I'm rebelling against the algorithm

FreeTube and PipePipe largely solve this problem for me. I just subscribe to people I am interested in and watch their videos. If they link or recommend another creator I have a quick browse and subscribe there too, or not. When I get bored, I unsubscribe. Everything is chronological. It's like the good old days of mailing lists/usenet/blogs/RSS except with video.

The only downside is that it's still centralized behind the scenes so you still get the weird algorithm gimmickry inside the content like people superstitiously saying or not saying certain words in the first few minutes, nonsense like "nothing to add, just commenting for the algorithm", that weird tendency to dopily repeat the same sentences around what I guess would be an ad break if I ever saw ads etc. I try to mitigate this by sending money to specific creators, showing that an alternative income source to YouTube could be possible, but of course that's still funneled through Patreon which is another centralized for-profit service that has a vested interest in getting creators to provide membership tiers and value-adds that chip away at their motivation to put out meaningful content that enriches broader society.

I've come to think that centralization is a bigger problem than "the algorithm". I don't remember having these issues anywhere near as much when people shared their stuff independently. To be fair, though, back then most people were doing it as a hobby outside of their day job.

I don't understand what forces people to stay at all on social media apart from addiction itself. I quit it 8 years ago and never looked back, simply because after Trump came to power it has become unbearable. Remembering, it was still just fine until 2013 or so. It's Europe-specific but probably Maidan 2.0 and Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the trigger that permanently broke the social media into two antagonistic echo-chambers, both eventually filled with morons alone because all normal people left. For US, it definitely was Trump's campaign in 2015 and sudden realisation that "some real people they knew and respected can be THAT crazy".

News? You can still subscribe to a newspaper or a magazine like it's 1985, they aren't worse at all than they used to be. Dating? Tinder or local country-specific dating sites work better, and always did. Professional contacts? They never came from social media.

Here's what worked for me:

1) Deleted all social media accounts, deleted apps and logged out of anything that has what you might call a newsfeed (including RSS).

1.1) Switched all important notifications to email.

2) Uninstalled the web browser from my phone.

3) Stopped reading the news and blocked my most frequently visited sites using parental controls. Instead of reading the news I just ask an AI (Grok is good at this) to summarize the latest headlines and I can ask any many follow up questions as I’d like.

The unifying theme is letting go of the idea of “missing something”. You don’t need to keep up with your friends online, you don’t need to keep up with the news, you don’t need to scroll to find inspiration. You can find all those things offline.

But the hard part is knowing how much things I've found online have contributed meaningfully to my life. For that reason alone I'm considering this an experiment. What will it be like to do this for 6 months, or a year? What will I want to go back to? What won't I miss?

4 weeks in and my daily lived experience is noticeably different. I feel different when I'm walking to the coffee shop, or working, or driving the kids to school.

Can anyone point me to bookmarklets / extensions to fight UI dark patterns like preventing infinite scroll, hiding reactions or batching notifications?

Can you try to look for something from a timer’s angle? Block the website/app after a certain minutes per day or something like that. Otherwise, can you experiment with doing just one thing at a time, even if social, say -- start the timer on your watch for 10-min and do just your Instagram scrolls but when that timer stops, you stop Instagram and do your work or something else.