I have done the same thing with YT. Notice my first post on HN is adding this website to my hosts files because I found it too addicting. As of date, I have unblocked YT but kept almost all of the social media sites. I watch Twitch for background noise nowadays. I find it to be less addictive since it feels more ephemeral to me.
YouTube addiction, one month sober
31–40 of 234 posts
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#32Youtube 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.
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#33I guess this is an adhd "superpower" of mine. I leave youtube on 24/7 and pay almost no attention to it. A big reason why I can ignore it though, when it's on 24/7.. mine plays the exact same documentaries, almost always WW2 or US Revolutionary War stuff over and over and over again. I watch a LOT of history documentaries but I have absolutely no interest in either of these time periods and have probably never search…
ADHD-haver here. I do the same thing but with music. I created a playlist of albums I've heard hundreds of times. The songs are in album order and when I play the list I play from the start of an album somewhere in that list.
It keeps that part of my brain occupied, but not focus, while I work on the task at hand.
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#34I’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…
Only check it on a schedule, keep it closed, and turn off all notifications
Keeping it closed is such a sobering experience. Sometimes I will close Slack to make an effort to get into focus mode, and run `sleep 3600 && open /Applications/Slack.app` to make sure I'm not leaving my coworkers hanging forever, but also let me get some time boxed focus time in.
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#35One 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.
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#36I 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…
This is something that I see mentioned by a lot of people but I really cannot relate. If a video is shorter than 10 minutes I usually don't bother clicking. There is something that I find unappealing about short videos. That said I am 100% victim of reddit doom scrolling. But just seeing a short video makes me close the app or scroll faster.
It basically "oh well I'm going to take a 2m break, let's click that short video " and getting sucked into the vortex.
A similar effect happens to me on Twitter. I sometimes click on a video / dumb meme account, etc. just to take a break or whatever (Twitter does a much worse job at creating the attention vortex, so it's easy for me to literally make it a 2m break). BUT, some hours later the algo digests my click and turns my feed into absolute garbage repeating an endless firehose of dumb meme content. (In Twitter's case this is actually helping me: I really avoid clicking on dumb content so the algo doesn't go nuts.)
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#37YouTube, like the entire Internet, is such a mixed bag. There is some really first rate content but most of it is total junk. Like Little Richard says "It ain't what you do, it's the way how you do it."
> There is some really first rate content but most of it is total junk.
A lot of the gaming-related stuff is just pure garbage.
"Secret gaming room" channels are especially egregious. Saw one where a kid bought a used boat (the kind with a below-deck area with a bed, kitchen, etc.), the kind you can get for ~20k or less if it is ~30 years old. Made a "secret gaming den", and then intentionally sunk the boat just to add some drama with the "secret den" filling up with water.
There's so many of these idiots on YT, that I can't even find the video now among hundreds of pages of videos.
Yes, they need to stay off my lawn.
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#38I’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…
Only check it on a schedule, keep it closed, and turn off all notifications
If knowledge were the only requirement, everyone would have six-pack abs and millions in the bank?
I agree that your suggestion is rational, but the article brings up addiction and lack of control which I feel describes me. I’d love a “just block it”, escape hatch of a solution but maybe I’m SOL and have to learn mindfulness
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#39Nice to see this post. With all the discussion and borderline obsession on here about ad-blocking and YouTube I can't help but think of the role addiction plays.
Re: YouTube addiction, one month sober
#40I guess this is an adhd "superpower" of mine. I leave youtube on 24/7 and pay almost no attention to it. A big reason why I can ignore it though, when it's on 24/7.. mine plays the exact same documentaries, almost always WW2 or US Revolutionary War stuff over and over and over again. I watch a LOT of history documentaries but I have absolutely no interest in either of these time periods and have probably never search…
ADHD-haver here. I do the same thing but with music. I created a playlist of albums I've heard hundreds of times. The songs are in album order and when I play the list I play from the start of an album somewhere in that list. It keeps that part of my brain occupied, but not focus, while I work on the task at hand.
I go through really weird phases with music. Music is a huge part of my life, sometimes I play piano, guitar, produce.
There's points I'll realize I've gone 6mo+ without opening spotify except for when I'm driving. Just months and months of the news or youtube as background and no music.