Most screen time apps I found focus on blocking the app itself instead of the addictive feed, so I created this app to allow me to keep using the "healthy" and "social" features and block the infinite scrolling (Reels)
After implementing the block on Instagram Reels, I got addicted to YouTube Shorts and Reddit feed. So, I extended the app to cover these as well.
To avoid replacing the scrolling for regular feeds, I also added a feature that shows a pop-up when I'm overscrolling in any app. It forces me to stop and think for a minute before I continue scrolling.
I built it on Android Studio, using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose for the UI. I use the Accessibility Service to detect scrolls and navigate out of them. Unfortunately, this only works for Android. There is no way (as far as I know) to do this on iOS.
I'd love to hear your thoughts
Then at some point Instagram decided I must not know what I want, they should show me recommended posts from random accounts.
There’s a setting to turn this off … but instead of being a normal toggle I can only “snooze” the posts for 30 days. 30 days of peace and then the spam comes back.
No matter how many times I make it clear what I want, they don’t care. Just gross.
So my friend suggested me to use bleeper, I had heard of it ofc but I mean I always thought eh it would be too much of an hassle, then when my friend did it and said its easy so I actually downloaded bleeper created an insta with a password on private incognito and then just pasted the password to my phone's bleeper in insta and then gave it to friend and boom I am now in insta dms without using insta.
And its all free. and they even run on matrix protocol and are pushing to be even more self hosted (ie. currently the account gets in their server, (i think) afterwards, it would be on your local device)
Seriously man, I think I am sort of a shill of bleeper even though they don't even know who I am or I have an incentive to, but I genuinely like their product. I genuinely hope that they don't ever enshitten it man. Bleeper team if you are reading this, that's my only request, don't add power creep, keep on focusing on local as you are doing right now and just don't ever enshitten your product.
It isn't really a noteworthy messaging app other than bring attached to a popular app.
Hmm. So it's the perceived "best place" as a default. Is there some "discoverability" feature as well?
You’re at a bar. You meet someone. They ask for your insta username to follow/message you.
Making friends and meeting people is hard enough for most people. The added friction of not being reachable on the platforms people use every day for messaging isn’t ideal. It’s not ideal to say “Sorry, I’m philosophically against social media so I can’t give you a username, you’ll have to text me” - and then you risk alienating them.
(You’d be surprised the percentage of people who rarely if ever use SMS these days, all the young people I know use Snap or Insta to talk to each other)
Every time my kids start a new sport or class or group we all get a new "group text" app to download and babysit.
Very much an XKCD moment -
Yesterday, I saw a couple moving musical equipment into my building and asked who was the musician. The person said I could find them on Insta. I had hoped they'd be on Soundcloud, as I'm a musician and post my music there. Insta is what a lot of young people use.
Before the pan, someone I matched with on a dating app rejected me when I told them I don't have social media accounts. She accused me of being a psycho (saved me from a bad first date). This is how a lot of younger people (she was like 10y younger than me) see the world.
Email is for corpses, at least that's what I think they'd say if you suggested it. Someone up the chain talked about classmates. I'd expect they are a younger demographic and the email stink would apply.
Wow. This is like a Black Mirror episode.
Same reason people use any social network: because your friends, family and/or people you otherwise/somehow care about are there.
Because Instagram is specifically the place that those people already are. It really isn't hard to understand why others join it. They weren't even first, just the place where people ended up being, until they won't be there anymore and instead it'll be another place.
Also matters what niche/community you're a part of, some of them already left Instagram for other places (like furries seems to have gone to Mastodon/Bluesky as far as I can tell [but not a furry, so please don't sue me if I'm wrong]) while others are still there, like most musicians/artists still seem to prefer Instagram, even non-mainstream ones.
It was the only way that I can keep in touch with my schoolmates / friends for years and though I have their number, we don't have any group chat aside from instagram and I use beeper to actually make it sane to use
If they're on Instagram, aren't they necessarily also on SMS, plus a billion other people? All ad-free?
Many people have friends in different countries, and while intra-country SMS is usually free, cross-country ones usually aren't. I think out of my current friend circle, literally all of them have at least one friend outside of the country where they live, but as an immigrant I'm probably biased too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/beeper/search/?q=instagram+suspende...
Yeah what I mean is beeper.
By the way, Meta then must add a paid plan “Messaging Only” mode for Instagram :)
I deleted my Instagram account, now my friends and I message on other (end to end encrypted) platforms that don’t subject us to censorship and spying.
Whereas on insta dm, literally all of my friends are there, mostly 24x7 active. I just used bleeper to sometimes interact with them. I think it made my mental health definitely more saner/net gain
I care about my privacy enough but I can't have it make me lonely. I hate meta with my guts but the sacrifice that I found was using bleeper or something that doesn't have anything extra of insta related except just chats
Sometimes Sacrifices must be made
(I have no other messengers and have recruited about a hundred people to use Signal, including much of the Vegas cash game poker scene.)
Quality over quantity is important always, but is of utmost importance when it comes to personal associations.
Delete your Meta accounts, find out who your real friends are.
You won’t be able to have friends period if all of society opts in to mass warrantless surveillance.
And yet they expect you to switch for them?
OOh I found a use for AI slop! Getting me off instagram!
You can use an application like Franz or Beeper to have ONLY the chats and nothing else.
Ideally this would just be a simple browser plugin.
But the app requires major accessibility permissions so that it can access the API it needs to see into the Android apps, something that doesn't even exist on iOS. Just to do what should amount things like deleting a ".reels" component.
That said, props to OP for figuring out how to build such a feature for mobile. Most of the Show HN's in this space are desktop-only thus kinda useless.
And some element titles/names are even on a different component than the content, which is even harder still. So it says "reels" on one component and the actual reels are on another.
Blocking now has to be a logical combination of CSS selection, text identification and a target-action component.
That said, they put up a fight in the browser because user interventions (browser plugins, greasemonkey scripts, ad blockers) are viable in the browser but not in native apps.
Though this is also why they want to force you to use their app, and I'm not sure how to incentivize apps to even exist as websites. It feels like a dying fluke that places like Reddit even maintain a web frontend for their app.
Which will sometimes block what you want, but not always since they switch their layout so much.
You need conditions.
Its really finnicky to get right and I usually want to block views on cards, recommended tabs, trending and I have to redo it every 2 or 3 weeks.
Native apps can in many ways be better than web apps but they definitely lack the client side control that a web app (or any website) comes with. The user is sadly just a consumer and the product at the same time without an opinion.
What I also don’t like are companies that more and more push the user into using the native (I.e. installed) app over the website. I use almost all apps in browser (YouTube, LinkedIn) and the LinkedIn website has a “this content is only visible in the LinkedIn app” banner that is so prominent, it’s disgusting. You’re unable to see details of people changing their job / completing a degree and you’re unable to see the list of “visitors of your profile” (even though this is a silly feature).
On iOS I use YouTube in the browser for a single reason: ads are not shown and/or skippable by reloading the site. Sometimes I use the YouTube app on an iPad and the advertisement experience is so bad. I highly recommend using YouTube in browser (Safari).
Since I’m also somewhat addicted to short, but only use YouTube, I’ve built a chrome+safari extension that allows me to watch X shorts (for longer than 1sec) before closing the page and redirecting me to a different page (whatever you want). This is quite helpful. You can check it out [here](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-trac...). I also use it on iOS via the Safari extension but I haven’t published it yet.
I'm currently using DFInstagram, which removes home feed. Only downside I see is that is also removes Instagram stories which I do like to check, but I can do that from PC if I want.
As for YouTube I can already remove 99% of the distraction by just putting things to private and completely remove recommendations on home page, but reddit / Twitter / Facebook would be great.
For the social medias I'd love to just have "old mode" where I'm only ever shown stuff posted by people I explicitly follow. Everything went to total garbage when "engagement" became the goodhearts metric, and news feed either throw you astroturf, ads, and rage-bait posts by people I haven't even followed
I can tell you, it feels better. I have experienced what I consider to be a material improvement in consumption habits, and overall mental health.
1. Don't show recommended content at all--I want to view only the content I've specifically asked for (or searched for) in this session
2. Recommend only content that I've chosen (e.g., by following), where there is a finite amount of it
You'd like such things to be part of the basic wiring of your device, though writing an app to regulate how other apps work is often not easy to implement today, so efforts like this are super valuable. What if a device could look after your attention and ensure you have the motivation to do other things?
Another way these kinds of switches could get built by requiring them as child safety features, like "Watch the YouTube video for school, but don't get an assault of Shorts after" or "See the single TikTok your friend sent, but don't spend five hours scrolling after"
It's pretty clear "willpower" does not suffice.
Think of willpower as a finite resource. It's simply not feasible to rely on it solely. You need to build the world you want to live in. (Set yourself up for success)
I end up going through that feed in a few minutes and it insulates me from the endless scrolling.
The other thing possible is to block certain post types with uBlock origin, on desktop or mobile:
www.instagram.com##article:has-text(Suggested for you):style(visibility: hidden !important; height: 300px !important; overflow: hidden !important)
www.instagram.com##article:has-text(Because you liked a post):style(visibility: hidden !important; height: 300px !important; overflow: hidden !important)What guarantee do I have that you are not selling all my user data?
The short answer is that, indeed, it comes down to trust, and I really understand and respect your perspective.
The long answer is that it's very unlikely this trust would be broken. Let me explain:
Firstly, the accessibility service doesn’t provide anything close to "full control." It’s just an API provided by Android that gives accessibility events, like changes in the screen layout and the UI nodes present on the screen to infer the type of content shown (Reels in my case). You can check online for details on accessibility events. It's nothing like a constant screen recording where the app gets all your data.
Also, Google is very strict with these permissions. When you publish an app on the Play Store, you need to clearly disclose why you're using those permissions. If you do something wrong or try to abuse this, they will take your app down. Anyone who values their reputation wouldn’t attempt something like this just to sell some user data.
Lastly, ScrollGuard doesn’t need to connect to any server to work!, all the detection happens on the device. So, if you want to be extra cautious, you can always go to your phone settings and block internet access to ScrollGuard. It will still work, and without internet access is imposible to export any data.
If you want even more control and just need a solution for Instagram, you can modify the app yourself. I wrote an article a couple of years ago on how to do this here: https://breakthescroll.com/block-reels-instagram/
bro is using social media that listens and records ton's of data in background.
https://www.hipaajournal.com/jury-trial-meta-flo-health-cons...
Feels a bit like being afraid to install a smart lock on your front door, so instead you leave it unlocked all the time.
For all its flaws (and despite my general ire towards them), the FSF has done one thing really well over the years, and that's keep the conversation alive around open-source software (which, in turn, has landed us at what I consider to be a really good compromise of a ton of high-quality source-available software).
The FSF isn't pulling as hard as it used to for a variety of reasons, but I think it's important to keep the pressure on and in cases like this, it's really easy to take the stance that at least source-availability shouldn't be compromised on, since the app presumably needs very broad permissions and capabilities from the OS.
Source: I am a developer of Clearspace, which is an iOS Screen Time App https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clearspace-reduce-screen-time/...
Not sure what OP is running waitlist for, my guess is a combination of screen time + focus modes + content blockers in Safari.
Instead of blocking sites outright, I tried redirecting attention at the key moment. I built a small extension that sets a daily reading goal, then reroutes me from doomscrolling sites until I hit it. After that, I can browse freely. It’s been a better balance: turning the feed’s habit loop into a nudge for something I actually want to do.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/detour/ogddhmpffcgk...
Why not just Chrome/Firefox/Safari to open the link instead of the Instagram app?
www.instagram.com##article:has( > div > div > span:has-text(Suggested for you)):style(opacity: 0% !important;)
www.instagram.com##div:has(> span > div > a[href="/explore/"])
www.instagram.com##div:has(> span > div > a[href="/reels/"])I was working on something similiar, using ReVanced(1) Framework, which allows you to distribute fuzzy tweaks to regular APKs with their ReVanced Manager(2) which can persist multiple version updates.
They have their own DSL (3), kinda.
My target was Instagram Reels, I did not come that far with JADX in finding the appropriate methods/attributes to overwrite because I kept getting stuck scrolling reels on my Android Emulator.
Novel obfuscation technique by Meta :/
(1) https://github.com/revanced
(2) https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager
(3) https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-patcher/blob/main/docs/...
The fact YouTube and Instagram don't allow you to disable endless algorithmic short form content is straight up evil.
Your dealer would be the last person you'd expect to teach you about addiction avoidance.
Maybe we need an initiative like "stop killing games".
Would you ever open source this?
Thankfully I don't doomscroll or otherwise sucked into the content generated by randos; I mostly only see stuff my friends post, but man, I would pay good money to never have to see a "suggested" anything again.
Incidentally I used to love the SelfControl mac app, but it started having leaks in its ability to function a while back and now seems unmaintained. The irony being that even though it's open source, anyone who'd be inclined to fix/maintain it would need to not know how it works or sacrifice their ability to use it. Afaik there wasn't anything as effective for mobile.
It feels a bit silly to need guardrails for something as trivial as scrolling.
Shameless personal plug: I wrote about it here. https://nabraj.com/blog/swipe-scroll-repeat-addiction/
No, this is full-on war for control of your mind. And the adversary spends millions to hire teams of the world's best psychologists and engineers to deploy technology that never sleeps with the sole purpose of grabbing and keeping your attention.
Once I realized this, I started treating doomscrolling and Youtube rabbit holes not as personal insufficiencies, but as systemic failures in my psychological defense system. I started installing my own tech to keep me safe, and I am much, much happier.
Predictably, companies like Google try to disable the defenses (e.g. with Manifest v3, which was a garbage excuse to disable many defensive extensions). And so the war goes.
Addictive media content, particularly short-form casino-style recommended content sucks time away from you in a way that's deeply meaningless. You have no time for friends or real social stimulation and you sit in bed continuing to scroll because it's easy, and you repeat the cycle until all you're doing is that and being sad and lonely, which makes you want to see people more or have a hobby, but that takes a modicum of effort and you have your phone right there.
But it is possible, without having to install tech to defeat these systems for you.
I think, as with most bad habits, the easiest way to defeat them is to never start them to begin with.
If you haven’t ever smoked, don’t start. If you haven’t ever gotten hooked on Shorts/Reels, don’t start.
I watch YouTube quite often, but only long form content. I even watch some content that takes me multiple nights to finish (e.g. a 5-hour stream of a great board game). I think the only time I’ve watched a Short was accidentally, or if someone shared one with me (fewer than a handful of times).
It also helps if your friends/family don’t do those things too (e.g. so they don’t keep sharing them with you).
But 100% agree that ideally, platforms would give us control over the types of content that show up.
The best I can do on YouTube is to subscribe to channels that don’t do Shorts, and only use Subscriptions as my feed. This has been quite effective.
I don’t even use Instagram (and definitely not TikTok).
My biggest vices are HN and Board Game Geek, but I feel that’s relatively tame (but I could still have healthier habits even with those).
Yeah, this kind of realization can be surprisingly empowering, because it takes something that seemed like unavoidable natural law and reveals it as an adversarial relationship.
To offer a boring but lower-tech version: Shopping centers which are deliberately designed to make people enter/exit through stores, and the companies that pay to rent that space in particular. So there's nothing awkward about tracking in some water on a rainy day, the company chose that tradeoff.
I was with you until here but this seems like a restatement of the same thing. No it isn’t a failure of you, it’s simply an attack of overwhelming force
It's like food, easier to have self control not to buy candies in the supermarket than to have self control at home when you know you have candies in the pantry.
I haven't felt the need to watch a reel since I uninstalled IG, before that I ended up scrolling here and there, not much but enough to regret the lost time at the end of the week
However on the App there's no way to do this.
The whole situation is so user-hostile that I'm actively seeking to move somewhere else.
Years ago, I designed a minimalist YouTube player that removed video suggestions and autoplays but used their player, didn't evade ads, etc. I got banned by Google because they disallow any alternative site for YouTube, only embeds are allowed.
Pretty sure I am still banned on all Google APIs too.
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-utube-distractio...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clickbait-remover-f...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapb...
I'm happy to see that BlockTube is available for Firefox at least. Thank you for sharing (all the recommendations).
Sent from my Firefox for Android.
Thankfully, it's rare because people using ad blockers is apparently rare on the whole.
I wish this were the case. There's quite a number of websites that use Admiral's services to detect adblockers. Admiral got 19m dollars in funding last year, so I imagine the adblock threat is meaty enough.
This business model is poison. Service operator’s interests will never be aligned with the interests of the users unless they are paying customers.
(By contrast, if the users were paying customers, Google would have no problem with your client—it would in fact be saving money on compute & traffic.)
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that seems like a perfectly reasonable policy.
In fact, I would have assumed that's the case before reading your comment.
"You'll consume using our dark-patterned, unhealthy interface which we deeply tuned to maximize addiction and obsession, or you'll GTFO!" -Google.
The embed links back to YT which is a major part of why they provide it for off-platform playback.
But if they somehow singled you out for overuse of the embed that seems rather arbitrary
Struck me as very anti-user and BigCorpo.
It was the project that solidified never building on someone else's 'lawn' again.
Why did you think that??
But dammit YouTube is my one vice. And then they throw those damn shorts on it, I can feel my attention span decreasing.
Seems every product just descends into this anti-human shitscape.
Also now that we have two big companies vying for attention, the competition is fierce to show "relevant ads" first because both receive intent almost simultaneously.
I got a youtube short of an office chair company in the feed. I wasn't looking for it explicitly. It was organic feed. Almost immediately I got an ad for that same chair in gmail. Because all of our phones are always listening for intents and keywords. This is recursive ad slop.
Not only do they have well-paid experts working on getting you using their platform more often and for longer, but they also have a scary amount of metadata on hundreds of millions of people... they can pluck a person that behaves just like you out of the ether, compare their engagement trends, and apply the same algorithm to you.
The resource imbalance becomes really difficult to comprehend. It's like you're trying to avoid a pickpocket that has successfully pickpocketed millions of people, and the pickpocket has years of your behavior at their fingertips and can cross-reference it with every pickpocketing attempt they've ever attempted... oh, and they designed everything about the city you're walking in to make it easier to pickpocket you.
The same applies when you get to the elite levels of any kind of endeavor--they have long since consumed all of the proverbial low-lying fruit, and so they pay skilled professionals a ton of money to carve out marginal advantages. No presumption of intentional action is too paranoid or unreasonable when you get to this point. Assume every word, comma, image, sound, etc. has been carefully chosen for maximal impact, conscious or otherwise.
I'm thankful that I'm weird enough to be actively annoyed by the mere existence of Shorts. No chance of getting addicted.
Don't use Instagram either so.
Your adversary is playing to win. Why should you forfeit the contest?
Or if the platform owners had a minimum of scruples or empathy for their fellow human beings, instead of being disgusting money-hungry goblins concerned solely with their own personal wealth.
Same goes for tiktok and similar other shit forming and then feeding on addictions. Everything becomes much easier afterwards, especially long term.
I removed FB apps quite some years ago when they were draining batteries of phones even when not used, a typical bad engineering that facebook seems to never get rid off (their web had always some issues, stuff doesn't work, feed doesn't load, comments fail or get posted 2x, albums don't upload all photos etc. with just ublock origin on firefox on fiber optic). I just don't need even their messenger, any worthy contacts can be migrated to other apps.
The exception to all above - whatsapp, simply too much used in Europe and literally everywhere else outside of US. But that's much better engineered product from start.
There you go Meta, you can enjoy the 4 times a year I use your site (and no others).
No doubt they'll track me via many other means that ought to be illegal, but it feels like a good start.
I take a hybrid approach - keep uninstalled by default most of the time, engage a browser extension for web to keep me in place, and failing all that use an app like this as well.
But it still saved me a lot of time in long run (and some phone battery too). I don't go to FB much, don't use instagram, tiktoks, tweeter and so on, and happy with that. Quality of actual real life and all that.
It has substantially reduced my usage.
However, I do have to check it from time to time for one of my jobs (to monitor our Page and events, and respond to customers), and the occasions when I switch to the second profile can still hook me for 20 minutes of scrolling...
That's why we invented a pill that helps with the former, but we might never have one that helps with the latter (although that would be nice)
There is the additional addiction of the physical action just like addicts can get addicted to the act of using a needle, but this is in addition to the severely addicting nature of the substance itself.
Any drug that affects dopamine has the potential to be highly addictive. Nicotine is one such drug.
So I guess you could think of it the other way around. If you can believe scrolling is addictive then you should also be able to believe that putting a stick of burning plant matter in your mouth is addictive. Once you open your mind to the reality of psychological addiction you'll see it everywhere.
For YouTube Revanced is very nice, but I also just removed my account, which helped me decrease the amount I spend on YouTube.
- Tiktok: "I don't want or need this" -> Delete forever.
- Pixelfed: "I don't want or need this" -> Don't install.
- Instagram: "Still get a ton of value from seeing updates come in from family, don't want the option of getting deep into reels" -> Strict daily timer.
- YouTube: "Still get a ton of value from the network of content published to the platform consistently, don't want the option of getting deep into shorts" -> ??? self control.
The dilemma I have with YouTube feels like exactly what the OP's app is intended to solve.
And I want to be where my people are. So I choose to make informed trade-offs.
! YouTube
! Remove blue box
www.youtube.com###clarify-box
! Remove shorts
www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:has(#rich-shelf-header:has-text(Shorts))
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:has(h2.ytd-reel-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has-text(Shorts))Though I've been trying to avoid using apps without source code nowadays precisely because of things like this. Mods can break.
https://gist.github.com/jkbe/f362514f99765ac7a9dc343acfe6918...
Is this a browser extension or extension of the ScreenTime APIs? I find those apps that rely on screentime API to have too many hoops to jump through on user onboarding (not to mention a buggy app search interface in the ios sdk), so would be willing to test other strategies
We have a way of finding out what our actual, real friends are doing: it's called talking to them
Could you adjust your app (or make a different version) that automatically covers up ads or automatically skips them (e.g. in Instagram stories). Would be great for TikTok too.
1. You can only run one VPN at a time 2. My banking apps detect when there's a VPN active and won't run
Awesome app, been looking for something like this for a while. Thank you!
That doesn't sound like a scalable solution. These apps are so pervasive and their use adopted at such a young age (with a large degree of social pressure) it seems like legislation is the only way to curb these dark patterns.
Like other commentators have said these are extremely well resourced companies looking for ways to exploit human psychology at scale. It's in a walled garden, compiled app so it's you have very limited ability to modify what you're shown. End-users of apps need to be given more power over what they can be shown and if that kills companies then to me that's an acceptable tradeoff.
Not related, see also media and nutrition.
The mitigations that work well for me are purely encouraging endogenous dopamine production. Hiking (or anything outdoors). Sleep improvement through regular rituals (no phone in bed). And, indeed, nutrition. Basically, the old adage of eat well, sleep well, get some exercise. That's how you get your groove back.
It's just that, sadly, the economic drivers (atm) for social media, food, news, and (most) traditional media are at odds with creating products for healthy consumption.
In the interim, we can counter that exposure when requisite interaction is mandated with tech (ad-blocking, nutrition information, etc.).
I do have hope that many of these economic drivers are starting to wane and there's still a chance of avoiding "Idiocracy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy ) as a documentary.
I am addicted to YouTube Shorts. It would be fine if it wasn't the first thing you see when you open YouTube. But often, I will open the app and then completely forget what long-form video I wanted to search for because the Shorts got me. It is insidious. The youtube app even asked me once - in some sort of survey - if I enjoyed seeing Shorts first thing and I said no. Nothing changed.
www.linkedin.com##main[aria-label="Main Feed"] .scaffold-finite-scroll__content
Removes all content, while still allowing you to post content (write-only media, innit?), and send and get messages etc.
So my scrolling fixation is mostly limited to the browser. One nice thing about meta is they ALL of their mobile webapps are terrible so they don’t get me, but YouTube shorts does very often. I wish there was a good way to block all shorts on YouTube through the browser.
You are doing God’s work with this app.
Use YouTube-DL to download videos from specific creators and watch independently. I haven't figured out how to view the actually useful subreddits without having access to the frontpage feeds.
Feeds are one of the worst things to be invented in the Internet age. I can't imagine how far behind we are because they've caught otherwise smart people in this insane dopamine trap.
I keep Facebook because certain communities and events only happen there.
For some of us, it is plain better to only block short form video.
I keep in touch with my friends abroad by emailing them when I think about them, and I get long form responses on what they are up to, not whatever is the public image filtered stuff that they may or may not be posting somewhere.
Why is it so difficult for half the people replying in this Show HN to accept that some people still want to use social media as social media and not just throw all of it out?
I disagree, YouTube has plenty of creative and interesting content if one has enough will to fight the nonsense that the algorithm shovels at you.
Same goes for reddit actually, and reddit is pretty trivial to filter. Subscribe only to the communities that you find worth it and don't open /r/popular etc.
Maybe I don’t understand what you mean but I follow about 3 subreddits and I just go directly to them in a browser. I don’t use their app.
I've tried filtering it, I've tried unsubscribing to all subreddits save for a few, nothing worked.
Part of it is likely my own personality (I get bored and go on for "just a minute") but also, Reddit is designed, like all social media, to keep you engaged. Your method is best.
I actually designed a minimalist Reddit client that did exactly that, you had no homepage, it was just a search box where you typed in the subreddit name and it took you right to a minimalist interface (no big images, no names, black and white interface, no voting, etc). I've been meaning to revive it but haven't got around to it.
The nice thing for me was that I made the URL structure identical to reddit so it was as easy as swapping "reddit.com" to "reddit.qnzl.co" in a URL and it just worked.
Anyway, this isn't a critique of your work, just my personal perspective.
I can’t believe how little moral responsibility the employees and management at these companies feel.
the platform is designed to capitalize on your slip ups in willpower. you can have great impulse control, but can you have it tirelessly, around the clock? this thing is lurking until you slip, as long as you're on it. attention capture is the goal.
Like the chips by the checkout in the grocery store, the "path" you have to take into the app requires you to put on horse blinders if you want to complete what you came in for without getting "engaged". It's very tiring if you're at all susceptible to distraction.
They push the short form content really, really hard and for me it's not a willpower issue, it's an "I don't ever want to see this feature again because I'll never use it" issue.