My Struggle with Doom Scrolling

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> I've found that having no social media apps on my phone has helped.

This. The phone without social media basically becomes a practical tool for basic communications, maps, taking photos, and news.

In other words: boring, and much less likely to be picked up.

There is a big opportunity for someone to make a all encompassing blocker. I am yet to find one. I think everyone is struggling with this in some way.

Anytime I get setup with a blocker it helps heaps. But I always slip back in. Every source of useful information (Reddit, YouTube) comes with toxic clickbait that you cannot disable.

I realized that my addiction is to the point that I cannot reason my way out of it. There needs to be a physical barrier.

A tangible example is sitting eating breakfast and the phone is sitting there and I so badly want to check cnn.com to see what is kicking off in politics.

Today I decided not to check it, and my imagination ran wild and I got really motivated about work. If I checked the phone though this wouldn't have happened and I would have ruined my whole morning searching for little dopamine hits.

Social media kills your imagination and injects someone else thoughts into your head. You want to let yourself think about things that you enjoy and motivate you INTRINSICALLY, not someone else because then you just keep needed to rely on their enthusiasm.

I can totally relate to this feeling of frustration with doom scrolling - I was in the same boat a few months ago, especially with YouTube. Fortunately, I managed to break free from the cycle by tweaking a few settings in YT itself (no special browser extensions needed). These are the changes that helped me:

Main settings that gave me a starting point:

1. Uninstalled YouTube app and now using only the browser version (on mobile and desktop)

2. Turned off Watch History in https://www.youtube.com/feed/history - "Pause watch history" (you can only pause the watch history and YT will periodically remind you to turn it back on. OH yeah, nice try Google!).

3. Turn off AutoPlay (toggle switch on the video player toolbar)

4. Tweak all the settings in https://www.youtube.com/account_playback - disable info cards and video previews (the setting that makes the videos to play when you hover over thumbnails)

After making these changes, your YT homepage and History page will be empty spaces - no videos at all. It is so refreshing! As a bonus, now YouTube shorts show only short-forms content from the channels you subscribed to. So it is more meaningful than some random junk.

Additional habits that helped me:

1. Subscriptions - I subscribed to specific channels that I want to follow - eg: Dave2D, MKBHD, fav cooking channels, NPR etc. and watch their videos via Subscriptions link

2. Topic-specific playlists - save interesting videos that I want to save for later - e.g: 'Health', 'Good recipes' etc.

3. Related videos - When a video is playing, YT shows a bunch of 'related videos' on the right. Most of these videos were not really related to the video, instead they are just trigger content. So I do two things here:

     - select the 'Do not recommend channel' from the vertical "..." menu in each video.
     
    - if the related video is genuinely interesting to me, choose the menu option 'Add to watch later'

With these changes, I watch videos in one of three ways only - by searching for specific topics, or selecting from my playlists, or browsing through Subscriptions.

This was a big shift from a "push" to a "pull" model and has effectively stopped my doom scrolling habit in just a couple of weeks. I feel like I am watching YT on my own terms now.

congrats on your success. rather than fight against the myriad dark patterns employed by youtube, one can also opt to bypass their slimy frontend entirely. for example you can enjoy the same videos with no toxic settings via:

invidious

freetube

pinchflat + jellyfin

MPV + yt-dlp

tubular/newpipe (mobile)