Making the Internet Boring

Internet is so much noisier these days. Even hackernews has become much noisier in the past year or so. These days i only visit hackernews every couple of days or so towards the end of the day, and use youtube occasionally after work and on weekends. I have shifted to more analogue media like paper books and vinyl.

Self Plug : If someone is interested, I built a plugin for youtube called Flowtube - Distraction free youtube on chromestore http://tiny.cc/w4s9101. It blocks all comments, recommendations, sidebar and homepage.

I also need a solution for my addiction. I was thinking of blocking all addictive apps in my main (phone) account and set up a kids account for myself where all the drugs are installed. Then I need to ask myself for screen time. I hope this is annoying enough to not switch accounts constantly. If that doesn't work, I need to give another person the control over the screen time.

Some more good advice:

Turn off your YouTube watch history. This disables video suggestions when you open the website or the app.

I made a browser for this: https://leash.ax/ – it cut my own screentime to two hours per day. Boring, in a good way!

Putting in blockers and the like helps, but what I've found worked best was to consider this quote by Anthony DeMello:

"When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you’re giving it power."

When I learned to stop feeling bad/guilty/thinking this was a problem to solve and just let my mind drift, I found that my mind naturally learned when it was disciplined work time vs. browse the internet time. Personally, I noticed that when I didn't have any artificial restriction, I was less inclined to waste time on those things.

In practice: "oh, my mind doesn't want to do that other thing right now but it does want to go look at this thing; let it." The more I've loosened my grip, the less distractions have affected my productivity.

I configured uBlock to hide comments and suggested videos from YouTube. Couldn't recommend it enough. I don't miss either of them and now (usually) only go to YouTube to do something useful.

Edit: Forgot to mention I also blocked Shorts. In fact, I forgot they even existed. I guess the medium is the message. Short and forgettable.

YouTube's only goal is to make more money. Most YouTubers' only goal is to get more views. Sure it can be useful but that's a perfect excuse to live on forever. People were fine before YouTube, and you can learn anything from words an images.

I recommend taking a page out of the FSF's book and just straight up not using it, because it doesn't respect its users.

Blocking recommendations is the one thing I'd add to this list. You can easily do so with uBlock Origin, and it's made the biggest difference for me.

Water still finds cracks, but it's about reducing the likelihood and increasing the time between binges (so that they mentally register as necessarily intentional and abnormal)

If you've got an iPhone/Mac I recommend Apple's free Apple Configurator tool to lock down your phone to only the set of apps you whitelist and/or route all traffic through a VPN/Proxy that whitelists only certain IPs. You can only change the whitelist when you're physically back at your Mac so prevents me impulsively relaxing the restrictions in any moments of boredom.

I uninstalled some of my additive apps and enabled gray scale after reading this... Hope it helps

- from a phone addict

You might want to try coding in monochrome as well occasionally. Syntax highlighting can be useful, but it has hidden mental costs.

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The internet is a rich tapestry of human knowledge and experience. When I scroll Instagram, I often discover incredible new artists who present in human form. Once you start tapping like on things, the journey of discovery is almost biblical.

The secret is learning to use your tools to bring joyful moments of surrender into your otherwise mundane existence.