alt Hacker NewsHow'd you kick it?
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The android app scrollguard helped me. Stops YouTube short, reels and TikTok from being clicked on. It has massive permissions to survey my phone which could be scary. But as an addict you have to admit when you need to check yourself into rehab. And the phone is the drug.
Get a life that's more interesting than dish washing 4-8 hours a day.
uninstall the app. Works really well to me. The conscious effort of reinstalling it is enough to prevent me from doing it. Whereas using the awfully implemented screentime guards, I just find myself clicking on "Allow for 15 minutes" before I even understand what I do.
It's bad I can't say that I did it with willpower alone but Brick helped immensely. Their product is great, not a subscription, and even though there are competitors or you could build something like this for your phone, they're good with customer service and I would recommend their product.
Also, Unhook for removing suggestions/comments/etc from Youtube, you can basically turn everything off until it becomes a search bar and your subscriptions.
Get a good website blocking browser extension. Remove anything that resembles a "recommendation" or avoid it like the plague.
For me it’s kicking itself lately. The content has gotten way less interesting over the past few months.
Maybe it just has to run its course.
I deleted the account, made a new one from a different location at a later date and then scrolled for a few minutes and realised I would need multiple hours of scrolling through absolute shit content I genuinely despise to train the ai back to what it was. And I gave up on that and deleted the app forever.
Not OP, but my favorite book of all time is Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I quit every drug, stopped playing video games, quit social media for 3 years, started exercising daily.
I'm only back on social media because it actually made my life worse being off it.
In the depths of it, it's the last thing before I fell asleep, and the first thing I did in the morning, so the first thing was to break that cycle. Forced myself to have an independent thought for myself in the morning before I checked TikTok/Reels/YouTube shorts/Reddit/Hacker News. Then, not bringing my phone to bed at night, then just https://xkcd.com/386/ letting people be wrong on the Internet. Unless it affects my offline life in some way, it's just not as big a deal anymore.
I wasn’t able to stomach the idea of Larry Ellison being able to silently nudge my political views so I just deleted the app. Without the allure of China being able to influence my opinion I lost interest.