Instagram Addiction

Something that makes me lean anti-Google and anti-Meta is how they make it impossible to disable the addicting features like shorts and reels. This is inarguably an anti-user move because the only people who want to use such an option are those who recognize they have a problem wasting time on those features. In my own small sphere this is the most visible "evil" thing that these companies do.

Weirdly, Instagram never hooked me. I guess I only followed people that didn't post, ha ha.

As per boredom (I'm 60, so, yeah, grew up without smart phones), best thing that can happen to your creativity. All my good ideas come from stretches of boredom (driving long distances for example). I love boredom.

When computers came firmly into my life, it was solitaire games I had to actively delete from my machine. So many wasted hours (I thought).

Note: we 60 year olds wasted plenty of time watching shit television content long before smart phones (and computer solitaire) came to be.

I have only just slightly made a little peace with this time-wasting habit. I've come to see that there is time of decompression that I sort of seem to need in the evening. As I say, it used to be TV where I would find solace in "vegging out". Lately it's YouTube.

Perhaps we can accept this but find better ways to veg out? I personally think YouTube is superior to the crap TV (and, god, commercials) of old. But drumming, playing guitar, reading ... these are better still.

Reading is good for this.

Sit down with a novel and leave your phone on the other side of the room. Read. If you get distracted or lost in thought, that's fine—just don't stand up. Stay where you are. When you're done being distracted, go back to the book.

It really makes a difference.

I found the stylistic choice to write in all lowercase so jarring that I could barely focus on the content of the article itself.

Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:

The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.

Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.

Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.

For me, that was the YouTube recommendations. Between the clickbait and the algorithm just being good, it could suck hours of my life.

Thanks God I found out about unhook extension, i disable absolutely everything but the video, and I use freetube to monitor my subscribed channel, so that I don't even need a Google account and the only thing that appear in my 'feed' is video of channel i subscribed to.

And even then, freetube has a setting to remove clickbait title and thumbnail..

It's been years like that and it feel so much better.

I believe there are tools, extensions, to fight back against the addictiveness of these websites but the general population doesn't know about them and once you're hooked you don't even think about it.

Smartphone just make it even worst but it in no way enabled it.

It really is insane. I deleted Instagram too, but so many other apps have the exact same formula, like YouTube and Reddit. All you can do is repeatedly delete these apps, and journal or read to keep them at bay. I bought a notebook for tricky Spanish verbs, and I've got another one for Jazz music theory. I am terrible at Spanish AND Jazz, but it helps me stay off my phone, and when I am doomscrolling, I make an effort to change course, look up something I'm really curious about and write it down. Hope that helps literally anyone.

I used a “trick” to make YouTube work in my favour. For a few days I purposefully watched and liked/subscribed a bunch of videos about things that I think make me a better me (jazz piano lessons, philosophy conversations, math/physics/CS lectures, etc) until the feed only contains those. If I notice it drifting because sometimes it tries to pull something on you, I make sure I thumb down the new shit and retrain it a little. Has been working well so far!

What I find weird about social media is that using it never really "feels good". I can go back to when FB was the addictive app back in 2015 or Insta/Tiktoks now, you'll find something funny here and there but beyond that it leaves you feeling worse than when you started using it. It might also be a side effect of getting old but Twitter and LinkedIn feel particularly triggering with so much rage bait

I recently had a few nights where I stayed up way too late watching YouTube shorts, which are about 1 minute each, on my desktop. I'd notice that an hour had passed, tune back into YouTube, then another hour had passed.

Now that I've recognized the pattern, I've decided to stop scrolling through shorts; watching a short without scrolling is fine. I also setup a systemd service to pause media and lock my screen every 30 minutes after bedtime. The screen lock may be overkill, but I have a bad record of digging too deep into subjects at night, so I think it will still be beneficial.

It's really annoying to read these articles that deliberately do not respect basic grammar rules. Is the purpose of it to make the reader dumber?

I'm in my late 40s and have Instagram on desktop. I watch reels from time to time. The clips I watch are definitely >6 seconds (more like 30s to 1.5 minutes -- there are very few clips under 10 seconds on my feed). And agree with emily, Instagram on desktop isn't as addictive. I scroll for 10-15 minutes and I'm done.

Also, Instagram's Reels algorithm isn't that smart. I watch maybe 20% of reels to completion (I skip 80% of reels after 2 seconds). The Reels algorithm shows me a bunch of stuff that it thinks would interest me, but really don't. I don't understand why, because I do follow a lot of content creators. I'm also quite reptilian -- if I see a weird animal or a dam bursting or a powerwashing scene, I will watch it. But Instagram doesn't seem to pick up on that.

Now I've heard TikTok's algorithm is much smarter and thus more addictive than Instagram's. I promised myself that I will never be on TikTok.

YouTube subscriptions are my main form of entertainment. I justify it because I learn so much useful stuff from them.

YouTube Shorts? I don't bother at all -- despite my having curated my subscriptions carefully, the recommended shorts are so boring that I never click on them.

Instagram took the most addicting thing about facebook - the images and visuals - and it became an instant addiction for many people.

It also quantifies social status - more followers generally means more status.

It can be scary evil bc it brings out the worst in us.