&t=2m41s

>So why couldn't you?

Maybe I eventually could have fixed it if I spent weeks on it and replicated all his failures but I didn't have to because ... he uploaded a video to help me. His video was the breakthrough I needed because it identified the particular relay. I actually had to watch more Youtube videos to learn how to actually replace the relay because the board is encased on epoxy resin and I had no idea how to deal with it. Various Youtube videos showed ideas of using an exacto knife and Dremel rotary tool to cut through the plastic case on the other side.

>, and I don't understand how one couldn't read about a fuse on a forum or in a manual and diagnose with a DMM.

One could hypothetically read the text of fixing a single relay of that particular washer model on a forum ... if... that guy in the vid hypothetically wrote a post on a forum... but he didn't. Sometimes, the mode of sharing is Youtube instead of a forum post. I can't control what other people do.

I did eventually find the official Samsung service manual PDF file and had to download it from some sketchy warez website because end-consumers are not supposed to have it ... but it only talks about board-level repairs ($250) instead of isolated repairs of replacing a single faulty relay.

Without hypotheticals or exaggeration, Youtube has literally saved me thousands of dollars. Showing how to fix cars, plumbing, ice makers, sewing machines, coffee machine, sprinkler systems, etc.

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#39

Post by academic_84572 »

For me, adaptive friction has been very helpful - allow access to distracting apps/sites, but make them progressively harder to use.

For phones, ScreenZen is great at this. Makes you pause before visiting an app or site, and you can configure the pause to grow each time you use it. You can also set a timeout on the app. Very flexible settings.

For desktop, I recently built a free browser extension called MooBlock - it's similar to ScreenZen in that it adds a forced pause before you reach a distracting site. But once you reach the site, a herd of cows start walking all over your screen to make the website less appealing.

It's available in both the Chrome and Firefox extension stores. Hoping to make an Android version later this year too.

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mooblock/eanbagjehd...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mooblock/?utm...

Re: Making the Internet Boring

#40

Post by NikxDa »

rglover wrote: post #10

Putting in blockers and the like helps, but what I've found worked best was to consider this quote by Anthony DeMello: "When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you’re giving it power." When I learned to stop feeling bad/guilty/thinking this was a problem to solve and just let my mind drift, I found that my mind naturally learned when it was disciplined work time vs. browse…

as fun as that sounds, my experience has been the polar opposite. if I let my mind drift, it's going to get cheap dopamine kicks from stupid YouTube videos all day.

You have an army of behavioral psychologists at Alphabet and Meta working against you; it's only fair to fight back.

Post reply on HN