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I believe most articles about smartphone addiction are missing the more important half of the issue: the addictive substance is the internet, rather than the en
by em500 2y ago
I believe most articles about smartphone addiction are missing the more important half of the issue: the addictive substance is the internet, rather than the enabling device. Certainly the phone allows more opportunities, but the actual substance is the internet. Most people will do fine for a month with a dumbphone and an internet connected laptop. Now try to live a month with any fancy phone and laptop, but without any internet connection whatsoever. The smartphone without internet is barely more addictive as a dumbphone.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI think we can be more specific than "the internet". It's the ad-funded web: drive engagement at all costs, utility be damned.
- aeronaut80 2y agoHN is pretty addictive for me - no ads on here!
- udev4096 2y agoRead their privacy policy. It makes sense not to have ads when you are incentivizing user's data
- fragmede 2y agoThere are plenty of posts here pushing a product aka advertising, even if the way they get to the front page isn't directly by the company giving money to YC.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- qrobit 2y agoWell, reading blogs without any incentive to earn money is quite addictive too. Same for HN
- ozim 2y agoLet’s call them by names, Google, Meta, Netflix, Tik Tok. Clickbait articles on other sites are mostly because of Google driving it anyways.
- stockboss 2y agoif we go one layer deeper, perhaps we can attribute that to the fact that people just aren't willing to pay for stuff, which leads companies to have to figure out how to monetize their services. that road inevitably leads to ads as the simplest, easiest and most obvious solution.
- zo1 2y agoI agree but I'd go a tad further: Why do Ads even work as a monetization strategy? Either we've collectively been convinced that paying for ads is valuable in some way, or that on some level they work at convincing people to spend. I'm worried about the latter, because it means people are highly impressionable. Perhaps we need to ban ads targeting children for starters, like we did smoking. Unfortunately with "ads", there is no easy "here look at this cancer-ridden black lung that was directly caused by smoking"-equivalent.
- weikju 2y ago> I'm worried about the latter, because it means people are highly impressionable. Better be extra worried then…
- whatever1 2y agoI have spent ridiculous amount of time in HN with 0 ads, pictures, notifications or anything related to engagement driving. When I need to take a break I just read random posts. Some of these posts are interesting to me and I might spend too much time drilling into them. I am pretty sure that I would do the same in the absence of smartphones, but with a newspaper instead.
- mongol 2y agoYeah me too. When I started using Internet, I spent hours and hours on usenet. Text only, not an ad in sight.
- em500 2y agoSme here, usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Ars forums, HN. Video sites/apps never did anything for me, but I'd read text-only forums for hours and hours.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoMe too, but is it an addiction? Typically one would classify it as an addiction when it stops serving your interests. Ads are the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of content out there that doesn't look like an ad that has ulterior motives. Not all of it is nefarious, but there are way too many smart people working on such things to believe that not seeing an ad is equivalent to not being influenced by marketers. And while they may differ on many topics, one thing marketing agrees on is that you should be engaging with as much marketing-influenced content as possible. So returning to my "is it an addiction" question... Broadly speaking it's fairly obvious whose interests would be served, if not yours, by spending an unhealthy amount of time on HN. I'm sure it was a conversation at one time, back when someone was deciding whether or not to build HN. It serves ycombinator's interests to have us here. I'm not saying it's necessarily problematic, especially in HN's case, but one does feel like a rat in a maze at times. You gotta wonder if there's a different way, one with fewer maze designers and more cheese. So my point is that we could still have engaging information available without it being engineered for engagement. We could design instead with dopamine hygiene in mind. And that's a situation with less addiction potential.
- yard2010 2y agoJust say cancer or AIDS, no need to use that much words
- megamix 2y agoSounds right but since we can't get rid of internet there's only one option left right? Edit: I love how the sentence above turned out without punctuation, especially the "left right" ending lol.
- em500 2y agoCompletely cutoff from the internet is probably not feasible for most of us, but many cases of access are probably far less urgent than we pretend them to be. Barring work, for me the vast majority of necessary access (such as financial administration) could probably be batch processed once a week.
- bionsystem 2y agoI agree, for me youtube is incredibly addictive, I'm even working with a psychiatrist about it (and other addictions of course). She was mentioning "the youth on tiktok" and I told her, youtube is the exact same thing for 30+ YOs. Her "key" is to be busy with some other activity.
- thefz 2y ago> youtube is the exact same thing for 30+ YOs Subjective. I can't stand using it for some reason, and when I have to, I hate the experience. There's something I can't grasp that makes me want to stay away from it. I salute those who have the stomach to sit in front of it for hours.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 2y agoYes same here. I just really dislike video content. I much prefer a long read / deep dive written article because it's much more accessible. I can read at my own speed of comprehension (generally much faster than a video) and I can easily jump around without losing context. But I'm not very typical I guess.
- Synaesthesia 2y agoI feel the same way but I'm still hopelessly addicted to the internet.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoI thought I was addicted to the internet too yet it turns out I'm addicted to information whether that be short, long, audio or video content. The insatiable desire to be up to date with current news, happenings in my fields of interest or social circles became unmanageable. Furthermore, the teams of people with doctorates employed by tech companies to make their product even stickier with each iteration made my battle all the more challenging. By creating hard boundaries that were non-negotiable such as limiting time on the top (n) sites, banning certain apps on the phone and deleting accounts helped me immensely. Being online is hard to avoid such as banking, portfolio management, booking medical appointments and acquiring entertainment to consume are now ingrained in modern society yet learning the skill (or art of) disconnecting to enjoy non-online or 'outside' activities and controlling my compulsion to surf aimlessly (laptop or mobile) from one site to the next took weeks to get under control. Training my family and friends to not expect an instant reply to messages also took a long time and surprisingly difficult. Today was a public holiday where I live and I'm happy to say I spent it offline. I did however listen to the news and the footy on the wireless. Only now in the late evening for 20 minutes am I replying to my messages and 'online'.
- 10729287 2y agoAddiction is not the internet alone, it’s having internet in the pocket and always available. Setting up times in the day to access it through a computer is way different.
- lm28469 2y agoI'm in vacation in a remote area and only get data in some places around the house (an less than 1mbps). I often reach for my phone, put it up to my face, see "no signal" before even know why I reached for the phone in the first place