I think the crux of the issue is our brains looking to be occupied with easily digestible content. I removed Facebook a while ago but then replaced it with Reddit and X. I quickly removed them, but then it was like my brain was looking for something similar and I was on Neighbors and Telegram groups for a while. So I removed those too, but now I'm on HN more. I tell myself I would rather be working, and that working is more beneficial to me in the long run, but for some reason, it quickly opens a tab to HN when I'm stuck or tired. Rewiring my brain is harder than I imagined.
“Why, exactly, are we rendered so uncomfortable by concentrating on things that matter — the things we thought we wanted to do with our lives — that we’d rather flee into distractions, which, by definition, are what we don’t want to be doing with our lives? When you try to focus on something you deem important, you’re forced to face your limits, an experience that feels especially uncomfortable precisely because the task at hand is one you value so much.”
I don't have an inspiring quote for it, but you can't focus on "things that matter" all the time, and often the things that matter that you can effect by thinking about them at that moment aren't that many. Yes, you can always be learning something new, but does learning for learning's sake actually matter?
This is why I love playing chess, reading fantasy books, and gardening... because they don't matter, and I'd rather spend my idle time doing those things than being glued to my phone.
Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do as well. Less time on the phone, more time reading novel whose style and substance I enjoy. Reading isn't something that "matters", but I find one more fulfilling.
Gardening makes the world a more beautiful place. You're right that in the long term, it doesn't matter, but when you walk outside and smell a gardenia...
I’ve always dreamed of a social app that frog boils my brain to something useful. Like imagine mastodon, but posts start gradually transition to duolingo questions or paragraphs of a book I’m reading on kobo.
My worry is that I would stop using the app in the same way I don’t open an ebook by default when I’m bored.
Start out chuckling to yourself reading tweets at 10am but after doing that for more than 5 minutes the feed starts morphing into your email inbox. That email you were dreading to open? Yeah well too late, you’ve started reading it now. Thank me later.
Come back from lunch and click on that catchy looking video of Primeagen reacting to yet another one of those articles that reads like hundreds of articles before it? Three minutes in he switches over to the terminal to prove a point about how anyone should be able to do a bubble sort except instead of vim it’s 3brown1blue sneaking in a lesson on the Bursuk-Ulam theorem.
It’s 8pm and you had to reply to a whatsapp message you received from your brother. While you’ve got your phone out you might as well catch up on what your friends have been up to on instagram. Except after 2 minutes the feed starts showing you your own past snaps of your kids and spouse! May as well stop staring at your phone and actually talk to them seeing as they’re in the same room.
I wish it were possible. But that would require all sources of information to have the same basic structure. It would be impossible to build for the same reason RSS failed.
If you stopped using the app and didn't replace it with social media that would be a good outcome, if it improved your habits to the point of doing something creative or productive instead.
Having gone through the same cycle, I've done some amount of acceptance. HN is least bad, as long as I don't get sucked into writing comments (oops). The total amount of time I 'waste' is really not huge, so I try not to stress about getting it to 0. YMMV, but worth considering.
I did a detox a few years ago. Just HN and maybe some Google news. Eventually I went back to reddit and it felt so weird. It took some time to get addicted to reddit again because it just wasn't as interesting. I really need to detox again because this stuff has ruined my attention span.
Perhaps we need to identify a substitute before quitting a certain thing? Something pleasurable and beneficial (not work). Like reading a book.
Simply cutting something out will leave a gap where that something was. We should fill it with things of our choosing otherwise it will be filled up with something of a similar gap shaped thing!
- It's possible that social media changes some peoples' lives for the better. (I do have a few friends who married people they got to know on social media, and I know the good things that have happened to me because of social media outweigh the real but less significant harms.)
- It's possible that the thing one replaces social media ("replace, don't resist") with outweighs the harm they received from social media too.
- I think we're mostly trying to work with practical solutions of how to mitigate harm instead of wishing we could change the past.
I think attempting to replace the easily digestible content with work is part of the problem.
You say you're opening a tab to HN when you're stuck or tired, but should be focusing on work. Your brain is stuck and tired because it needs a break. You can train it to do something other than switch to easily digestible content when that happens, like taking a walk or stretching, but you can't completely avoid a loss of productivity when you're stuck or tired. The brain isn't 100% effective all of the time.
Personally, I found the smartphone app and web experience to be waaaaaaay more addictive than desktop browsing, because the phone is always with me.
I also found I can break away from my phone, when I delete and disable all content streams. This painfully includes podcasts and Spotify, at least initially, and I also disabled Safari all together! Otherwise it won't break the habit of reaching for your phone! Screen time limitations for apps won't do, because I am still not getting the tease out of my mind.
The idea is to have the phone for communication with contacts, do-one-thing tools, navigation and personal time and information management. And nothing else. The phone should never be the place where "something happens", where you can discover and explore. It shouldn't be more on your mind than your headphones, not more exciting than a spoon. Notifications should always ever be sent either by "myself" (e.g. calendar) or by real contacts (calls and messages).
Public transport planning/navigation, synchronized calendars and encrypted messaging are the deal breakers with "stupid phones"/no phone, for me.
Sure you can still shift your pleasure seeking to the desktop, but at least your mind won't be bothered by temptation and intrusive thoughts, when you're on a walk, sitting in the bus, in the kitchen, on the toilette, ... You will have a chance to break away.
For desktop web, maybe ublock the 'next' button on websites like HN? Hide all the internet points?
> This painfully includes podcasts and Spotify, at least initially, and I also disabled Safari all together!
I've done the same on Android since about six months ago. No browser, no play store, no social media apps. It's frustratingly hard and technical to remove these, and it shouldn't be. No problem for anyone here I am sure, but most people would find it too hard and give up.
Next I noted what still kept my attention on the phone and removed everything it all. My email client, ChatGPT app, all the games like solitaire. They all went.
It's great. I still spend time on HN, Reddit, and Facebook, but much, much less. And as soon as I leave my home office, I'm disconnected from all of it. I am pretty sure I will never go back.
I've replaced it with my ereader and a note taking app on my phone. Most of it went totally unnoticed and painlessly, the biggest cognitive issue I noticed has been my desire to research things when I am out and about. But I use the notes app to keep a list of things, and then I research them more fully and mindfully when I'm at my laptop.
Note that I definitely do spend more time on these websites on my laptop than I would have before. But the overall time I spend is way down, and that's good enough for now.
I beg you to please tell me how to uninstall a web browser altogether. I was dreaming of installing GrapheneOS but nobody in the forums was able to answer my question whether it was possible to uninstall the web browser altogether in a way that renders it impossible to be installed again in a whim.
I struggled to have a pixel delivered, for the 6th time, so I ended up with an iPhone, which has screen time.
My wife despises me when I ask her to manage screen lock codes for me, so I’ll ask a kind coworker I always meet on Tuesdays, to lock the screen time in my stead.
Were that to fail, I’m kind of doomed. I ducking spent around 12 hours yesterday scrolling between NH, Reddit, messaging, and other webs.
Another option is to get a signal capable feature phone, but those are also smartphones and quite expensive and outdated. For me, it’s either screen-time lock or grapheneOS without a web browser.
I know I’m missing on the good HN content but it’s still way too engaging.
I’d only allow “nautilus” and r/science and a few other websites whose engagement-interest ratio is higher
> I ended up with an iPhone, which has screen time.
You can also disable Safari through content restrictions, which is protected by the PIN, too.
By the way, I set up the restrictions and then blindly type the PIN, so I can't remember myself. May need some tries to get in a PIN twice :D Alternatively, you could try to hold the phone sideways and use a mirror, do something else immediately afterwards.
Nobody needs to know the PIN. You fall back to your Apple ID anyway. With your ID you can set up a proper, long, long password you can hide on paper, in the attic or something. If you wanna go hardcore, you could also split the password in three long parts without noting the order. Then you'd may have to try all 6 combinations which is rather annoying. And you can have the Appstore require a password for installations too.
Usually it's enough to delay the immediate impulse long enough for your better self to gain control again :)
I would really recommend not to restrict (just) screen time. Complicated schedules will only encourage you to have legitimate reason lifting restrictions, and even low supply won't get the phone out of your mind. Phone: No fun - 24/7.
You don't need a schedule to not look at the dial pad :D
I am happy it's working for you! The key really is to make the phone holistically boring. Like, the first few times you mindlessly reach for it out of habit, when you remember there is nothing (!) for you to do, you need to feel a very sobering disappointment. That's the feeling to aim for. Sadly music is a casualty. (If anyone really needs a personal soundtrack, maybe consider local files and VLC?)
Also, whenever I am tempted to reinstall the suck, for whatever "important" or "exceptional" reason, I try to ask myself "Is it important enough to risk messing up your life? Is it really important to do this instant?", or "Is avoiding these unexpected five hours of idle boredom worth reinforcing the toxic habit, enslaving your mind again, adding to the tragic loss of lifetime?".
In regard to "research", removing all web browsing is an easier sell, if you can still look up the odd, timely (actually) important information somewhere. I keep Kiwix (for Wiktionary and Wikipedia*), Dict.cc and the Google Maps app around. Google Maps usually has more, and more up-to-date POI information, and better search results, than Apple Maps. E.g. you can find a doctor's phone number, or a store's opening hours, reliably. This covers 95% of my "look up" impulses and the remaining 5% are better done on a larger screen and with a keyboard anyway, so they get postponed to a note or reminder, same as you do. (I rarely do follow ups later, go figure...)
I guess mail and messaging really depends on your use case and social sphere. At least, I need to send emails from my phone sometimes (if only to get it done immediately).
> Note that I definitely do spend more time on these websites on my laptop than I would have before.
Yes, but it's much less reinforcing and invasive. And on the desktop you can modify those streams to tingle your dopamine receptors less. Like mentioned, ublock-ing the 'next' button, or 'related/suggested content', internet points, and so on.
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* Yes, without the suck "content" cached, I got space for offline wikis lol...
> Like, the first few times you mindlessly reach for it out of habit, when you remember there is nothing (!) for you to do, you need to feel a very sobering disappointment. That's the feeling to aim for
Yes exactly! I feel like we need to start a movement here.
I did try Kiwix, but honestly I don't need any reference material on my phone unless I'm going on vacation or something. In which case I almost certainly need a browser for the trip, and that's fine.
HN is opened subconsciously while working whenever I encounter a difficult problem. Focusing is pretty easy when the road is straightforward, but the second I run into a challenge my brain tries to escape.
Not sure what that means biologically/evolutionarily.
It means we short circuited the reward wiring in our brains with too much 'informational sugar'. We get obesity and type-2 diabetes because of refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. These things were never part of our diet in evolutionary time scales. Same thing with content. Our brains are getting trained to consume low effort high dopamine content so our scales for gauging difficulty vs reward of tasks are all out of whack.
And also social interaction. Can’t be solitary hunter 24/7.
Men’s brains seem to be far better suited to embrace long abstract solitary activity (like math or programming) than women’s, on average and also at the extreme ends. Probably because of evolutionary psychology. But still even men have limits and need to take a break from sustained solitary activity, and socialize. Even if the actual socialization doesn’t produce any long-term deliverables, it helps center you psychologically.
Given the rise in remote work, I wouldn’t be surprised if FB/Apple hijack that to move interactions from the watercooler to the “metaverse”. I already see a lot of young men (not women btw) “wasting” hours on various Discord gamer / political voice chats.
For what it's worth, I think I did a reasonable job of this. I don't consume any web-based algorithmic feed content and participate in nothing interactive other than Hacker News and do not visit Hacker News every day, or even every other day most of the time. Almost never on weekends. It's really an "I'm bored at work" thing.
As others said, I had to replace these things with something else. I'm not meditative enough to just sit around with a perfectly still mind staring at the wall. For me, it was a few things. Books, first. Not hugely consistent with what they're about. First few years was mostly sci-fi and fantasy, then a year or so of non-fiction pop physics books. Right now, I'm mostly reading cooking books and learning to cook better. That's the second thing. I cook all of my own food, from scratch, and experiment a lot. That consumes quite a bit of time and it's active time. Third, music, but not algorithmic feed music. No YouTube music or Spotify recommendations. Nothing social. I'm listening to complete albums, curated either because I'm in my 40s and already know a lot of music I haven't listened to in a long time, or via human critics the same way I curated music in the 90s. Fourth, movies, but again, nothing algorithmically generated. Just like it's 1999 again. In fact, Alamo Drafthouse is doing a celebration of 1999 for its 25th anniversary. It happens to also be my and my wife's high school graduation year, so a lot of beloved movies to go see. At home, we're doing 70s. We've gotten through Easy Rider and Rosemary's Baby (yes, I know, they're 60s), Badlands, Days of Heaven, Dog Day Afternoon, and Harold and Maude. Quite a few more to go, queued up and ready, curated from prior knowledge. I've already seen most of these but my wife has not. Fourth, exercise. You can't just get off the couch and do it. I spent years building up the capacity after spending the latter half of my 30s mostly inactive due to degenerative spine problems. Started off with resistance bands and walking 6 years ago. Today, I lift for about an hour 6 days a week and then run, row, or both for cardio, anywhere from 60-90 minutes a day. Fifth, concerts. My wife and I saw Judas Priest and Dead Kennedys at the end of last year, Tool last week, and we've got Madonna, Social Distortion and Bad Religion, Ministry, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Slowdive scheduled over the next few months. We usually travel to a multi-day festival or two each year as well but haven't decided which yet for this year. This is also curated from prior knowledge. I guess I miss out on whatever is hot right now, but oh well, there was plenty of great music already out there in 1995 and plenty of these acts still tour.
All in all, this gives me goals, accomplishments, scheduled events, social interaction with a real, non-anonymous person I actually know who is physically present, had made me far healthier, more fit, and better looking, and the quality of my entertainment, though I suppose less "addicting," is much higher.
The downside is this is expensive, but it probably doesn't have to be if you actively bargain-hunt, stay local, work out at a gym instead of buying your own equipment, and eat worse than me. Probably many people on the Internet would say another downside is I'm not very tuned in. It's an election year and I have no clue what any candidates are doing, saying, winning races, and I probably won't vote. Oh well. I'm sure the world will do about the same as it would have done if I didn't exist, which is fine. I'm not that important and neither are you.
Edit: I guess it's worth adding none of this involved or required getting rid of my phone. The phone is, in fact, quite useful. I listen to my albums on it. I buy movie tickets and concert tickets through it and they're delivered to the phone. I buy airline tickets and keep them on the phone. I keep my recipes, log my food, log my workouts, and map my runs on the phone. The local train system sells and keeps passes on a mobile app. There is nothing wrong with phones per se. Just don't let these apps gamify shit for you. Don't opt into social features. Don't create an account if they don't force you to. Disable all notifications. Don't worry about what other people are reading, where they're running, what they're eating. Just worry about yourself. Don't have or use any pure social apps. No algorithmically-generated content feeds. Read full-length novels, watch full-length feature films, and listen to complete albums. Force yourself to exercise at least a medium-term attention span. You don't need a change of theme every 40 seconds.
I've never used social media or had a "problem" with my phone. So I used to read articles like this a little smugly, but I'm growing increasingly discomfited by the notion that I'm...out of touch..?
Yeah, it's probably overall a positive thing that I've never been hooked on instagram, but it's also a language/shared experience with which I have no point of contact. I'm a little worried that not having a social media presence /at all/ is going to turn or has turned from mildly admirable (such restraint!) to...weird.
And it's great to be weird! I just hope that it doesn't impact potential connections in the future.
>I'm a little worried that not having a social media presence /at all/ is going to turn or has turned from mildly admirable (such restraint!) to...weird.
Well, I have some good news: here you are, on social media, having a presence. Admittedly, it's a bit more niche than Instagram.
Link aggregators was what site like this, digg, and reddit were called when they started. They introduced a social aspect for upvoting content into a dynamic feed. It’s something more than a forum, and something less than what later became social media.
But before that, forums existed that let you subscribe to threads in your forum account. It's just that the mundane masses used them a little less than the geeky folk. All Reddit added was stealing the upvote/downvote thing from Slashdot and Digg.
I don't agree. I made friends and noticed other cliques of friends on forums like GBATemp over a decade ago.
Regular visitors knew each other after seeing the other users' posts, there are in-jokes, and it's not so different. I would say HN is less self-centered (we don't have unique avatars or signatures) than many old-school forums were. Friendships are less likely to be formed here.
> I don't agree. I made friends and noticed other cliques of friends on forums like GBATemp over a decade ago.
And I ran a forum, over a decade ago, in which people from all locations/walks of life participated, and I met more than a handful of them in real life. I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
I should have specified that, to me personally (but apparently not for you), those old forums were very much like social media. I don’t see a categorical difference between them because the same behaviour is displayed on both of them.
Bars and churches have different purposes and people's behaviour in each of them should change because of that. The person acting the same and doing the same things in both would be considered to be behaving very strangely otherwise.
I don't know of any ills with social media that weren't present on forums for me. The difference seems to be one of scale.
I know my intention for joining both was the same (human connection over common interests).
The term doesn’t have to mean what the literal words on their own do, or apply to everything that the individual words might, taken in their own.
[edit] and in this case the term is far more useful if it is not as expansive as you suggest. We’d just need another term, then, to describe the kind of thing people usually mean by “social media”.
Yeah, there are lots of other little aspects that push something closer to or farther from being the kind of thing we usual mean by “social media” (“so it’s a fuzzy category?” yes, like approximately all other categories and labels). Downplaying personal or account identity (which HN does to a more extreme degree than even most forums et c) definitely counts as moving something toward the “not social media” side.
While both have been coined "social media", I think there's a huge difference between content aggregation/discussion sites, and content creation sites. I think, deep down, everyone knows HN and its ilk are not "social media". It's a merely discussion forum at most.
I thi k one if the damaging things about social media sites like Instagram, Facebook etc is that everyone displays their best life on it. You visit these sites and see these photo that make you feel bad because you ask "Why is my life not exciting? Why don't I have those things?"
Hackernews and other forums don't really hit that nerve with me. Yes, it's easy to just keep scrolling and reading more but at least I don't feel like shit afterwards. It's addictive but only but for me in that I waste time on it when I could be doing other stuff. It doesn't make me depressed though.
There is still a similar vein of productivity and hustling. Ask HNs are often about side project, productivity hacks, and income streams. Show HNs and blogs are the same topics, but actualized. It’s the same treadmill, but instead you feel bad about not being hyper productive, elite haxxor skills, or cashing out.
I think a big thing about social media is having people or personalities that you follow. I don't use HN in a way where I notice who is commenting or posting and there's nobody I "follow" on this site. Every story and comment is like a new anonymous person to me.
When I was heavily into Reddit I'd use RES and get to know people so it felt more like social media. Now that I've deleted my account and sporadically read Reddit it doesn't feel like social media or something I'm addicted to.
A decade or slightly less so ago, maybe because this site was smaller and close-knit and interest rates were lower, you could get a similar effect from seeing Show HN threads about this person launching some amazing technical project or impressive startup. In this uncertain economy not so much. Also, blogs are increasingly less fashionable so you don't see nearly as many "wow what a trenchant and witty thinkpiece" posts from devs playing thought leader.
It’s really not the same by matter of extremity. Hacker news has maybe a small fraction of the addictive mechanics at play in instagram or twitter. Personally, I only come back to this site because I don’t have other, far more addictive social media to scroll when bored.
People that tend to procrastinate do not need a reason to do so, and the things they get addicted to are not necessarily engineered to be so. Social media is strongly engineered to be addictive, HN is engineered not to be addictive (though it still is, as I should definitely be aware by now).
This is media (web) that we are social on (discussion). It’s these folks own definition of social media that needs fixing so they don’t feel isolated. I don’t use instagram not bc I’m weird but because it’s a shit experience.
The social in "social media" doesn't mean discussion. It means sharing personal media and creating bonds with people. i.e. socialising. Hacker news has no means to do so.
We have pseudo anonymity which allows for reputation. I am not sure how much more of a bond you are looking for, but conversation and rapport is about all you need for socializing — both are here.
National borders and most romantic dates won’t ask for your HN profile but they will ask for all the other major social networks. Not everything with an account and a comment system is a Social Network to lay-people and first encounter authorities.
HN isn't technically social media, but it's close. The little vote buttons, the karma, the constant feed of "hot" articles, are designed to fuel the dopamine push that creates addictive engagement.
What it lacks to be true "social media" is engagement around a social network. There are certainly "social networks" at work on HN, but most of the users don't know each other and aren't focused on each other's statuses, pictures, videos, relationship statuses. Instead they're mostly focused on intellectual competition via comments. (when you're not allowed to compete for jokes, like folks do on Reddit, you compete for whatever else defines your identity, which on HN is intelligence).
Ironically, HN's always wanted to be a social network, in that they want to build "a community of users" where the users all recognize each other (they claim that's necessary in order to build a community). Once HN introduces personal blogs or tweet-like status updates, it will 100% be a social network, with all the same health concerns.
Forum participation is a bit different than social media in that it is first and foremost about the discussion and not so much about 'you' which seems to be the main focus for social media, furthermore you can't follow people and there are no push notifications so it is impossible to create 'an audience' other than whoever is there.
Those are distinguishing factors that are strong enough to differentiate otherwise the BBS I used to hang out on would have been social media and IRC would be as well. I don't buy that broad categorization. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter -> social media. Reddit not and HN definitely not.
Though the quantity of 'meme' content may have to factor in there somewhere and then we have a continuum of online participation with on one end personal messaging and on the extreme other IG, TT, FB etc.
I think there are important differences between news forums like this one and social media:
- HN doesn't have notifications
- HN doesn't provide affordances for virality: you can't "retweet"/"subtweet"; you can't start trends like #ProtectTaylorSwift; you can't brigade people; etc
- HN doesn't have a personal algorithmic feed
- HN doesn't have DMs
- HN links elsewhere (mostly) for the main content
- HN's moderators are available directly, and they also participate in discussions
- You can't be an influencer on HN: you might be a patio11 or something, you might even get jobs from your HN karma or posts, but hawking products based on your clout for a kickback is astroturfing/shilling and the community is pretty good at snuffing it out
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I guess overall my argument is that if forums--even forums like Reddit or random vbulletin forums--are social media then the term kind of loses meaning. It opens the door to questions like "are blogs social media, after all there are accounts and comments sections".
I know people highroad social media and its users a lot (I'm guilty of this haha; finally my misanthropy is good for something!), so there's something attractive about an argument that cuts holier-than-thou HNers back down to size (trying to be generous and lighthearted here, again I'm a member of this crew). I just think the shoe doesn't fit in this case. There are good things about social media! Black Twitter! Queer/Geek Mastodon! But I really feel like those services are meaningfully different than forums--especially this one.
Having gone the other way, can comment slightly. Tried FB, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Vimeo, Imgur, LinkedIn, and Slideshare. (Plus several forums/newsforums like Reddit, Slashdot) Mostly found out I was not humanity's demographic. I don't really like posting exercise photos. I don't really want to take pictures of my pets. I don't watch sports all that much. I don't follow celebrities much. There go most of the 10k+ categories. (re: Instagram's unlinkable explore page https://www.instagram.com/explore/ )
From my own experience, you don't actually feel very "in touch" unless you're successful. Instead, you end up making a lot of posts into the void that maybe get 10-20 views? 100 on a ++ post. Spend a month on a demo and get 1 comment. Watch nobody ever read what you wrote, while others post "does sugar go in spaghetti?" and get 60 million views and 4 million comments. [1]
Game I made for the Library of Congress' Game Challenge this year. Combination of a match-3 game, and a society simulation, such as the Civilization series. Part I thought was neat was Tetris style swap powers you earn with trominos and tetraminos, as well as pentaminos for structure criteria. Note: LoC wanted "simple, easy to start"
I think you're the 21st century equivalent of the people who "don't own a television."
It depends on what your social circles are like. Given that you're not attached to social networks, it seems likely your associates aren't super connected either. So you might miss out on a few inside jokes, but those are fleeting in the moment anyway. Probably nothing truly long lasting. Because of the broadness of the social network experience, it's not the same as missing Dallas or Game of Thrones in prior decades. And you might not have a water-cooler to talk at anyway...
Personally, I don't use tech to interact with people. I use it to interact with information, data, etc. I can live without it, but prefer having it because there is always something I want to know more about.
When I was a kid, the source was an over-priced encyclopedia.
Now, it's a search and to me, that's the magic.
Also, you can't Ctrl-F search paper, and that's a huge downside, imo.
> Personally, I don't use tech to interact with people.
I am a person. You have interacted with me using tech.
How are you defining "tech" exactly? I use messaging apps all the time to organise things with friends or talk to distant family members. There's no better way to do it, I can't meet everyone in person and if plans change, it's better to know sooner.
The better question may be: How are you defining an interaction?
This may be a hot take, but I don't consider HN to be personal interaction. We post content individually. We read it individually. Replies are about the content, not about the person. I am replying to something you wrote, but know nothing about you as a person, so it is hard to claim we have a personal interaction together just because of this comment.
I never claimed we had a personal interaction, I only claimed you interacted with me, a person. I define it the same way any dictionary defines it: you acted and it has an effect on me.
I agree that personal interactions are hard to come by online, but this is different to interacting with people at a surface level online.
I have 2 accounts that anyone could argue are social media and this is one of them. The other is so specialized that I'm fairly sure no one here uses it and I mainly use it for reference. An account was needed to search. Since I have an account, I will occasionally provide an answer to someone that has a question that I've had in the past, but even that's rare.
Otherwise, I use Teams at work, but that's not social media.
I never said I never interact with people, but it's definitely much, much less than I interact with data and really, it's incidental and not the point of me and the tech.
No worries, the line near the top of the article about needing a phone in the search of a partner is so absolutely foreign to me I had to stop and reread the sentence to be sure I was comprehending correctly. And I'm more than a decade younger than the author!
I’m in my 40s, how would you expect to court a partner without a phone?
There is already plenty accounts out there that even the relatively small barrier of iMessage -> SMS is a large enough of an inconvenience to stop a lot of casual relationships from moving to the next level or even continuing.
Having no phone means you are basically unreachable for most of the day. A much more significant hurdle to get over. It’s possible to find another like minded person but that is a very tiny minority of people looking for a partner. It’s not the 90s anymore and people are accustomed to living in this constantly connected world. Look at most sitcoms from the 90s so many of the situations they find themselves in just aren’t relatable because of the easy communication we have with everyone at all times.
I guess we need to agree exactly what "not using a phone" means.
I send >85+% of my sms or sms-like messages from a laptop/desktop. So no, I don't see a phone as an important part of my communication besides the fact it gives me a number serving as an ID that could just as easily be provided many other ways.
I primarily took this line to mean dating apps, facetime, and other social media like functions; which I would argue are mostly worthless for developing and maintaining friendships or partnerships.
If we're taking it to the extreme and saying that not having a phone somehow disallows you any digital communications; then yes it will be significantly more difficult without a phone, perhaps to the point that some would feel it's a necessary device.
Random interactions at a third place can happen without a phone, but eventually you'll want to meet somewhere else, and unless you're comfortable with the old school "meet me at the clock" style meetup and all the failure modes that could occur, you're going to need a way to communicate
My experience with Instagram Reels and Youtube Shorts and Facebook stories (and all the other things that compete with TikTok) is that it can still get its hooks in, but you have to invite it in. That is, if it doesn't immediately grab you, its not enough to open TikTok and idly doom scroll for 2 minutes. You have to consciously watch for 15 minutes before it starts to alter your brain chemistry.
I did that (scrolled for 15+ minutes) around a dozen times. I kept waiting for the algorithm to serve me that really great addictive content, but I only found a couple actually good creators.
Most of the best videos I saw were Vine compilations
you're really not missing out; social media has its benefits but I'm not sure they outweigh its detriments
I deleted my FB account ~8 years ago and twitter ~1 year ago and have not regretted it one bit. IG is the only one I have left and use that to share/keep up with family/friends' photos.
I managed to make my phone boring in the past few months and it’s delightful.
I removed all apps that need my engagement to make money.
It took time for me to realise why I was picking my phone up and then wondering why.
My brain was reflexively reaching for my phone as it was bored (or anticipating becoming bored?) but then when I concisely looked at my phone I thought “well there’s nothing to do here why did I pick it up?”
It’s taken a couple of months but now I rarely find my phone in my hand without a conscious reason to have it there.
It’s not just the apps. I know I have a problem with checking Hacker News and another very low tech discussion site (local to my area, basically a 2003 website).
The discussions are very pertinent to my daily life, unvarnished, and the clientele of note (kind of like Hacker News I guess).
For me it’s because I think I have very little time for real friends as a working parent; I text old friends from college and such, but my daily life is lonely outside my family, and logistics and chores consume a lot of that time. More free wheeling discussion like with a circle of friends is what these discussion groups fill for me, and that’s hard to quit.
> For me it’s because I think I have very little time for real friends as a working parent; I text old friends from college and such, but my daily life is lonely outside my family, and logistics and chores consume a lot of that time. More free wheeling discussion like with a circle of friends is what these discussion groups fill for me, and that’s hard to quit.
It's the same for me, too. The people around me have few common interests, and conversations with them are awkward and sparse, and I've changed enough in my life that the communities I once was a part of are no longer feeling as welcome to me anymore. I've found the online communities to be both the best and worst outlet in my life, because they are directly tailored to my interests but are also not actually in my proximity.
Could you please explain more? Finding people online and discovering they live hundreds of miles away generally feels isolating to me, even potentially increasing the sense of isolation I feel from just the failed local friendships.
Sure. I think this is simply an idiosyncratic aspect of our personalities. While you find those online people who might be friends but live far away feels isolating, I find that getting to know the people who read and comment on my blog over months and years (sometimes we email back and forth) creates a real bond, much like like the epistolary friendships of the nineteenth century conducted only by mail between people who never actually met IRL. Some of my daily readers have been commenting for 15-20 years!
> More free wheeling discussion like with a circle of friends is what these discussion groups fill for me, and that’s hard to quit.
I’ve enjoyed discussion boards long before smartphones, but have been spending more time scrolling them on my phone than I’d like since 2020. This point, along with the author’s discussion of “the desire underneath the desire” is making me think that I’m actually just missing the types of conversations I’d have with coworkers at lunch or over happy hour beers before I started to work from home full time. Most of my close friends are not programmers or involved in startups, so this sort of makes sense to me as a missing social outlet.
I dont see a problem with HN in of it self. The problem is only when you spend disproportionate amount of time on HN (or twitter), vs other activities.
I'll find myself closing my browser because of boredom, then within 5 seconds feeling bored and reflexively reopening it to the same site. This can happen a few times before I become aware.
I adjusted my rules a bit to make them fit into my setup (WFH, Homekit lights, etc), the main challenge being that rather than accounting for time spent online and trying to limit it to 1h, I just wouldn't go online at all (unless for work). It was a wonderful week, and even one week can start to make a long-term impact!
Another thing worth trying is to leave your phone at home, and attend to your "digital needs" from a smartwatch. The screen is too small and the input too quirky to be efficient at wasting attention, but you can still get directions, pay for stuff, reply to a message, etc. (I actually don't have mobile data on my watch so I need the phone to keep the watch online, but I'm mindful of when I'm in "no phone mode". You can also seize the opportunity and just go offline, without giving up on things such as checking the time or playing music.)
Years back I tried to make a phone case that would shock me at random while using it. The idea was to replace the dopamine hit you get from checking your phone with a twinge of anxiety and dread.
I never finished the project. Turns out generating high voltages requires tall inductors, which generally make a phone case unacceptably thick.
> I removed all apps that need my engagement to make money
This is the heart of the issue right here. Nicely out in one sentence.
Now if we could just get members of society to apply the same principle to their newsfeeds. I walked into a room discussion yesterday where a few were extolling how they “read both sides.” I congratulated them on subsidizing not one, but two circuses.
A couple years ago, I removed most social media out of my life; anything on my phone with a public "friends" or "follows" list.
I can't put my finger on it, but overall I found myself more at peace.
I did eventually end up back on Twitter and adjusting the social app "rule" to "strangers-only" apps. And I found that worked out well as I could still get up-to-the-moment industry things (I've since switched to threads).
Recently I needed to sell an old couch and craigslist wasn't getting the job done, so I installed Facebook, fired up the old profile, and made my listings.
And now I'll just randomly catch myself browsing Facebook. It's without purpose, and I don't care much about what I'm seeing. I just randomly end up there scrolling. It's the weirdest thing.
The couch is still unsold and I've had two scam attempts on Facebook (none on CL). So I'm very much looking forward to getting rid of both on garbage day
That's basically what's happening this evening, although I will be putting out a post about the free couch in the alley - and if nobody gets it on time, Chicago's garbage trucks pretty much take _anything_.
Yeah stooping culture blew up during covid. My apartment is furnished with two couches that I picked up for free (both within my building actually). I'm going to estimate having stooped up to 10K worth of stuff since 2020 (almost all of it in astonishingly good shape), including plants, kitchen appliances, kitchen table and chairs, dressers, coat racks, a door sized painting (it might actually be a door as a canvas), etc. I have also given away things like my TV and living room console, one of those couches, medium fridge, plants, etc.
It's a pleasure to give and receive. It prevents perfectly good, clean, functioning things from meeting an early end at the landfill simply because selling it ends up being more of a challenge than expected.
Never imagined such a communal barter system to spring up in the modern day.
Very true. This process went much faster in Brooklyn. But also there were more people willing to pay for decent-quality things. It hasn't been bad in Chicago, but definitely slower and the prices have to be lower for used things.
The bigger issue is that I don't have a means to transport it. If I can find someone to pay me to come get it, it's a win-win. But every day the price drops. And if it's not gone by this afternoon, it's going to the alley with a "buy-nothing" post. Pretty sure it'll be gone within an hour after that.
I remember remarking here years ago how I annoying I found it to have to use my phone to read QR codes while watching TV, only to learn that almost every HN reader/user ALWAYS has their phone on their person/within reach. Mine is rarely on my person/within reach.
This reminds me of a pamphlet I got that had just a giant QR code on it related to a specific disease. The rest of the pamphlet had keywords and cloud bubbles or pictures of people.
The QR code leads to a page that has more information, but they put ZERO information on the pamphlet even though it could have conveyed all the information behind the QR code quite well and look good still.
I don't use QR codes because it is usually information that is useless. Or it would be on the actual thing.
I tried the same and ended up becoming an expert in the Met Office weather app. Breaking the habit of picking up my phone and doing something, anything, was really hard.
Reading this makes me realise I have a healthy relationship with my phone. I don't have any "social" apps installed, or "scroller" apps (Insta, TikTok, and things like that). I don't pick up my phone during the day while working, and in the evening it sits next to my keys by the door. Being present is easy.
On my tablet, I have my RSS reader which produces about 30 entries per day, of which I read 2 or 3 articles, and then I'm done for the day. If I put down the tablet to do something else, I have zero experience of "FOMO" because blog articles are experienced at a glacial time scale.
But also on my work laptop, we have Slack and Email and such on my laptop (only, no hand-held devices), and none of them have notifications enabled. Also, once I've read my mail to inbox zero, I close that tab. Then I'll open Slack (not both at once), and once I've caught up I close it. Then I do some productive work. I'll open them later when it's convenient for me.
I think that's an attitude I developed at some point in the past few years. All modern Internet-based tech wants your engagement, full of dark patterns (like making things disappear if you see it once or lift your finger), and you have to protect yourself from that. Choose devices, apps, services that keep you in control. Discard the ones that don't.
I'm similar to you where my phone is bare bones, often not within reach. I do take it with me wherever I go — often it is my wallet. Maps, Camera, Notes and Messages are about the only four apps I use on it (yeah, Health and Weather and the aforementioned Wallet — Apple Pay, actually - from time to time). When I find myself out and about, standing in line or otherwise bored, I don't pull out my phone as I see so many others do — there is nothing interesting to me on the phone.
But I also turn 60 this year so, for me, my laptop is my "phone". It stays at home of course (except on trips) but it is where I do all my browsing, coding, image editing, etc. And to divorce myself from my laptop would be a hard task.
A remote friend of mine checks email/messages only in the morning when he gets up. Sometimes I have been up when he texts me and I reply within seconds — only to get his reply to mine the following morning — like playing chess by mail. (Sometimes he never responds at all ... I think he finds connectivity to be bad for his mental health and I respect that.)
I would like to be more like him — limit my browsing to the morning; essentially turn off the WiFi by 9:00 AM so to speak. Unfortunately when I am finishing a task (perhaps an hour out in the garage building a virtual pinball machine) I use the break time (perhaps a cup of tea) to open the laptop and see what insanity the US politicians are up to this hour of the day....
The only social app I have is Discord, I'm 15 and it's like the MS Teams of my generation. Nobody likes it, it's designed like crap and we hate the developers but everyone uses it so we just kind of have to. There's really nothing better I can think of, and my friends aren't as much of a nerd as I am (They still think the nerdy stuff is cool though, they love my Pentium III + Voodoo3 retro PC) to use anything like Matrix clients or Revolt.
What do y'all find issue with in Discord? Compared to literally everything else in a vaguely related space (whether on the org management side of things, Slack, Teams, etc., or on the broader video/voip/messaging side of things), Discord has pretty fantastic user experience, at least to my tastes.
1. Been through 6 accounts, A slightly edgy joke will get you banned and appeals are not accepted nor are they replied to anymore.
2. The "app" is literally just Electron and somehow they still screwed it up, it's laggy, always being overhauled, and almost always has a new useless feature only for nitro that increased it's size several hundred megabytes.
3. Used to be fast and pleasant to use on mobile until a major redesign I had to revert from that put everything in tabs and made it look like every modern mobile chat application.
4. Nobody really cares about this anymore, but the people on their platform-wide moderation team were caught back then having very egregious double standards, allowing content that was on the border of being CP because of "artistic interpretation", look up discord cub controversey for more information
To be fair I got banned trolling like twice and I could kind of recall what got me banned, but at the same time I'm still not too sure because the process is the opposite of transparent and you aren't alerted to what got you banned, nor are you allowed to save your data from your account.
You know, I actually should start a blog. I hope you don't mind if I just talk about the PC here.
Wanted a retro build for mid to late 90s games, did almost an entire year of research and after a failed attempt involving Socket 939 I finally found some guy on Facebook Marketplace of all places who was selling a "Retro Pentium 3 PC". I was shocked because I live in central Alabama and cool stuff is never sold here, me and my brother went to meet him and paid for it. I already knew the specs from messaging him but it had a 733MHz Coppermine P3, an odd 320MB of PC100 RAM, a Netgear GA311 (which I already had like 3 of) and a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. I cleaned it out, put it in a brand new ATX Cooler Master case, gave it a SATA hard drive with a SATA to IDE adapter, repasted the CPU, put in a new PSU, installed a Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS, got Windows 98 SE set up with Photoshop 7, Office XP and a crap load of games and it's been one of my favorite pieces of technology I've ever owned. Beat Deus Ex for my first time on there and my life was changed, my vision is now augmented.
YouTube (mostly PhilsComputerLab) and VOGONS taught me how to work on all this retro stuff, and when I was a kid I would make XP and 98 virtual machines for fun so I got really used to both of them. (I still like 2000 the most)
honestly the next gen of matrix clients built on matrix-rust-sdk should all qualify for this - whether Element X on iOS/macOS or Android, or Fractal on GTK, or iamb for TUI with vim bindings (or weechat-matrix-rs when it’s ready). nary a web browser in sight.
>All modern Internet-based tech wants your engagement, full of dark patterns
I cant prove it... but I have noticed that my phone when I leave it alone does not do much if any notifications. But if I pick it up for a few mins and fiddle with it. Suddenly there are 2-3 notifications from applications that havent made a peep since yesterday but only after I turn the screen back off. Usually to tell me something very trivial. I suspect there is a background timeout that waits 1-2 mins after I set the phone down. Trying to get me to re-engage with the thing.
All apps on Android have Sensor Access permission, permanently [I think] and by default. GrapheneOS also allows that by default but has a toggle to change the default to deny.
LinkedIn app is one of the apps which tries to access Sensors.
These are all great tips. Especially closing slack/email and disabling notifications.
I struggled with these for awhile, growing up during the IRC, ICQ, AIM era, messaging always felt like a requirement of using a computer. Putting them away for focus time is critical.
A lot of articles on reducing phone use coming out at the moment. For example (older, but recently updated: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/break-up-with-you...) I think a lot about the fact that we carry on our persons the most addictive device ever created.
I've recently adopted the grey scale trick -- set your phone to grey scale display mode. It works pretty well! Of course, I can always disable it if severely tempted, but it creates another hoop to jump through. I also have one of the phone safes, which I use sporadically. Ironically, having an Apple watch makes the phone safe more effective, because I can lock up the phone but still answer critical calls if necessary.
Weird that in the 23rd century, a lot of us are replaying Oddyseus, collectively tying ourselves to the mast.
- Turn off tap to wake on your phone. It sounds funny but having to press a button to turn on your screen will make you do it less.
- Remove social media apps from your phone. (duh). If you have to use them, use them in browser which generally sucks and will prevent you from using them for a really long time.
- Take apps off your home screen. My phone is a lot less appealing when there isnt a shiny bright a/b tested to death app icon telling begging me to click it. It takes seconds to search for and pull up apps.
- Turn off notifications for everything but calls/texts. (duh). I don't need any push notifications. Once you stop getting them you will stop looking at your phone expecting them to be there.
Cellular smartwatch (Pixel watch in my case) is great for minimizing distractions while retaining basics: calendar, note-taking, basic messaging, phone calls, maps, music (via Bluetooth) and payments. But WITHOUT the very distracting web browser and YouTube. Battery life can be pretty poor though if the phone is turned off, you really can't listen to music all day for instance.
I also use greyscale mode on phone, can set a keyboard shortcut. Some apps are also just far too colourful - e.g. Duolingo - and look better in greyscale I think.
Phone can be a productivity machine too though with a Bluetooth keyboard, phone stand. Can have full desktop environment with a keyboard and mouse and VNC client.
Seconding smartwatches. There's no reason to habitually check my phone (and risk getting distracted) when my watch tells me if I have notifications. My watch is basically a read-only beeper for high-priority notifications, so there's no fear of missing out on something important.
I don't even need a cellular watch. Just having the phone inconveniently nearby (e.g., in a backpack, or on the bathroom counter instead of a nightstand) adds enough friction to eliminate mindless phone use.
The problem a lot of people have with doom scrolling is that there's basically no barrier to doing so except shear will power. Making the process more inconvenient, even if just by having to stand up and walk over to the phone, can make a substantial difference. If the notification is not worth the walk over to the phone, then the notification ceases to be a prompt to go doom scroll.
It allows you to separate certain essentials (getting possibly important notifications, calls) from temptations that you want to avoid (twitter/X, instagram, tic tok, etc...)
Yes, that functionality is so basic that it has always been part of the phone itself. If I get an unimportant notification, my phone plays a quiet beeping sound. If I get a wechat message, my phone plays a louder ringing sound. I can tell the difference from across the room. I can tell the difference while the phone remains in my pocket. So could you. Distinguishing sounds that were never similar to begin with is not a difficult task.
What is the watch adding? Were you having trouble distinguishing calls from notifications before?
The watch isn't "adding" anything, and that's the point. It's taking away unnecessary capabilities and only giving me what's important.
If I get a message in the middle of a meeting, I can figure out if it's just my mechanic saying my car is ready to be picked up. Or if it's a severe medical emergency. All this without bothering anyone else with audible alerts or getting distracted by any number of things on my phone.
If you have your own system, that's fine. I'm not saying this solution is for everyone. All I'm saying is that it's a useful solution for at least one person in this world.
> I can tell the difference while the phone remains in my pocket. So could you.
The solution might not make sense to you, because you apparently don't have the issue. For some people, a phone making a sound in their pocket, ANY sound, or vibrating, or just merely existing, is an invitation to do some of that sweet sweet scrolling that releases the good chemicals.
A smartwatch (like the Apple Watch) is, at this moment, just smart enough to allow you to interact with simple yet "smart" (i.e. not phone/SMS) apps, like WhatsApp, maps, music, payments, tasks, exercise, but inconvenient enough so that procrastinating on your watch just isn't a thing.
Before: Every time a message arrives the phone makes that noise, and a little lamp is lit in my brain which stays lit until I pick up and unlock the phone and look at the message, answer, etc.
After: The phone is in silent mode all the time. When a message arrives I get a little tickle on my wrist - I just glance down and see who it's from and the lamp in my brain has nothing to do anymore. I even sometimes forget to pull out the phone and answer the message later.
It's easier to leave the phone out of reach, I feel less need to have it on me.
It's great having a phone which never makes a sound. If a call comes in I see it on the watch and can reject the call from my wrist and optionally send an SMS instead. And podcasts are not interrupted by annoying pings.
It's a Garmin, so only have to charge it once every 10 days or so, and there's not much to do on it.
Yep this is the primary benefit of my apple watch, i no longer feel the need to incessantly check my phone for notifications. i just glance at my watch
> I think a lot about the fact that we carry on our persons the most addictive device ever created.
The device is not addictive. Some applications of the device are addictive. It may seem pedantic but I think it's an important distinction; it's the difference between, for instance, parents limiting "screen time" and parents engaging deeply with what their kids are doing on their "screens", which can range from learning programming to interacting with real-life friends to, yes, mindlessly scrolling Instagram or getting radicalized.
I've done grayscale but the truth is that I'd disable it with muscle memory over time. I got efficient.
At the end of the day I had no life and I didn't spend it on anything worthwhile so the phone it was. Once I did worthwhile things I naturally used my phone less. I'm glad you k kw your limits and it works for you, but beware your brains searches for efficiency!
I've adopted a different approach. Going fully offline makes life really difficult, so I decided to basically compartmentalize my online life.
I have different user accounts for different tasks, with privoxy set up to block irrelevant network traffic . Admittedly I mostly use a desktop computer for my online life so it's tailored toward that, but I did configure my phone to use a proxy as well it's been working pretty well.
It’s a document scanner, a document-signing device (we did basically the entire house search, offer, and closing process all on our phones, last time), flashlight (I use this daily), camera that can do “live photos” (they’re magical, I have zero interest in a camera that doesn’t do that), a check-depositing terminal, a tape measure or level (in a pinch), a note-taking device, and so much more. Music player. Alarm clock. A credit card.
My phone is without a doubt the single most-useful electronic gadget in my house, and it’s not a close call. My desktop machine and laptop are nothing but toys unless I’m building stuff for computers. (My tablet is the second most-useful, and again, it’s not a close call)
That’s one of the few of those that works just as well on a desktop or laptop—the difference is, if it’s something time-sensitive and comes in while you’re, say, in the line at the grocery store, or just on the couch watching TV, you just tap-tap-tap-tap and you’re done, move on with your day, barely even interrupts whatever you’re doing.
[edit] that is, the functionality’s just as good on desktop, but it’s not better, and a phone is far more convenient.
These are precisely the reasons I want a smarter phone. Taking pictures of my kids and navigating around town. We also listen to children’s stories in the car using Spotify so that too. Banking I could probably work around but it’s possible I’m just not realizing how much I use my phone for these types of things. That said, I have zero social media or scroller apps, outside of HN.
My phone has never really been the problem. I don't install frivolous apps, don't watch YouTube or TikTok, etc. The real problem for me is ... HN.
Here I am. At work. With one browser tab wasting time on HN. Admittedly, though, I'm not totally lost. I'll check HN when I'm taking a break for some other reason, running a big suite of tests maybe, or like now, listening to our C-suite regale us with the exciting future of the company and how awesome we all are. Somehow they manage to do this while continuing to sound like they have no idea what to actually do next (and it's not a tiny company, ~5000 employees). But I digress.
For almost a decade I worked with mobile devices; their certification, R&D, testing. At any given time I would have a dozen devices on me to test out in the field or demo units prior to sale.
Now that I no longer do this for a living, I seldom if ever carry a phone with me. I don't do social media, I don't watch movies on a phone, navigation I just look up where I want to go on a map and just drive there. The only connectivity I have outside the home is my Apple Watch Cellular for those random "pick up bread" messages, weather, and to tell the time.
" When I was seven years old, my daddy caught me smoking a
cigar. Locked me in a broom closet for two days and two nights with
nothing more than a box of cigars and a book of matches. No food,
Brewster. No water, just those god damn cigars. Wouldn't let me out
till I finished every last one of them. Taught me one HELL of a
lesson!"
I think you and I got the Brewster's Millions treatment.
Around 2010 I was at the heart of the Shoreditch startup scene and we
had boxes and boxes of iPhones sent to us by Apple. I literally had 4
or 5 iPods and iPhones on my work bench for messing about with. All
the time I kept a Nokia as my actual phone and adopted the drug
dealer's creed of "Never use the product". Something just clicked
inside. I could see these things as very useful palm sized tablets.
Cute. Probably "the future" , but I didn't actually have a use for
them. Somehow that stuck.
>navigation I just look up where I want to go on a map and just drive there.
This is one of the two reasons I believe I cannot get rid of a phone. After getting lost in a not great neighborhood in the 1990's and getting jumped, I have pretty severe anxiety about travel to places that I am unfamiliar with. GPS has been a godsend.
And pictures of my kids. There is no more convenient way to take constant pictures and videos of my kids than with my phone. I don't remember entire years of my life, and therefore their lives. But I have pictures and videos to remind me!
From my observations, people's innate ability to relate a map to the world varies. There are some studies attempting to tie this to gender, but my experience is that is not a hard line at all. I'm sure training is a component, of course, but some folks do not tie the abstraction to the real world well at all.
I seem to be good at it, but no one in my wife's family is, so during family get-togethers on that side I'm usually driving or navigating. The fact I can retrace a path I took two years prior from memory is an astonishing feat to them.
When I'm inside the house (any house, but including my own), I often point to a direction when talking about a nearby place. People laugh and correct me because the place I'm talking about is to the north, not to the south as I point out with my finger. I can't go back to a place I was last week without asking for directions. I walk and turn the wrong corner in familiar environments, etc.
My quirk is being phoneless. I have an android phone, but unless I'm flying, it stays at home, in a drawer.
It's certainly not for everyone, as apps are used for almost everything, but I've found it helps me achieve deep focus by introducing just a little bit of friction, and forcing me to be more "in the present".
I carry a phone everywhere, but all the apps companies want you to install seem to add more friction if anything. Like, I have a credit card, why the heck would I use Apple Pay, let alone some store-specific payment app? Even if there's some fancy digital restaurant line system, that works via SMS, I'm not installing the Olive Garden app.
The distinction between social media and communicating with friends is a interesting, but important one. I have some Signal groups that at times have huge bursts of activity and I haven't met everyone in them in person. Yet it's totally different from "social media" like Facebook. This seems obvious, but 2008 Facebook was closer to my Signal groups than current Facebook or Twitter. I want to say it's the news feed that made Facebook problematic, but maybe it's the volume and that there always is something new?
I have Facebook and have a fair variety of people on it but it's mostly dip in/dip out/here are photos of my trip. Mostly use email/SMS/iMessage if it's arranging a get-together with a closer overall group.
With Facebook, I think it is partly the feed but it's also that I've accumulated a fair number of mostly professional colleagues and friends-of-friends over time. Some classmates I've stayed in various degrees of touch with.
The one I am loving in recent years is searching if an item is in stock at a store nearby and in many cases, seeing the location of the item in the store itself. Not to mention being able to compare prices and see reviews or other details.
> I tend to use media (games, chats, dating apps, social media, etc.) excessively (for 4-8h a day)
This statement alone could be enough to qualify your habit as an addiction, FYI. If you compulsively fill your free time with a behavior that you describe as “excessive”, then that’s a sign that this is not a healthy behavior.
Perhaps it’s more important to realize that something doesn’t need to fit the exact definition of “addiction” in a textbook for it to be an u healthy behavior.
> However, since I never miss them when I have better things to do, it never fits the definition of addiction.
This doesn’t actually disqualify you from addiction like you think.
For example, an alcoholic might drink excessively when they find themselves in a situation or location that triggers their excessive behavior (going to a bar, driving past a liquor store on their way home, attending a sports event that serves alcohol). Part of their treatment would include modifying their behavior to avoid those triggers. For you, the trigger could be as simple as having large amounts of unplanned free time.
> On the other hand, I also don't drink, smoke, or consumer caffein without a purpose, so maybe I just don't tend to get addicted.
I had a friend who was in the addiction treatment and recovery industry for a while. He said it was actually very common for people to end up in rehab because they believed themselves to be immune to addiction or to “not have an addictive personality”. This created an opening for a lot of denial and rationalization, which led to deeper and more protracted problems before they did something about it.
A common example is a functional alcoholic: They can go for years denying that their use of alcohol is a problem because they’re holding down a job and they may skip days of drinking under certain conditions (something better to do) without going into full on classic withdrawal. However, they still have a problem and still default to drinking excessively during bouts of idle time. Excessively is the key word in this situation, and it’s the key word in your own post.
To be honest, the fact that you described an undesirable habit as “excessive” with 8 hours of use per day and then two sentences later tried to rationalize yourself as someone who doesn’t get addicted would be a major red flag that this behavior is problematic. Addicts tend to go through phases of rationalizing away their problem before they accept it.
Smoking is twice as common in people with ADHD. ADHD specifically affects impulse control which means you’re much more likely to get addicted because bad habits are harder to stop doing.
Nicotine is a stimulant: ADHD'ers are self-medicating and probably before they even know they have ADHD. It's not (primarily) because of a lack of impulse control.
Nicotine does stimulate the prefrontal cortex like adderall so self-medicating can play a role, but a lot of people with ADHD don’t get addicted to their medication. From what i’ve experienced, its the behavior that’s hard to quit. Not saying you’re wrong, just that I think the higher number of smokers is more due to the fact that quitting is harder because of the action of smoking, not because it acts similar to medication in some ways.
This is just plain wrong. People with ADHD are much more likely to develop addiction than people who don't. Most of the addicts I know, including myself, have it.
My experience is the opposite. I don't get addicted. Obsessed with a topic for a while? Sure! Compulsively repeating some behaviors, like checking HN? That's me! But once I get distracted by something interesting, it's like those never existed. They just lose their appeal.
ADHD is a pretty broad brush. While I’ve no doubt that some instances fuel a predisposition for addiction, I’ve seen exactly the opposite tendencies exhibited also.
I'm not saying there aren't people with ADHD who don't get addicted, but the statistics are unambiguous. Just google ADHD and addiction and you'll find plenty of studies.
9% of men without ADHD and 5% of women without ADHD
Fair enough, more than double. However, not the majority of the people with ADHD, so it could still be a ADHD-relates boredom problem and less a typical addiction issue. (Which doesn't make the results less dangerous, but the mechanisms that cause it different)
A trait of an addiction is that it significantly alters the way you perceive rewards and pleasure. It's not that it's hard to find better things to do, or that the other things aren't better, it's just they're not that. It's like it lowers the brightness on the rest of life.
If you manage to stay away from it for a period of time you start to see that it was just a lie, a skewed perspective.
People I care are usually one of the reasons, I forget about excessively using media. So, they don't suffer from it.
"..how often it squeezes out other worthwhile and important uses of my time"
Theoretically? More often than not!
Practically, as I have ADHD it's not easy to define worthwhile consistently.
"..that I keep justifications at the ready and think about others who do the same"
Usually, I don't think explicitly about it. I don't justify it, I just do it for a while (more or less excessively) and when I deem other task more worthwhile (for whatever reason), I forget about them completely.
> What’s the desire underneath the desire to check your phone?
This seems like a big question that gets elided in discussions of social media addiction. My understanding of "classic" addictions (ex. substances) is that there's typically some initial romantic experience or period where a person kind of falls in love with this ideological version of the object of addiction ("chasing that first high", but with a wider definition of "first high" than simply the first time they took the drug). Maybe they spend a beautiful month in Paris drinking wine all day long and that forms the bedrock of the later addiction, as they try and recreate th e magic of that experience ad nauseum. I've never really tried to reconcile phone addiction with this pattern though, but if we are going to call it a true addiction we should probably attempt to square these things up. Identifying the underlying desire, rather than just modeling the phone addict as someone simply pressing a dopamine button, seems like a more productive approach to developing a healthier relationship to technology. Like in my case, my worst scrolling behaviors occur when I'm avoiding something that I find overwhelmingly stressful. When I'm enjoying the outside world I rarely reach for me phone, it's only when I'm uncomfortable or anxious that I open Reddit or Insta (or when I'm waiting for my brain to finish waking up). Maybe targeting this anxious-avoidance would help me end the behavior, rather than trying to behaviorally hack my way off the phone.
Just my experience - but I think a large piece of this has to do with many of us join “social media” or a forum. We get excited at first to be able to see our current and new friends, it’s this feeling of opening a massive conduit to see the people you know and like / feel a sense of belonging. Facebook started as a college app - college is probably when some people are the most social. But after a long time, friends drift, I have so many people on social media that I haven’t actually had a conversation with in years but still see their updates. I feel like my addiction is rooted in the desire to connect with people, to see friends. There isn’t a physical place that makes sense to do so to get the same thing (bar, church, common room, whatever) so I go on social media to see those people, then realize I don’t have anything to message them over because it’s been years, and doom scroll. Engagement converted.
I see your point about the “romanticised version of themselves” and that’s what comes up for me - curious if anyone else feels the same.
I agree that it's deeper than just dopamine addiction. I think the phone provides relief from our deepest insecurities. For me, I found putting down the phone (and alcohol) came much more easily when I addressed the real issues I was trying to escape from or find answers to.
Definitely see how that's a factor in many cases, but I can see other possible explanations. For example, I used to be a real serious Twitter addict, but it wasn't really FOMO driving that IMO. My own post-hoc analysis is that it was a mixture of needing feel "in control" during a period of political upheaval, alongside a desperate desire to build a personal brand and receive recognition. There's lots of people and lots of software, I think the underlying motivations are going to be different for different pairings of the two.
I used a Light Phone II for a few years, which is essentially an expensive e-ink dumbphone (it runs Android under the hood, but you can't actually run any apps outside of some minimal built-in ones for stuff like directions and music).
My main gripe was that I like to listen to music and podcasts while I walk, and the LP2's apps for that are rather lackluster (nearly to the point of unusability for me). It drove me back to my smartphone a few times (a OnePlus something-or-other), which would usually last a few weeks before I'd go back to the LP2 again because the smartphone was too distracting (like I'd pop open a web browser to look up an actor while watching a movie, then getting sucked down a rabbit hole and missing the whole movie before I realized it was happening).
I'm trying a new experiment now--I've got a smartphone again but it's a super tiny one (a Jelly Star which has a 3 inch screen). It's very annoying to actually use for typing or reading because it's so small. It's only been a month or so, but so far I'm finding it's a very nice compromise. I can listen to all my podcasts and music using my normal Android apps, and I can fire up a web browser in a pinch, but it doesn't suck up my attention because it's so uncomfortable to use for any period of time.
At least as devs/tech people go, the fixation on phones seems a bit off the mark as we're always on our machines. I use my phone for menial phone-stuff in addition to reminders/lists, but on my machine I can fall into a bad habit of too much reddit or HN (I never use fb or twitter).
I guess the phone issue makes sense for those who have dedicated work machines that aren't used for any personal use whatsoever.
I really wanted the Light Phone II, but I need my phone to play music and podcasts. How did you get over the absolutely boneheaded way audio files are handled?
The biggest inconvenience are businesses that insist on an app. I bought tickets to a hockey game and couldn't attend because the venue doesn't honor printed tickets. When I have to Zelle my mechanic I do it from my laptop at home before I leave the house -- good thing I trust him.
I "keep up" on news via my laptop -- which I keep open on my desk. I check my papers and Hackernews, etc throughout the day. I have a print subscription to the New Yorker.
> The biggest inconvenience are businesses that insist on an app. I bought tickets to a hockey game and couldn't attend because the venue doesn't honor printed tickets.
That kind of thing is my biggest concern with going smartphoneless. It seems like more and more businesses assume a smartphone as a prerequisite. I would really love for there to be a "you have to allow customers without a smart phone" law.
I don't want to be excluded from society because the $1,000 chunk of incredibly advanced electronics I bought a few years ago stopped getting updates.
I hope you at least got a refund on the tickets.
> When I have to Zelle my mechanic I do it from my laptop at home before I leave the house -- good thing I trust him.
The incident really made me double down on my commitment to using a dumb phone. And yeah, cash is always an option, but he did an engine replacement for me. That was a lot of dough to be walking around with.
Another places that punishes me for not having a phone is Whole Foods, I never get my discount for having Prime. They say I can use my phone number but it never works. I refuse to put more effort into it.
Do you regular carry some other single purpose electronics to compensate the lack of function? I want to get a simple phone such as the Light Phone, but I wonder if I'd also want to bring around some kind of small camera or mp3 player.
After many years trying to reduce my phone usage, I think the best way is to install a MMORPG such as wow classic or similar. I barely touch my phone now.
this made me chuckle, but I'm with you on that! The times that I've been deep into something, either a project that enjoyed a lot (like writing a CHIP-8 emu, that was fun!) or a book that I couldn't put down, or a video game that I just to play (Ark?) I didn't even cared about my phone!
I've struggled with a bad phone addiction, and my previous attempts at either going phoneless (or rather smartphoneless) failed because there were enough useful things I needed from my phone on a regular basis (e.g. maps, Uber/Lyft, Venmo, etc.)
I think that after years of trying I finally have a system that has greatly reduced my "mindless scrolling" on my phone. I had previously set up "focus mode" to block apps, but I did it with the idea that I would be "in the zone" and thus blocked anything that could give a notification like the Messages app and GMail. The blocklist was too broad so I ended up just turning it off. Now I only block the apps that I use for "mindless doom scrolling", like the browser, any social media apps, shopping apps, etc. Of course then it's easy to just click the "use for 5 minutes" button, but I was amazed the amount of times I would just unconsciously open one of these apps whenever I felt the smallest tinge of boredom. It was at least a reminder to me "Do you really want to be looking at that now?" I'm not perfect know but I've come to enjoy being a little bored at times and forced to find something more interesting to do.
I also banned my phone from my bedroom which vastly improved my insomnia symptoms.
I think the key is blocking feeds.
It’s totally ok to actively look for stuff online with a question or problem in mind.
For me it becomes addictive when I am prompted by a feed.
Recently, when I feel the urge to pick up my phone without a specific purpose in mind -- I force myself to write something down in my (physical, pen/paper) journal instead.
It doesn't even have to be "why am I trying to pick up my phone right now," though it often becomes that.
Analyzing how this makes me feel, I've found I am more calm throughout the day, and I attend to things with a bit more mindfulness / care.
I'm trying to go smartphone-less, but a major blocker are services that rely on apps that are critical to my life, e.g. banking, insurance, transport. Some of these services don't even have alternatives and you MUST use an Android/iPhone to do basic operations like transferring money, logging in, or showing your ticket.
Now that I mention it, it seems like the critical functionality that these apps provide are usually just credential holders, e.g. ticket / card, MFA auth that happen to be locked in a proprietary app. I really hope more services adopt standard credential/authentication mechanisms.
Anyone happen to know a list of services, e.g. banking (US/EU-based) that don't require an app these days?
> I’m currently on my phone for 90 minutes a day. Five of those are spent on Instagram. I no longer feel addicted.
I take it this is an improvement over the prior state of affairs, so that's great to hear. But I'd personally consider 90 minutes an awfully long time to spend on my phone every day.
If I assume the author doesn't have a laptop they're also using, and their phone is their only computing device, that sounds like a victory large enough to write a followup article like this about.
If not, I think I'd want to know whether they had just shifted their usage from one platform to another rather than actually decreasing the overall magnitude. If that's the case, I wouldn't consider it much of an improvement.
I mostly stopped using Facebook: I slowed down a few years ago, and generally stopped in early 2021. Now I probably open it every few months.
But, I'm still looking at news frequently when I'm on the toilet, or if I'm trying to fill a few minutes. I do it instead of reaching for a magazine. I use Google's feed. It's... addictive... But at the same time, it's not endless. At a certain point the "news" is just the "olds," and if I'm reading the "news" for that long, it's time to switch to Kindle or find something educational.
Gave up having a phone a year ago, when even the cheapest "prepaid" plans went to $30/mo minimum.
I'm way out in the woods, anyway. Verizon ran a tower here I could talk to until a few months before I gave up phone; but then something happened and i'm told its an AT&T tower now. It didn't provide signal anymore, even in the front yard, most of the time.
Having had several years of "phone don't work" is a great way to make switching to "no phone" easier. I just regret the money I spent all those years for a service i didn't really receive.
I think it's difficult to not be addicted with how much simple content there is out there that's easy to digest. TikTok, YT shorts and Instagram reels are pretty good examples of this.
No phone for 3 years now. I am so much happier. Every excuse you have in your brain right now is moot because we survived the 90s, and with probably higher attention spans.
I have several excuses: one, yes this worked in the 90s, but as smartphones shape the culture now, they are a soft, sometimes hard requirement, now that they are widespread. We did fine without the internet and credit cards too, but not culture, business, life relies on it.
Second, surviving is a very low bar. Maybe it's not such an excuse to set it a bit higher. Living organisms survive all kinds of ailments, abuse, deficits and other bad situations. Yet, it's not "fine" to inflict these on each other at all.
Third, what works for one, doesn't necessarily work for another. It's great to find something that's working, but humans are different, their situations are different, they are at different stages of life, and so, advice in general is not very universally applicable.
Yep, just like I wrote about my experience in my age of distractions post back during the COVID-times… It stayed on the front page for quite a while here on HN: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/
I also mentioned the greyscale screen trick people bring up here, haha. Phones are huge contributor to this whole problem.
How long was he in 'phone detox'? From what I gather, only 2 months, which isn't nearly long enough. I've been 100% phone free for 4 years now, and was 95% free 2 years prior to that (only powering it on for work). I can personally say that anything less than a year is probably not long enough to even dent the addiction, and anything less that 2 won't teach you the discipline to stay phone free.
A few weeks ago, I watched a YouTube video [1] that helped me reduce my phone usage from 2-3 hours a day to less than 30 minutes. It made a significant difference in my life. Sharing the link here in case anyone needs a helpful guide.
My interest in no phones is going back to the old days where you’d have to make plans to meet someone at sometime and be there next week with no communication in between, not having ease of access to every bit of information, not relying on maps, etc.
It’s crazy how much having a phone changes things and it’s fun to think about living life in almost another world simply by getting rid of it.
For one month now I have mobile data turned off on my phone. I have started reading much more on the subway since the main distraction is gone, and there are surprisingly few drawbacks. Of course, YMMV.
What started as a one week experiment quickly turned into a month and now I'm thinking about getting a cheaper data plan, since I'll only be using it for emergencies.
I find that all of the positive effects he's talking about of trying to cut down consciously eventually fade away after a while. I dislike how the article acts like he's become enlightened from one detox. I've been in this mode many times. This has been harder than dealing with a nicotine addiction for me.
I tried this for over a year back in 2011. The hardest things for me were maps, I had become reliant on mobile mapping... and of course friends and family complaining I dont have imessage or facetime.
> "Do you want to be my girlfriend?" I ask Almond one day.
"I already am. That's what this is"
Spot on. Sometimes that's all it takes, someone from the real world to
remind you that you're OK, that _this_ is living, that it's good
enough. After that the unreality at the inside of digital perdition
starts to unravel and dissolve. The mind starts to wander back to that
most highly addictive of all things, reality.
I have a similar experience. I lived almost three years without Google and Amazon[1] before a global pandemic changed my life in a way that did not make this sustainable anymore.
Admittedly I considered ending the experiment even before the pandemic hit and it is very likely I would have done so. Also I deliberately did not pick up the abstinence again.
Despite all that, I would never call that phase a failure. It gave me a lot of confidence that life without these services is well possible and that it was not much of a sacrifice for myself. What it thought me, however, is that it very well was a nuisance for others sometimes[2]. And that is the reason I ultimately decided not to continue, but I believe I use the services of both companies much more deliberately than before.
[1] Why these two of all things? In 2015 or 2016 I sat down and classified all the services I was using by how much valuable data they collected about me and how much value they provided in return. These were the two services that lost. It might seem strange at first but the data Amazon has about me is a ton more valuable than the data Facebook has. I decide what I put on my profile there, which friends I add and if I want to use messenger. I feel I do not have that choice with Amazon - I order what I need, but that still paints a pretty accurate picture of me. I'm not sure if my analysis today would come to the same conclusion, but that was my thinking back then.
[2] This is even more true for WhatsApp, but there I'm still steady.
One addiction to watch out for is the desire to read articles about other people's attempts to conquer their phone addiction. They seemed to start about 2-3 years ago - surely we have passed the peak by now?
In my experience you get a degree of dopamine from the inevitable schadenfreude felt reading of the author's difficulty or perceived "failure", but there is a steep law of diminishing returns when it comes to learning anything new, until eventually you realise this and that, even if you are not addicted to your phone, you are almost certainly addicted to something else yourself (e.g. Wordle, some podcast you could almost certainly live without, websites you would be ashamed to admit to using, damaging personal relationships, the spotting or collecting of pretty much any real or virtual object and so on.)
The secret is to (a) tell yourself not to click on the stories in the first place and reward yourself for doing so (b) look but quickly scan them. Also, actually check who wrote the article, so you can decide whether or not you know or care who they are.
My own phone tips are:
- deleting apps (especially anything social but also YouTube and anything that feeds you random content - the advice from another commenter about considering the business model of the app is good)
- inserting gaps between apps on your home screen so it's not cluttered (iPhone users: do a search for "Invisible iOS Home Screen icon Template" - it's ridiculous Apple don't let you add blank spaces, but we are (still) where we are)
- turning all the badges/counters off
- massively pruning notifications
- having a mobile browser home screen filled with icons for 'meaningful/useful' favourite sites
- using text only news sites (less distracting)
- placing the phone face down or across the room
- keeping it in silent mode the entire time
- putting it in airplane mode at night
- books/audiobooks (because more effort's gone into them but also they're longer, so there are far less frequent occasions when you have to decide/browse what to listen to next)
- personally I'd also recommend turning screen time etc OFF - on iOS at least you can get a decent enough idea of usage just from looking at the battery page and time limits inevitably never work.
I'm aware if I was truly free of any addictive behaviour myself I'd have skipped writing a comment about it, but I don't comment on this issue that often and the above have genuinely worked for me for quite a long time.
Wait till these guys try the Apple headset.... oh the irony.
I think the AVP (Apple Vision Pro) is incredible. I am wearing it... a LOT. I'm working, wandering around, playing, etc. I don't think I'm crazy either. It's not social media per se at the moment but it's definitely a major shift from not being "online".
I'm wearing it so much I'm getting puffy bags under my eyes (hopefully temporary)
There is a whole new set of issues and causation coming!
I mainly use my phone to "waste time", somehow I've gotten into a lifestyle where I end up waiting for other people a lot to do something - codependency, woo - and tend to browse Reddit while doing so. It's fine if it's a few minutes, up to half an hour, but after that I start to think wtf I'm doing with my time.
Mind you, I'm not alone, the other two people living here do the same, the joys of ADHD I suppose.
