14 ms·

America’s social-media addiction is getting worse

143 points by seagullz 7y ago

rohan1024 7y ago
I'm pretty sure India's is worst but nobody is performing these kind of studies in India. We will learn damages when it's too late. It's exactly like pollution nobody gives a damn here about it. This is going offtopic but check pollution data for India its same as that of China. At least China has proper facilities for measuring the air quality.
- chewz 7y ago
  > check pollution data for India its same as that of China. At least China has proper facilities for measuring the air quality. I have checked. It is not the same. World Most Polluted Cities in 2018 - PM2.5 Ranking | AirVisual – https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities
  - rohan1024 7y ago
    Note that this is the case when we have limited data points. If we do full fledged studies we would reveal severe issues with pollution in India. Coming back to social media there's a growing number of foreign youtubers who react to Indian media. The ammount traffic they are receiving is phenomenal. This though not a correct indicator definitely highlights growing social media in India.
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      The link above shows that 20 of the world's top 25 polluted cities are in the India. (The rest are 2 in Pakistan, 2 in China, and 1 in Bangladesh.)
    - ugexe 7y ago
      If you don’t believe there is enough data points then why did you ask us to check the data?
- cojxd 7y ago
  Usage of social networks in India currently looks like what the usage of social networks in the US would've looked like ten years ago if smartphones would had been so widespread as they are today. (Now that was a hard sentence to type)
rolltiide 7y ago
The use cases expand and contract year over year, iterating towards ones that create longer sessions without necessarily being dopamine like addictions Just pointing out that people merely use a service for X minutes doesn't tell what people are doing Over the last year the instagram service added IGTV, which can be replacing TV and youtube for some people, for example These can be completely exempt from the messed up frustrating picture feeds and the use case of attracting likes.
malvosenior 7y ago
> On July 30th the junior senator from Missouri unveiled the “Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act”, or SMART Act. The bill would limit social-media usage to half an hour a day (users would be able to bypass the limit by adjusting their app settings). It would also ban addictive features, such as “infinite scroll” (when a user’s entire feed can be seen in one visit) and “autoplay” (when online videos load automatically one after another). We should never let the government dictate UI through laws. It’s shocking that it’s even being proposed.
- mc32 7y ago
  On the other hand it’s shocking social media companies use every psychological tool at their disposal to get people to share their private info as well as getting them to engage with them as much as possible. I’m shocked they’d do this!
- dustinmoris 7y ago
  Why is it shocking? The government has always had a say in the UI if it was for the greater benefit of it's citizen: - Off putting images printed on cigarette packages - Warning stickers put on microwaves to prevent people from drying their house cats in the microwave - Forcing speed meters in cars - Forcing head lights of cars to be turned on after a certain hour of the day - Lot's of "UX" regulations in casinos and other addictive establishments - Licenses to sell alcohol which basically influences where people can find and shop alcohol - Recently the UK has drafted a law which prohibits supermarkets to stock and display addictive unhealthy food close to the checkout tilts (Mars, Snickers, fat crisps, etc.) Why should it be different on the internet? Social media has a damaging and addictive negative impact on society, so it need's to be regulated to protect citizens from the exploitative patterns which these companies purposefully implement to hook vulnerable people into their system. I wonder what makes people believe that the internet should be this sort of "law free" place where anyone can implement all the exploitative behaviour which is otherwise forbidden elsewhere?
  - yostrovs 7y ago
    Many of us find most of your list disturbing as is. So we certainly don't use it as evidence that we'd like it to grow longer.
luckylion 7y ago
Are they using social media more and more additionally to watching TV, or is it shifting more towards social media? And if it is: is social media worse than TV, and why?
briga 7y ago
And if these companies had their way users would be spending every waking minute on their platform, collecting that sweet sweet ad revenue. That's what happens when primary business success metrics are engagement and hundreds of micro-experiments are run every day to make these platforms addictive as possible.
Theodores 7y ago
This is quite a visible moral panic as we can see people glued to their phones in public places, e.g. on the train or bus. I am not a Facebook person myself but I see no harm in someone spending their time commuting on a train using Facebook instead of something more worthy, e.g. reading a newspaper. Behind closed doors people plug in to regular TV programming and spend hours on games consoles. There are only so many hours in the day and people who spend hours on social media are spending less time watching regular TV. Instead of moral panic we need some better numbers. For instance we have unemployment numbers, we could also do with numbers of how many people lost their lives to Facebook/X-Boxes/YouTube/trawling Wikipedia this month.
- pojzon 7y ago
  I fail to understand how "reading a newspaper" is more worthy than reading facebook. Both are used for pushing some propaganda and to sell ads..
  - ericmcer 7y ago
    Newspaper articles, especially pre-internet era, require an attention span longer than 3 seconds to get through. Content had an editorial process, a physical body was held accountable for content. There are tons of differences that make a newspaper a better media for your brain to consume.
    - poloniculmov 7y ago
      Most people I saw reading the newspaper on the subway were reading either a cheap tabloid or the free paper distributed on the subway.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    I do still read regular newspapers (print versions in digital format). The quality difference to online news media is gigantic. Depends on what you consume of course.
  - TheBranca18 7y ago
pjc50 7y ago
How about America's TV addiction, or even talk-radio addiction? Or even, you know, the actual addiction addiction of the opiate crisis?
- the-dude 7y ago
  "According to a Nielsen report, United States adults are watching five hours and four minutes of television per day on average (35.5 h/week, slightly more than 77 days per year)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption Nielsen may be biased though.
  - jumbopapa 7y ago
    That seems insane... I get off work around 4:30pm and get home from the gym around 6pm. I make dinner and it's basically 7pm and then I have leisure time to read a book, work a personal project, or watch TV. I aim to go to bed 10pm. I never spend 3 hours watching TV and I'm not sure how some of these people are doing more than that! The weekends could skew the numbers, but even then I don't watch it that much.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Retired people, children, and the unemployed.
    - matwood 7y ago
      > get home from the gym around 6pm. I make dinner These are 2 things that apparently large parts of the population do not do. Instead they grab fast food on the way home and watch TV until bed. At least that's the responses I get anytime I say people should work out every day, and eat healthier by spending a few minutes cooking.
    - kaolti 7y ago
      We gotta realize HN isn't exactly representative of the population.
    - deleted 7y ago
EvagohP5 7y ago
do americans really do this?
maxwellito 7y ago
I don't find the data precise enough to make conclusions. Yes, we spend more time on social apps, but it's also our main way of communication. I wouldn't be surprised to know that 80% of the time spend is in private conversations. We are just switching from classic apps (SMS, email, WhatsApp) to messaging in social media apps.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  Also just because the app is open on my screen doesn't mean I'm looking at it. Bad science is bad, only one upped by the bad reporting.
nottorp 7y ago
Is Youtube a social site now? I think it should go in the other corner where it says 'TV Addiction'...
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >Is Youtube a social site now? Absolutely, go pick a video at random from a YT account with more than say half a million subscribers. Go look at the comments, go look at the 'community' tab on one of those accounts pages and look at the engagement in their non-video shares as well. Go watch one of these accounts when they do a live video and the chat is often flying by faster than you can read more than one or two lines.
afarrell 7y ago
One important part of solving this is allowing apps which provide the ability for an individual to bind his future actions. If there should be any government policy, it should be to make these tools which help augment individuals' own strivings for self-discipline. It would be really nice if Apple would re-allow content-blocking apps on the iPhone. https://support.freedom.to/en/articles/2259444-freedom-app-store-removal-status https://support.freedom.to/en/articles/2259444-freedom-app-s... It would also be nice if someone would develop a subscription service like SelfControl.app, but which took recurring payments in order to support an engineer making continual improvements. https://github.com/SelfControlApp/selfcontrol/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen https://github.com/SelfControlApp/selfcontrol/issues?q=is%3A... ------- By the way, there exists some similar fintech for substance addictions: https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/next_step-card-recovering-addicts-debt-1273.php https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/next_step-card-...
- dcow 7y ago
  > It would be really nice if Apple would re-allow content-blocking apps on the iPhone. They did, didn’t they?
  - Delmania 7y ago
    Yes, they did. I paid for a lifetime subscription to freedom just for this.
- tfha 7y ago
  I think the approach of "have more self control" is doomed to fail. We have a social media addiction problem because there are literally teams of scientests using machine learning, A/B testing, and other techniques to get you hooked onto the app. If you want to break the addiction, the only thing you can do is abstinence from the apps that employ these tactics. I don't think that you can win against adversaries that literally make a living out of getting you to keep clicking. Media like HN is fine, self control techniques work here because YC isn't doing all of the same dark patterns and addiction strategies that are being employed by facebook, youtube, twitter, snapchat, etc. If you realize you are addicted to one of these opiate-like apps, you really have to choose cold-turkey.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jumbopapa 7y ago
The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without checking their phone. It impacts work and leisure. An assignment at work is delayed or low quality because you checked your phone every few minutes, you don't understand what's happening in a TV show/movie because you kept checking your phone, you can't get interested in a good book because you can't read more than a page or two without checking your phone. I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it. I highly suggest everyone checkout Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It's a fantastic read.
- roganartu 7y ago
  The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without going outside for a cigarette. It impacts work and leisure. An assignment at work is delayed or low quality because you had a cigarette every few minutes, you don't understand what's happening in a TV show/movie because you kept looking away to light up another cigarette, you can't get interested in a good book because you can't read more than a page or two without getting another cigarette. I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it.
- heinrichhartman 7y ago
  > but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal: Everyone know's it's bad. People get trapped. It has severe consequences for personal health and the society as a whole. But, hey, "it's not impossible to break free from it" by yourself. No need for Government action. The key metric for me is impact to society. You can do all bad things to you if you want to, and they only impact yourself, but if things have large impact on: - Social fabric (stability of families and communities) - Political Culture (erosion of discourse culture) - Education (lower attention span) - Healthcare (burnout!) - Working productivity It might be a good idea to change the rules to prevent these effects.
lota-putty 7y ago
Addictions are good for business. Addictions are predictable & can be channelled to make profit. Like they say, "Make hay while the Sun shines". Whole private business community rides on such waves of addictions(good/bad). Some successful businessmen with guilty conscience do charity.
gedy 7y ago
I went to Disneyland for the first time in 20+ years and it struck me how much people stare into phones. In lines of course, but also in the middle of rides? Just didn't seem healthy, like we are running a huge social experiment which eliminates talking and paying attention to those around you.
- cylinder 7y ago
  I hadn't thought of that because I hadn't been to a theme park in years, since smartphones took off. Wow. I couldn't imagine a line full of kids staring at phones. Lines were always tedious, but we joked around and generally entertained ourselves through it. Man, we are becoming a dull bunch of people.
ryanmercer 7y ago
I applied to the most recent winter YC batch with the idea of, I want to help people put tech down and plug back into the world. Sadly, they weren't interested as it won't make 1 billion dollars in a few years for them to make bank on. I think purely the attention companies get at demo day would have been a very powerful thing and I know there are countless tech types the world around that are fed up with technology in front of them all the time (and it's nothing new, I knew a programmer in the late 90s that got rid of his computer, then his game consoles, then his television because he just didn't want to be around the stuff outside of work). I mean, look at how many CS types buy hobby farms or talk about someday buying hobby farms. Look at a lot of the van life and tiny home types, same kinda thing. I would love to help people take a step away from tech, if anything just to help myself. Here's a snippet of something I wrote in 2017, it's probably the first time I really put thought into ME and tech >In 1995 when I discovered the internet we got 60 hours a month, shortly after we got 120 hours a month. If the weather was nice you didn't give a shit about the internet, you were outside. If the weather was bad you'd connect to the internet, get lost in the text of a MUD. I remember the first time I saw an image on a website, the first time I saw video on a computer. Here's another bit, this grows and evolves in me almost daily >I've got 21st century burnout. I'm not alone, I know I'm not. I've got two friends that are of a similar mind. I want to live in a world where community is a thing, where life is simple, where the only real concerns are who's bringing what to the block party or what book I want to read next. https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-the-20th-century https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-th... What's really crazy is just look at video games, the time we spend in video games is dumbfounding >ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SIX BILLION HOURS A YEAR. That's 17,808,219 man-YEARS spent on video games annually. 17 million years wasted every year playing video games. Seventeen MILLION. I break that out, using great works we've done, to show what we might accomplish if we just put down video games https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-end-the-time-we-waste-on-virtual-lives https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-... And that doesn't include the obscene amounts of time people, hell I, spend on Instagram, Facebook, HN, Reddit, Tinder-like apps, sending gifs and memes in a dozen message/chat threads. We've gotta do something about this.
- Youcandothis 7y ago
faissaloo 7y ago
My solution to this problem is simply that these websites shouldn't exist. A network of more than a thousand or so people can't reasonably give you any real sense of community. All these sites have a commonality: they are ad supported, so in order to end this the consumer ad industry must be collapsed, block ads and avoid purchasing products advertised to you. Once the ad industry is collapsed such sites will either be paid for or will be setup to facilitate a genuine need. This will maximise the benefits and avoid creating a constant stream of broadly irrelevant and useless information.
- nradov 7y ago
  I doubt that anyone will ever figure out a reliable way of blocking ads on the major social media web sites and mobile apps. It just doesn't seem technically feasible due to how the platforms work and the way ads are directly integrated into content.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    Legally ads have to be marked as such, so it will definitely be possible somehow. Additionally, 'good enough' is acceptable, it might be a constant fight but one side has less stamina than the other by virtue of the fact that they're limited by market logic.
- luckylion 7y ago
  What makes you think that people don't value those sites enough to pay for using them? People pay huge sums for cable packages which is essentially a monthly fee for "make the time go by more quickly". Social media is similar in that regard, so it might just be worth money to them as well.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    If people valued the existing sites enough to pay for them they'd already be doing that, it would simply be a more reliable stream of income.
jake2110 7y ago
Regulation the usage of private websites and something as specific as infinite scroll on an app is ridiculous. I understand we regulate things like cigarettes and alcohol, but I absolutely hate the idea of government getting involved in regulations of software and the internet. I just don't personally think that if I'm going through multiple private businesses (phone manufacturer, ISP, social network) that I should be restricted by government regulation on something as mundane as spending too much time on Reddit. That being said, that's my personal opinion.
akpakima 7y ago
What comes after Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat..? Introducing the next generation of social media.. PAGEDIN Pagedin lets you create events to share with friends, book restaurants, attractions and services. iOS users can download the beta version via TestFlight. https://testflight.apple.com/join/IPITLy7T https://testflight.apple.com/join/IPITLy7T For more info, queries and suggestions Email: team@pagedin.co.uk www.pagedin.co.uk
5trokerac3 7y ago
Imagine a Star Trek episode where they go to a planet were everyone is staring at a personal device and not interacting with each other. That's what walking into a bar in 2019 is like. We're living in the part of the dystopian movie, in the beginning, where they explain the timeline of how everything got so bad.
Youcandothis 7y ago
It's strange that people still believe in internet addiction.
scarejunba 7y ago
Yeah, people are in touch with each other. I’m glued to my phone on transit because I’m catching up with my friends who I haven’t seen in days, something I can’t do at work. Fucking insufferable, the paternalism.
- siphon22 7y ago
  Well said. Another factor is that not everyone, especially women, do not want to leave themselves open to strangers to bother or even harass them. The best way to do that these days is to be busy on your phone, or to put on some ear/headphones in public. Looking busy is almost a must on public transit or else you risk looking like prey to unwanted solicitations.
chaoticmass 7y ago
I helped crack down on my own social media usage by getting a feature phone for calling and a really cheap low-end smart phone ($40) for those times when I really need an app for something.

143 points by seagullz 7y ago

I'm pretty sure India's is worst but nobody is performing these kind of studies in India. We will learn damages when it's too late. It's exactly like pollution nobody gives a damn here about it. This is going offtopic but check pollution data for India its same as that of China. At least China has proper facilities for measuring the air quality.

chewz 7y ago
> check pollution data for India its same as that of China. At least China has proper facilities for measuring the air quality. I have checked. It is not the same. World Most Polluted Cities in 2018 - PM2.5 Ranking | AirVisual – https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities https://www.airvisual.com/world-most-polluted-cities
- rohan1024 7y ago
  Note that this is the case when we have limited data points. If we do full fledged studies we would reveal severe issues with pollution in India. Coming back to social media there's a growing number of foreign youtubers who react to Indian media. The ammount traffic they are receiving is phenomenal. This though not a correct indicator definitely highlights growing social media in India.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
    The link above shows that 20 of the world's top 25 polluted cities are in the India. (The rest are 2 in Pakistan, 2 in China, and 1 in Bangladesh.)
  - ugexe 7y ago
    If you don’t believe there is enough data points then why did you ask us to check the data?
cojxd 7y ago
Usage of social networks in India currently looks like what the usage of social networks in the US would've looked like ten years ago if smartphones would had been so widespread as they are today. (Now that was a hard sentence to type)

rolltiide 7y ago

The use cases expand and contract year over year, iterating towards ones that create longer sessions without necessarily being dopamine like addictions Just pointing out that people merely use a service for X minutes doesn't tell what people are doing Over the last year the instagram service added IGTV, which can be replacing TV and youtube for some people, for example These can be completely exempt from the messed up frustrating picture feeds and the use case of attracting likes.

malvosenior 7y ago

> On July 30th the junior senator from Missouri unveiled the “Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act”, or SMART Act. The bill would limit social-media usage to half an hour a day (users would be able to bypass the limit by adjusting their app settings). It would also ban addictive features, such as “infinite scroll” (when a user’s entire feed can be seen in one visit) and “autoplay” (when online videos load automatically one after another). We should never let the government dictate UI through laws. It’s shocking that it’s even being proposed.

mc32 7y ago
On the other hand it’s shocking social media companies use every psychological tool at their disposal to get people to share their private info as well as getting them to engage with them as much as possible. I’m shocked they’d do this!
dustinmoris 7y ago
Why is it shocking? The government has always had a say in the UI if it was for the greater benefit of it's citizen: - Off putting images printed on cigarette packages - Warning stickers put on microwaves to prevent people from drying their house cats in the microwave - Forcing speed meters in cars - Forcing head lights of cars to be turned on after a certain hour of the day - Lot's of "UX" regulations in casinos and other addictive establishments - Licenses to sell alcohol which basically influences where people can find and shop alcohol - Recently the UK has drafted a law which prohibits supermarkets to stock and display addictive unhealthy food close to the checkout tilts (Mars, Snickers, fat crisps, etc.) Why should it be different on the internet? Social media has a damaging and addictive negative impact on society, so it need's to be regulated to protect citizens from the exploitative patterns which these companies purposefully implement to hook vulnerable people into their system. I wonder what makes people believe that the internet should be this sort of "law free" place where anyone can implement all the exploitative behaviour which is otherwise forbidden elsewhere?
- yostrovs 7y ago
  Many of us find most of your list disturbing as is. So we certainly don't use it as evidence that we'd like it to grow longer.

luckylion 7y ago

Are they using social media more and more additionally to watching TV, or is it shifting more towards social media? And if it is: is social media worse than TV, and why?

briga 7y ago

And if these companies had their way users would be spending every waking minute on their platform, collecting that sweet sweet ad revenue. That's what happens when primary business success metrics are engagement and hundreds of micro-experiments are run every day to make these platforms addictive as possible.

Theodores 7y ago

This is quite a visible moral panic as we can see people glued to their phones in public places, e.g. on the train or bus. I am not a Facebook person myself but I see no harm in someone spending their time commuting on a train using Facebook instead of something more worthy, e.g. reading a newspaper. Behind closed doors people plug in to regular TV programming and spend hours on games consoles. There are only so many hours in the day and people who spend hours on social media are spending less time watching regular TV. Instead of moral panic we need some better numbers. For instance we have unemployment numbers, we could also do with numbers of how many people lost their lives to Facebook/X-Boxes/YouTube/trawling Wikipedia this month.

pojzon 7y ago
I fail to understand how "reading a newspaper" is more worthy than reading facebook. Both are used for pushing some propaganda and to sell ads..
- ericmcer 7y ago
  Newspaper articles, especially pre-internet era, require an attention span longer than 3 seconds to get through. Content had an editorial process, a physical body was held accountable for content. There are tons of differences that make a newspaper a better media for your brain to consume.
  - poloniculmov 7y ago
    Most people I saw reading the newspaper on the subway were reading either a cheap tabloid or the free paper distributed on the subway.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I do still read regular newspapers (print versions in digital format). The quality difference to online news media is gigantic. Depends on what you consume of course.
- TheBranca18 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago

How about America's TV addiction, or even talk-radio addiction? Or even, you know, the actual addiction addiction of the opiate crisis?

the-dude 7y ago
"According to a Nielsen report, United States adults are watching five hours and four minutes of television per day on average (35.5 h/week, slightly more than 77 days per year)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption Nielsen may be biased though.
- jumbopapa 7y ago
  That seems insane... I get off work around 4:30pm and get home from the gym around 6pm. I make dinner and it's basically 7pm and then I have leisure time to read a book, work a personal project, or watch TV. I aim to go to bed 10pm. I never spend 3 hours watching TV and I'm not sure how some of these people are doing more than that! The weekends could skew the numbers, but even then I don't watch it that much.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Retired people, children, and the unemployed.
  - matwood 7y ago
    > get home from the gym around 6pm. I make dinner These are 2 things that apparently large parts of the population do not do. Instead they grab fast food on the way home and watch TV until bed. At least that's the responses I get anytime I say people should work out every day, and eat healthier by spending a few minutes cooking.
  - kaolti 7y ago
    We gotta realize HN isn't exactly representative of the population.
  - deleted 7y ago

EvagohP5 7y ago

do americans really do this?

maxwellito 7y ago

I don't find the data precise enough to make conclusions. Yes, we spend more time on social apps, but it's also our main way of communication. I wouldn't be surprised to know that 80% of the time spend is in private conversations. We are just switching from classic apps (SMS, email, WhatsApp) to messaging in social media apps.

acollins1331 7y ago
Also just because the app is open on my screen doesn't mean I'm looking at it. Bad science is bad, only one upped by the bad reporting.

nottorp 7y ago

Is Youtube a social site now? I think it should go in the other corner where it says 'TV Addiction'...

ryanmercer 7y ago
>Is Youtube a social site now? Absolutely, go pick a video at random from a YT account with more than say half a million subscribers. Go look at the comments, go look at the 'community' tab on one of those accounts pages and look at the engagement in their non-video shares as well. Go watch one of these accounts when they do a live video and the chat is often flying by faster than you can read more than one or two lines.

afarrell 7y ago

One important part of solving this is allowing apps which provide the ability for an individual to bind his future actions. If there should be any government policy, it should be to make these tools which help augment individuals' own strivings for self-discipline. It would be really nice if Apple would re-allow content-blocking apps on the iPhone. https://support.freedom.to/en/articles/2259444-freedom-app-store-removal-status https://support.freedom.to/en/articles/2259444-freedom-app-s... It would also be nice if someone would develop a subscription service like SelfControl.app, but which took recurring payments in order to support an engineer making continual improvements. https://github.com/SelfControlApp/selfcontrol/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen https://github.com/SelfControlApp/selfcontrol/issues?q=is%3A... ------- By the way, there exists some similar fintech for substance addictions: https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/next_step-card-recovering-addicts-debt-1273.php https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/next_step-card-...

dcow 7y ago
> It would be really nice if Apple would re-allow content-blocking apps on the iPhone. They did, didn’t they?
- Delmania 7y ago
  Yes, they did. I paid for a lifetime subscription to freedom just for this.
tfha 7y ago
I think the approach of "have more self control" is doomed to fail. We have a social media addiction problem because there are literally teams of scientests using machine learning, A/B testing, and other techniques to get you hooked onto the app. If you want to break the addiction, the only thing you can do is abstinence from the apps that employ these tactics. I don't think that you can win against adversaries that literally make a living out of getting you to keep clicking. Media like HN is fine, self control techniques work here because YC isn't doing all of the same dark patterns and addiction strategies that are being employed by facebook, youtube, twitter, snapchat, etc. If you realize you are addicted to one of these opiate-like apps, you really have to choose cold-turkey.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jumbopapa 7y ago

The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without checking their phone. It impacts work and leisure. An assignment at work is delayed or low quality because you checked your phone every few minutes, you don't understand what's happening in a TV show/movie because you kept checking your phone, you can't get interested in a good book because you can't read more than a page or two without checking your phone. I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it. I highly suggest everyone checkout Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It's a fantastic read.

roganartu 7y ago
The biggest concern to me is the attention span most people have today. They can't go longer than a few minutes without going outside for a cigarette. It impacts work and leisure. An assignment at work is delayed or low quality because you had a cigarette every few minutes, you don't understand what's happening in a TV show/movie because you kept looking away to light up another cigarette, you can't get interested in a good book because you can't read more than a page or two without getting another cigarette. I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it.
heinrichhartman 7y ago
> but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal: Everyone know's it's bad. People get trapped. It has severe consequences for personal health and the society as a whole. But, hey, "it's not impossible to break free from it" by yourself. No need for Government action. The key metric for me is impact to society. You can do all bad things to you if you want to, and they only impact yourself, but if things have large impact on: - Social fabric (stability of families and communities) - Political Culture (erosion of discourse culture) - Education (lower attention span) - Healthcare (burnout!) - Working productivity It might be a good idea to change the rules to prevent these effects.

lota-putty 7y ago

Addictions are good for business. Addictions are predictable & can be channelled to make profit. Like they say, "Make hay while the Sun shines". Whole private business community rides on such waves of addictions(good/bad). Some successful businessmen with guilty conscience do charity.

gedy 7y ago

I went to Disneyland for the first time in 20+ years and it struck me how much people stare into phones. In lines of course, but also in the middle of rides? Just didn't seem healthy, like we are running a huge social experiment which eliminates talking and paying attention to those around you.

cylinder 7y ago
I hadn't thought of that because I hadn't been to a theme park in years, since smartphones took off. Wow. I couldn't imagine a line full of kids staring at phones. Lines were always tedious, but we joked around and generally entertained ourselves through it. Man, we are becoming a dull bunch of people.

ryanmercer 7y ago

I applied to the most recent winter YC batch with the idea of, I want to help people put tech down and plug back into the world. Sadly, they weren't interested as it won't make 1 billion dollars in a few years for them to make bank on. I think purely the attention companies get at demo day would have been a very powerful thing and I know there are countless tech types the world around that are fed up with technology in front of them all the time (and it's nothing new, I knew a programmer in the late 90s that got rid of his computer, then his game consoles, then his television because he just didn't want to be around the stuff outside of work). I mean, look at how many CS types buy hobby farms or talk about someday buying hobby farms. Look at a lot of the van life and tiny home types, same kinda thing. I would love to help people take a step away from tech, if anything just to help myself. Here's a snippet of something I wrote in 2017, it's probably the first time I really put thought into ME and tech >In 1995 when I discovered the internet we got 60 hours a month, shortly after we got 120 hours a month. If the weather was nice you didn't give a shit about the internet, you were outside. If the weather was bad you'd connect to the internet, get lost in the text of a MUD. I remember the first time I saw an image on a website, the first time I saw video on a computer. Here's another bit, this grows and evolves in me almost daily >I've got 21st century burnout. I'm not alone, I know I'm not. I've got two friends that are of a similar mind. I want to live in a world where community is a thing, where life is simple, where the only real concerns are who's bringing what to the block party or what book I want to read next. https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-the-20th-century https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-th... What's really crazy is just look at video games, the time we spend in video games is dumbfounding >ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SIX BILLION HOURS A YEAR. That's 17,808,219 man-YEARS spent on video games annually. 17 million years wasted every year playing video games. Seventeen MILLION. I break that out, using great works we've done, to show what we might accomplish if we just put down video games https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-end-the-time-we-waste-on-virtual-lives https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2016/8/2/humanitys-... And that doesn't include the obscene amounts of time people, hell I, spend on Instagram, Facebook, HN, Reddit, Tinder-like apps, sending gifs and memes in a dozen message/chat threads. We've gotta do something about this.

Youcandothis 7y ago

faissaloo 7y ago

My solution to this problem is simply that these websites shouldn't exist. A network of more than a thousand or so people can't reasonably give you any real sense of community. All these sites have a commonality: they are ad supported, so in order to end this the consumer ad industry must be collapsed, block ads and avoid purchasing products advertised to you. Once the ad industry is collapsed such sites will either be paid for or will be setup to facilitate a genuine need. This will maximise the benefits and avoid creating a constant stream of broadly irrelevant and useless information.

nradov 7y ago
I doubt that anyone will ever figure out a reliable way of blocking ads on the major social media web sites and mobile apps. It just doesn't seem technically feasible due to how the platforms work and the way ads are directly integrated into content.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  Legally ads have to be marked as such, so it will definitely be possible somehow. Additionally, 'good enough' is acceptable, it might be a constant fight but one side has less stamina than the other by virtue of the fact that they're limited by market logic.
luckylion 7y ago
What makes you think that people don't value those sites enough to pay for using them? People pay huge sums for cable packages which is essentially a monthly fee for "make the time go by more quickly". Social media is similar in that regard, so it might just be worth money to them as well.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  If people valued the existing sites enough to pay for them they'd already be doing that, it would simply be a more reliable stream of income.

jake2110 7y ago

Regulation the usage of private websites and something as specific as infinite scroll on an app is ridiculous. I understand we regulate things like cigarettes and alcohol, but I absolutely hate the idea of government getting involved in regulations of software and the internet. I just don't personally think that if I'm going through multiple private businesses (phone manufacturer, ISP, social network) that I should be restricted by government regulation on something as mundane as spending too much time on Reddit. That being said, that's my personal opinion.

akpakima 7y ago

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5trokerac3 7y ago

Imagine a Star Trek episode where they go to a planet were everyone is staring at a personal device and not interacting with each other. That's what walking into a bar in 2019 is like. We're living in the part of the dystopian movie, in the beginning, where they explain the timeline of how everything got so bad.

Youcandothis 7y ago

It's strange that people still believe in internet addiction.

scarejunba 7y ago

Yeah, people are in touch with each other. I’m glued to my phone on transit because I’m catching up with my friends who I haven’t seen in days, something I can’t do at work. Fucking insufferable, the paternalism.

siphon22 7y ago
Well said. Another factor is that not everyone, especially women, do not want to leave themselves open to strangers to bother or even harass them. The best way to do that these days is to be busy on your phone, or to put on some ear/headphones in public. Looking busy is almost a must on public transit or else you risk looking like prey to unwanted solicitations.

chaoticmass 7y ago

I helped crack down on my own social media usage by getting a feature phone for calling and a really cheap low-end smart phone ($40) for those times when I really need an app for something.