10 ms·

Doomscrolling ourselves to death

• smokel 29d ago
  Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had larger attention spans. There are still stupid people now.
  • estearum 29d ago
    If there were stupid people back then and there are still stupid people now, wouldn't the interesting thing be to look at what's different?
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    • smokel 29d ago
      There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill. Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful?
      • estearum 29d ago
        > There are more people now, and all else being equal, there would likely be more stupid people as well, in absolute numbers. That might give someone the impression that things are going downhill. Can you point to a specific observation or claim that this is relevant to? I don't see any argument that's sensitive to the absolute number of stupid people in the world. This is a non-sequitur at best. > Also, the article and book claim that people have read less classics than some time ago. But the same argument is even worse in reverse: people from some time ago had no clue about climate change, computers, women's rights, or AI. With all their smarts, they let this happen. How does that suggest that reading the classics is useful? Your argument here is implicitly that if reading the classics were useful, then we should've invented computers sooner than we did? Do you find that compelling?
  • kichimi 29d ago
    I agree with you and could say the same thing about 90s/00s TV as he does with YouTube. "Celeb takes a bath in baked beans for charity"
    • mplanchard 29d ago
      This is in fact one of the primary points of TFA and the book it recommends: that the degradation of literacy, public discourse, and general intelligence that started with the television (and was well-described in Amusing Ourselves to Death, referenced in TFA, and which the title pays homage to) has only continued and, if anything, accelerated with the introduction of the smartphone and modern social media.
      • Crabber 29d ago
        Perhaps I missed the full name somewhere in the thread, but what is TFA?
        • tonyedgecombe 29d ago
          The fucking article. Or you could imagine a more polite alternative.
        • mikestew 29d ago
          Sibling comment got the definition, but “TFA” comes from “RTFA”: “read the fucking article”, in response to “yeah, but what about ($THING that was discussed at length in the first paragraph)?” Origins: “RTFM”. “What’s the switch for ls that prints time stamps?” “Read the fucking manual.”
    • Jtariiiii 29d ago
      The average children's cartoon from the early 2000s has several orders of magnitude more value than the average tiktok feed. The existence of slop in the 90s doesn't prove that slop is not more prominent in the 2020s.
  • api 29d ago
    The history of Opium is likely more relevant.
  • intended 29d ago
    It is slightly dismissive, since we see degradation of literacy within the past 20 years. https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-reading-in-2026/ https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-repo... We also know from colleges and schools that students coming in are having difficulty doing the reading needed for classes, even in literature classes. AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning) The issue isn’t that we have stupid people then and now. The issue is that trends of literacy and development now are changing direction.
    • smokel 29d ago
      My point is exactly that comparing some variation within 20 years with to a 1000 year period makes little sense. Sure, our collective literacy might be decreasing now, but perhaps it was a bit too high to begin with? Leaders of a country are not the majority. The article makes quite a few of these categorical mistakes. AI also allows for a lot more learning. Using ChatGPT to read and better understand Moby Dick works wonders for me.
      • mplanchard 29d ago
        AI seems to be a good tool for people who are already good at learning and critical thinking to use to accelerate their learning. Research on broader populations so far is not so hopeful, with most people using it to avoid learning. This is unsurprising to me, since people are often quite resistant to learning. As to your point, literacy rates have been declining since the 80s. 40, going on 50 years is plenty of time to study a trend and draw conclusions. Can you point me to any time in history where low literacy led to better outcomes for the average person than high literacy? Or even a study that looks solely at modern times and doesn’t manage to correlate literacy with positive social achievement? But even if you can’t accept a historical argument due to the spans of time being incomparable, I personally believe from a more normative perspective that literacy is a foundational and fundamental good for humanity. But, if you can’t accept that argument either, consider how much of our ability to interact with and understand our own society requires literacy: imagine trying to sign up for healthcare, understand your taxes, weigh the risks of a surgical procedure, or figure out who to vote for if you either can’t read, can’t understand nuance, or are constantly missing words due to a lacking vocabulary. And of course, being less literate means you are more likely to be convinced by people whose rhetoric is convincing, whether or not their ideas are correct and whether or not they are actually trying to fleece you. Do you speak more than one language? I think that is also a telling experience. It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to live in a country where my second language is the only one. Sure, I can follow along with a conversation well enough, but dealing with government bureaucracy, forms, healthcare, and politics without the ability to be certain in my interpretation of the text would be a nightmare. The irony of people sitting here on this all-text discussion site, responding to a textual article about the effect of technology on literacy, responding with “well, maybe literacy is actually not so important,” is so utterly ridiculous that I hope it’s satire and I’m just missing the joke.
  • shubhamjain 29d ago
    I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology. But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too. I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.
    • ljf 29d ago
      That is also true for me on struggling to complete books, but don't forget when books first become cheap there were letters to the newspapers deploring that young people were reading rather than 'living' by talking with friends or going to the theatre. I remember for a history project at secondary school reading the notes from a parish meeting in the 1600s from my local church, where the elders were complaining about young people meeting in the porch of the church at night to drink and socialise. Which is pretty much what my friends and I were doing at as a teen (though local park over the church).
      • pwillia7 29d ago
        Plato was suspicious of writing even lol https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/ https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
    • CrimsonRain 29d ago
      Re: books Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly. I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page. However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible. It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.
  • RobotToaster 29d ago
    > Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound. For most of time, until the industrial revolution, technology didn't really advance that quickly. The world you were born into would be technologically near identical to the one you died in. Technology is now advancing at such a rate that most if not all of humanity is in a permanent state of future shock, and it's only going to get worse. Nobody really seems to have a clue how to deal with that.
    • smokel 29d ago
      While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
      • estearum 29d ago
        You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.
        • smokel 29d ago
          For all we know social media will emerge across another 6,000 year timeframe. I think we're going in circles :)
          • flufluflufluffy 29d ago
            The point is that radio, then television, then internet, then smartphones, then AI, each one of which is as impactful on the world as the examples you gave, emerged within a couple hundred years ago years, rather than a couple thousand (and the last few within a couple decades).
  • catchnear4321 29d ago
    > There are still stupid people now. Some even equate attention discipline to intelligence of all things.
  • aerhardt 29d ago
    Like I said in another comment, this famous article by the Atlantic [1] has pretty convincing testimony that kids studying the humanities at elite universities can't read either. I agree with the sentiment that we tend to misrepresent the culture of mass societies, as if at one point in time there were droves of people reading Aristotle. But the ability to read and our transition to an oral or post-literate culture is very much affecting elites too. There is pretty good evidence when you compare contemporary histories. Or if you live in a bourgeois milieu, you just need to ask around. I don't think that reading necessarily makes you a better person. I've met a good amount of people of the highest moral dignity who do not read. But on the whole, reading helps build competence - moral and technical - and create a sense of shared culture. Going back to an "oral culture" is nothing but a regression. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
  • adamtaylor_13 29d ago
    I just can't agree with this. Social media has a noticeable, damaging effect on those who consume it constantly. If you haven't had the distinct displeasure of being around an iPad kid, I envy you. There's anecdote that aligns with experience, that aligns with studies. And frankly, it seems silly to me that we need science to empirically prove something we can all witness with our own brains. That said, whichever method you submit to: they all bear witness to the same conclusion: Social media (especially the brainless forms like TikTok) is incredibly damaging.
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  • GPerson 29d ago
    It will be kind of surprising if neither global warming nor AI nor nuclear weapons knocks us back to a pre-industrial society in the next 200 years.
• samuraijack 29d ago
  Sorry for being pedantic but content like “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” is not doom scrolling. Is it low quality use of your time, sure, but it’s not doom scrolling
  • dag11 29d ago
    I've noticed a usage shift in the last few years. In 2020, "doomscrolling" originally meant to be stuck scrolling at all the doom-y posts we were bombarded with as the world fell apart around us. As things "stabilized" in the last few years, I've noticed that everyone and myself still tends to use "doomscrolling" even just for when we're stuck, locked in place, scrolling low quality content. I figure in ten years when someone asks what "doomscrolling" means, we'll probably just shrug and say it means scrolling away to our doom.
    • Flere-Imsaho 29d ago
      I use the phrase "brain rot" for the low quality stuff that I scroll through. I do really hope that we retain the original meaning of "doom scrolling", as I think it's still as relevant today as the COVID days.
• throw93839394 29d ago
  > hiding my smartphone from myself. I have shoved my smartphone behind wardrobes and under beds. I have shut it up in cupboards. > One particularly desperate ... strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture So over privileged people buy $1500 iphones, only to kick them across room, to hide? I do not think reading yet another master piece would help such person!
  • CrimsonRain 29d ago
    Articles like this is what you get when you give mics to mentally unstable people. Have no self control; kicks phones...then blames society and writes doomposts.
  • recursive-call 29d ago
    Whenever I see people doing this kind of thing, I always think “if they were serious, they would downgrade their internet service plan”. Watch how fast the “addiction” leaves them when they’re paying by the MB
    • snazz 29d ago
      I’ve been looking for an MVNO cell phone plan in the U.S. that offers data at a max speed of 512 kbps (or something similar that is fast enough for most legitimate uses, but a little painful), and I haven’t found anything. Seems like an opportunity. However, I can waste plenty of time on sites like this one, and it is functional on a 16 kbps connection.
• coffeefirst 29d ago
  I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media. There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me. I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities. We have a big problem.
  • marliechiller 29d ago
    Do you have examples of what weird stuff they would say? Im having a hard time imagining what you mean exactly.
    • puppymaster 29d ago
      if i hear 'aura farming' or 'xxx-maxing' one more time I might punch someone.
      • kingleopold 29d ago
        funny that, I read ZIRP and FAANG this FAANG that, zero interests cause this, cause that, for YEARS here. It's not that different if you can compare, all lead by bots and affected masses.
      • colechristensen 29d ago
        I'm sorry to break it to you but this isn't social media, it's you getting old. Most language is invented by children and most of what they invent dies pretty quickly. You transition from not noticing it's new because you weren't alive before to keeping up to falling behind to getting annoyed. rizz no cap sus swag YOLO such wow pwned that's what she said fo shizzle crunk bling talk to the hand as if homeskillet not! take a chill pill grody gag me with a spoon Thank you for attending my TED Talk.
        • samizdis 29d ago
          And thank you for the "gag me with a spoon" reference. Frank (and Moon) Zappa really hit the nail on the head in Valley Girl (1982). Terrific parody of teen culture/language.
• kristianc 29d ago
  Ed West’s longstanding intellectual project is fairly conventional reactionary/retvrn/conservative pessimism, and he has no particular technology background of all to speak of. The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate. No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.
  • g8oz 29d ago
    Clicked on some his other posts...and yeah. He essentially advocates for a society that has the attributes that he accuses oral culture of: conservative, repetitive, static, lacking innovation.
• Tarsul 29d ago
  Killer line: "Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book"
  • gregcohn 29d ago
    Yeah, I think the elitist part of the book being reviewed is that it elevates books per se. I have a degree in literature and a home full of books, so I’m as sad as the next guy about no one reading anymore, but I think the argument (such as it is reconstructed by the reviewer) is better when focused on the types on things one could be doing, and the self-reflection and self-improvement that comes from doing them, rather than bemoaning the specific works not read. “No one reads Shakespeare anymore” is probably true, but it’s just as sad that families talk at dinner less, kids spend less time outside, watercolors and paint brushes gifted by grandparents are tossed aside, and kids don’t ride bikes, go camping, explore the woods behind school, bake brownies (that aren’t viral recipes), and so on. Instead of measuring IQ in correlation to technology, you could probably measure VO2 Max. I would be willing to bet that it turns out that the algorithmic feed, and especially TikTok, are specifically correlated to some of these deleterious things, and have outsized effects on kids, teens, and the neurodiverse. Not everyone possesses the self-control to put the phone away after a 15-minute scroll break the way grandpa would shut off the tv as soon as the 6 o’clock news was over, and the algorithm is designed to prevent that and ultimately probably wears down native willpower over time. “Let’s ban TikTok” sounds stupid and reactionary, but what to do about it is a discussion we ought to be having.
• sgt 29d ago
  I think people still read, but the problem is largely that people read older literature, meaning anything older than 5-10 years at the very least. People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop. It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
  • coffeefirst 29d ago
    Wait, really? As best I can tell, the problem is contained to kindle self publishing and the like, which were always unfiltered. And we buy plenty of new books.
    • sgt 29d ago
      It's better with properly published titles but even those writers are increasingly using AI and leaks into their works.
      • coffeefirst 29d ago
        Out of curiosity what book did you get burned on?
        • sgt 29d ago
          Haven't properly burned myself yet. I've just avoided books based on skimming through online or in bookstores. Some had pretty clear telltale signs of AI slop (although usually quite subtle). At his point I think that one has to assume that almost every author is using AI to some extent. And even if they don't, their editors will apply changes, no doubt using ChatGPT and other tools.
  • Jtariiiii 29d ago
    AI generated text isn't so hard to detect that people could get away with it. As long as you are reading a well reviewed book the chance of AI slop is very low.
  • rpdillon 29d ago
• blfr 29d ago
  The not-reading part is seriously starting to sound like lamenting the death of the epos. Yeah, there is a real loss of an art form there but also most books are padded to death and should have been articles at most, maybe even tweets. The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.
  • bdangubic 29d ago
    > The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us All would be well with the World if this was actually true…
  • aerhardt 29d ago
    One of the reasons why we read less long-form, according to a bunch of cognitive science studies and to my own anecdotal experience, is because our attention is shot. A viral article in The Atlantic [1] shows evidence and testimony that kids at elite universities simply can't read anymore. I've seen the claim repeated in many other places and looking around me I believe it. Those kids are not replacing Dostoevsky or Aristotle with more compact versions of it. The airport book industry is indeed full of books that could be fit in ten pages. But there's a universe of useful - potentially life-changing - books beyond that, and not only in the humanities. Some modern technical books justify their length. I seriously doubt that something like The Data Warehouse Toolkit can be replaced by reading piecemeal blogposts online. Same goes for history, I sincerely doubt you can properly learn it in depth without reading long-form. In my experience, people who only listen to history podcasts or consume 10-minute videos tend to have a much poorer command of the facts and of the broader motions of history. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
    • 29d ago
• Stitch4223 29d ago
  > Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week. That’ll teach them. Jokes aside, reading something doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I think people read more than ever. Subtitles, captions, social media posts, source code. Most of it is jank. > people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture Reads like unsourced depressionwave slop. First source that comes to mind: https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocum https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocu... Assuming memory capacity would yield the best decisions and best leadership ignores charisma, personal life experience, sociopathy, interdependence, society, uncertainty about the future and more. You can’t be too literate and educated: it’s a rat race / status race like any other. Even if the classics and history siphon into modern productions such as Hades. > The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism. Cultural accessibility is at an all time high. Next to oceans of entertaining things more optimized for consumption it’s hard to stay relevant. Expertise and being able to rely on others with expertise is more valuable than requiring every leader to have read the classics or being part of some intellectual elite. Knowing things is awesome mainly because it’s fast and helps with survival. Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all. Edit: wrong any/every
  • adamtaylor_13 29d ago
    > Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all. You are correct and yet it's a straw man. At no point did the author advocate for everyone knowing everything. He IS advocating that everyone know something. A position that is increasingly, comically, tragically untrue.
    • Stitch4223 29d ago
      Thank you for pointing this our :)
• larodi 29d ago
  There's another perspective - everyone and his dog today is reading more than ever because of LLMs (which are really LCPs in 2026 considering the machinery embeds all kinds of concepts in tokens). We ingest more information, condensed or not, than the average PHD scholar did mere 20-30 years ago. That is... by all measures - a lot. And while many ppls throughout the centuries would never enter a library (and thus many would never consciously talk to AI), we can assume one cannot use AI atm if they don't read through all (or at least some) of its response. Perhaps we'll reach the Lady's Illustrated Primer* at some point (amazing we're not there yet, but we are actually given all the visual artifacts produced by Gees), but right now - everyone on a computer with AI access reads more than they did back in the 90s. It is just not reading off a book. And there is also a strong argument that reading off the endless (still, sadly) stream of generated text is more beneficial to the person than reading endless nonsense on everyday media. Because media is super biased, and local media even more so. * ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
• iNerdier 29d ago
  ‘… many tech titans, Steve Jobs in particular, limit the amount of technology their children access…‘ Is he not aware that Mr. Jobs has been dead for over a decade?
  • tonyedgecombe 29d ago
    Yeah but he didn’t unlock his kids locked down devices before he left.
• doginasuit 29d ago
  I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity. What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various information feeds with blog posts, news articles, and projects relevant to my interests and the moment. I've come to prefer a more raw exposition of other people's thoughts. It seems partly in the interest of credibility; more spontaneous writing offers a richer surface area to judge the quality of thought. And finding it in a place where other people are free to critique and engage with those thoughts means that I'm not locked into just one voice. I also have the opportunity to engage myself which fundamentally changes how actively I think about it. I'm open to the idea that the shift has come at a cost. There is value to reading something that someone has put a lot of work into and in large quantities. But the days when I felt it was enough to just passively let information flow over me seem to be over; it is a luxury I can't afford.
  • sdf4j 29d ago
    If something changes frequently, is it important to know? is the change inevitable or artificial? I’ve learned to appreciate lasting things and ideas.
  • tripleee 29d ago
    AI has come for those blog posts and news articles. There's very little incentive for people to invest in quality content anymore - I'm seeing things like this more with many others just quietly stopping: https://exploringjs.com/ https://exploringjs.com/
  • Sharlin 29d ago
    Fiction doesn’t age in the same way.
    • warmwaffles 29d ago
      My biggest problem with fiction books is that it is hard to build suspense when I can clearly see I have another 100 pages to go or if I know that it's a series. After I realized that in my late teens fiction was very difficult to keep at consistently.
• Escapado 29d ago
  On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read more than I read growing up, but it was usually in the form of short content. Same goes for watching things. Unlimited access to short form content of any form has made my monkey brain feel a resistance to longer form content and that annoys and scares me. It’s like having free hyper palatable but unhealthy food in front of you at all times while you know that there are fresh ingredients for a proper healthy meal in the fridge. And as absurd as it sounds as a 30 something year old, I am now actively working on getting into the habit of reading books again and watching movies in one go to work on that specific problem. And talking ti my friends and family it looks like many of them struggle with similar problems. I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.
  • pj_mukh 29d ago
    One of the most insidious realities of the introduction of AI is that we've taken our eye off of tech's original sin - the algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain. I don't see how it's any different than opium and why the regulations should be any different. Even the problem of "AI slop" is mostly that it invades the algorithms, weaponizing them even more. I'm not a huge fan of heavy-handed regulation, but some clinical regulation like making "Explore" tabs or feeds irrelevant to your social networks, opt-in by default would have such a Pareto improvement to all our brains. Instead we are getting endless whinging over water usage in data centers ironically flooding our algorithmic feeds.
• xg15 29d ago
  I'd honestly be interested to know what kind of argument HN would accept to acknowledge there IS a problem.
  • tonyedgecombe 29d ago
    You have to remember that a lot of people here work for companies causing these problems.
• not-so-darkstar 29d ago
  off-topic but anyone knows why these medium.com-like website have so many trackers in them? 100+ blocked by ublock origin
  • pajamasam 29d ago
    It’s how they make money
• giarc 29d ago
  Here's my n of 2 story, but my young kids read all the time and it's likely for two reasons. My wife and I read, and still read to them every night, and second, they both have Kobo Clara Colour e-readers. They love graphic novels and the colour screen keeps them engaged (we had black and white e-readers before and it just wasn't the same). We get 100% of our books from the public library and they probably read 5-20 graphic novels a week. Best $120 investment we've made.
  • talon8635 29d ago
    How old are they?
    • giarc 29d ago
      9 and 12. They've been reading like this since the day they could read. My wife wants to keep pushing my older daughter away from graphic novels (to regular novels) but to me, doesn't matter what they read, as long as they are reading.
      • yawz 27d ago
        I think it gets worse during their early teens when most of the socializing these days seems to be phone/app-driven. I hope they'll keep the habit going.
• sdcfgy 29d ago
  Currently reprogramming myself on this. I’ve started doing more stuff on paper and using single-use devices as there’s not an immediate attention demand from something else then.
  • iammjm 28d ago
    Same. I am also trying to unfuck my brain using pen and paper each day. Got a nice Lamy fountain pen and a notebook I like and I try to write as much as I can each day. Even if most of it is trivial, I still think it’s beneficial because it stops me from consuming content on the internet and it turns me from a consumer into a creator. I think it also improves my focus and does some mental health work too. But it is an uphill battle. After hours of overstimulation, just being by myself feels unbearable, like I can’t stand to be alone in my head without any noises to distract or amuse me.
  • adolfojp 27d ago
    I got a Kindle a while back and I found myself when i first bought it swiping the screen as if I was trying to open the web browser on a smartphone. I didn't even do it on purpose, it was a force of habit. I programmed myself to interrupt myself with mindless distractions, not even diversions, distractions. So yeah, I always carry a small notebook and a kindle (and a fanny pack) and I have no social media apps on my phone which is a start.
• bob1029 29d ago
  I've abandoned all forms of media outside of HN, GitHub, Steam, Spotify and the occasional visit to a pirate streaming site.
  • b3lvedere 29d ago
    I’ve just been extremely selective with what i consume, just because there is an extreme amount of things to consume. Social media tries to trigger FOMO and Sunk Cost among other fallacies upon you. Not caring can be a powerful tool.
• good8675309 29d ago
  It’s not just kids at risk, I also struggle with it as a millennial. I love skimming HN, comments, blogs but I almost never read a full article. I wanted to read the Bible recently, and it was such a challenge that instead I generated an app to doomscroll it called ScrollMyBible.com (plugging because it’s 100% free/ad free and has actually been helping me read more) - maybe this idea could be used for other applications where we redirect this tendency that is weaponized against us towards something constructive
  • bogwog 29d ago
    > redirect this tendency that is weaponized against us towards something constructive Who is "weaponizing" it against you, and how?
    • good8675309 29d ago
      X, FB, TikTok, YouTube, etc. The doomscrolling algorithms are 100% weaponized against us to keep us scrolling endlessly.
    • xboxnolifes 29d ago
      Anyone who profits from your attention.
    • deleted 29d ago
      [deleted]
• Sharlin 29d ago
  After a long period of reading very little fiction (and even less on deadtree), I’ve been rereading some SF in my bookshelf (the Culture series in particular) and I’ve been positively surprised how easy it has been to reach the "zone" where you aren’t constantly losing your focus or trying to fight the instinct to reach for an electronic device. Starting is the hardest part. It helps, of course, when the author’s prose is as compelling as Banks’s (RIP).
• drcongo 29d ago
  > YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles I've basically given up on humanity. YouTube is a cesspit of stupidity - a race to the bottom and right through the other side of how utterly devoid of dignity human beings can be. I feel a physical rage at the mere sight of all the thumbnails of people pulling the stupidest face they can to try to get the stupidest people on the planet to click on their stupid video.
  • sunrunner 29d ago
    Unfortunately YouTube captures the full set of extremes and everything in between, so I don't think it's fair to label the entire thing a cesspit of stupidity. For every MrBeast there's a 3Blue1Brown. For every recycled clip from a well-known TV series uploaded purely to drive ad revenue for a bot-controlled channel there's a fine art restoration video showing a very niche process with a real, skilled human behind it. And so on.
    • Havoc 29d ago
      > For every MrBeast there's a 3Blue1Brown. The average seems to be shifting rapidly towards slop though Even with a curated subscription feed it’s getting pretty rough
• airocker 29d ago
  Wondering if hn ever considered doomscrolling and why they did not do it
  • chamomeal 29d ago
    Probably cause they’re not selling ads
  • vlod 29d ago
    I mostly limit myself to 3 pages of HN, till I see a count of 90 as the last article, then I stop. I don't want this site to be destination for doomscrolling.
• Theodores 29d ago
  In the olden days we read because there was nothing better to do, with no TV until evening. If all you have is books, you read. It is as simple as that. Some people came from houses that had books in them and others did not. Accessibility to books was important, you would just pick things off the parent's shelves out of curiosity, and learn what you liked. Not everyone was culturally rich even if they were financially well-off, you could come from a poor background where the house had books, and reading whilst bored was a form of education not everyone had. If you lived in the countryside and needed to walk miles to see a friend then you tended to read more than those that had friends next door. They had sports and general shenanigans to get up to, and would not be reading as much. I don't see those moaning about kids today downloading The Complete Works of Shakespeare from the Gutenberg library to read it on open source recycled e-screen tablets, whilst eating their quinoa and jackfruit. Leave those kids alone means protecting them from online nonsense but there is no going back to the 1970s or earlier when kids would spend hours immersed in a book purely for the pleasure of it.
• luxuryballs 29d ago
  "Huxley was right" coin jar is pretty full these days!
• medellin 29d ago
  Interesting article right up until they introduce the right vs left debate. The left doesn’t want to appear “elite” because they are so smart and intelligent they don’t want to offend. Give me a break jagoff.
  • medellin 29d ago
    As usual downvotes from hn libtards. This place is just reddit v2. What sadness
• jscipione 29d ago
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• teiferer 29d ago
  Scrolling through the comments here, let's be honest about having actually read the entire article. Have you? Be honest. At first I had not, only the first 3-4 paragraphs. And it just read like another one of those articles where somebody is sad about their own and their kids' habits. I then found that most comments here are about that too. But I realized that not actually reading a lengthy article like this one is part of the problem, so I went back. I have read it fully now and noticed two things. First, it's a very lengthy way to say few things. The author could surely have made the point much more crisp. But second, it's not just about the personal situation and some abstract form of person in society. It's also about those "in charge". And that's frightening.
  • lobofta 29d ago
    I did. The point can be made very quickly yes, but the background and context provided is what made this a good read to me. Sometimes we need to marinate in a topic for it to enter into deeper layers of the brain.
    • robomc 29d ago
      This is one of the things about the novels he describes too, and their impact on empathy. Like, you can explain to someone in 3-4 sentences that slavery is cruel but that's not the same as inhabiting a characters circumstances for 500 pages. It's a natural instinct for engineers, to think you should always convey information in the most efficient way possible, but it's actually not how real understanding tends to occur in the real world. You need a lot of noisy carrier signal and time and context etc.
  • froh 29d ago
    [dead]
  • djeastm 29d ago
    >it's a very lengthy way to say few things The author would likely suggest that we used to read for the variety of expression in the language in addition to becoming informed.
  • 29d ago
• udbhavs 29d ago
  Trying to get off the internet for me feels like a messy divorce. It's difficult because it was essentially my world growing up, shaped my value system and defined the type of things I should strive towards. Being involved in game dev, electronic music, and CTF communities exposed me to people doing all sorts of cool things and made me aspire to be at their level. There were really two components to it I valued - the inherent interest in the topic itself of course, but also the sense of community and recognition you got as you dove deeper and created cooler things to share with people. At some point the second overtook the first, and I internally started to value the outcome or reaction to something I would create more than the satisfying pursuit of making itself. Doing a thing wasn't valuable unless it would be acknowledged by some group of people. It's been a long process trying to get rid of that mindset and I'm still not done, and has caused a lot of anxiety and questioning my interest in the hobbies I love. A lot of the questioning has been driven by the absolute saturation of my online feeds. The algorithm can so quickly figure out the type of stuff I like and show me so much of it that it begins to start feeling meaningless in 10 minutes of scrolling - deconstructing that value system in real time (and I guess technically helping? hooray for accelerationism). If there is so much out there, what am I supposed to create that could add to the pile in a meaningful way? It really takes a lot of effort to sever yourself from the algorithmic mindset and remind yourself that you got into it because you like doing the thing. Not to mention the second order effects, like the ancillary feelings of guilt that show up because I start questioning why I want to avoid seeing things about topics I supposedly enjoy. Part of it is personal flaw - I find it difficult to see something cool without feeling some imperative to figure out how I could do it myself. When I don't want to feel bothered, I'm driven towards more mindless consumption that doesn't run the risk of reminding me that I should be doing something. I feel I would be much happier engaging in the hobbies I have if I was a bit less aware of everything related to them going on in every part of the world, and the algorithm is a big culprit in that. Detaching from it is not just hard because "phone feels good", but also because it means completely giving up on the value system I grew up on, where you could know if you were doing something meaningful if it got attention from other people in the communities you wanted to be a part of. "Attention" has been too commoditized at this point to use it as a fulfilling indicator of return (but unfortunately, some people have to play this game if they want to support a living off a creative endeavor - at least I can ignore that part because I just make music or do creative coding as a hobby).
• Hnrobert42 29d ago
  Could this post been equally effective without the history literacy since the early middle age? I recognize the irony of complaining about this post's length.
• hdz 29d ago
  I encourage those who want to read more to start a book club with their friends. My club has read 6 books now and it gets at two things the article mentions, isolation and illiteracy. I’ve recently also subscribed to a few in print magazines to address the desire for up to date recent information we get from social media. HN is still hard to quit, the amount of useful information here is still high. digg.com summarizes X which I’ve found to be useful for not feeling like I am missing out on discussions there.
  • talon8635 29d ago
    A book club of substance. We are awash in both high value books and pre and post AI formulaic slop. Any reading of books is probably better than no reading, but given some of the pop books, that might be debatable.
• tolerance 29d ago
  The idea that society was always going to be literate—as in a book-reading people—is sort of absurd, especially when the practice is treated like a means to an end and the medium of the book itself is rivaled by digital media that affects its audience quicker, requiring less effort from them in return. Now force all of culture and the most basic forms of social interactions through this digitally mediated funnel. You get the worst aspects of pre-literate and literate civilizations.
• h02 29d ago
  This may sound old-fashioned, but parents can say no. Deciding what our children may do and what they have access to is part of being a parent. We don’t have to let them do whatever they want and then lament the results. I recognise that it’s easier to establish these habits early. Our children are still toddlers, so we haven’t yet faced the challenges of parenting teenagers, but they rarely have access to screens because we deliberately restrict it. Even Steve Jobs limited his children’s use of technology at home. Recognising the problem ought to lead to setting and enforcing limits, not treating our children’s access to these devices as inevitable.
• jiaosdjf 29d ago
  This is why I still browse 4chan and of course HN - because the feed is entirely time based with zero recommendations and no infinite content. I've also added userscripts to remove shorts and recs from YouTube as well as uninstalling absolutely all social apps and only using web Ironically 4chan /pol/ now has higher quality debates and more diverse opinions than Reddit, and a faster website that doesn't constantly push nag screens or hang rendering. What I'm getting at is the internet is too common and we need to retreat to extremely niche and selective platforms with limited content that you can't just binge for 2 hours.
  • iammjm 28d ago
    There is an algorithm to the HM feed and there are definitely recommendations. We are both posting in this thread because it has made it to the main page because people upvoted it. That’s the algorithm/recommendation system.
• TexanFeller 29d ago
  I just started reading Infinite Jest and unsurprisingly it seems shockingly relevant to the doomscrolling problem. I’m aware of its flaws, but I’ve heard it recommended a number of times related to our modern problem of amusing ourselves to death. So far it’s surprisingly enjoyable, eerily relatable, and not nearly as difficult to follow as I was warned.
  • woopah 29d ago
    That's great to hear! It's awesome when people decide to tackle longer books. I think the matter of our (declining) attention spans and what it does to our spirit is something DFW thought a lot about, for example in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8juL7cdGj40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8juL7cdGj40. It seems remarkably prescient for our age, but perhaps it also suggests that being present and engaged is actually a perennial problem.
  • biophysboy 29d ago
    A lot of postmodern maximalist books like IJ try to reckon w/ these problems. Its easy to reflexively hate the meaningless, ironic, media-fried worlds they build, but they are mirrors, not instruction manuals.
    • iammjm 28d ago
      One of IJ’s most important topics is the critique of the empty destructive postmodern cynicism that you are referring to. Wallace was in fact trying his best to do more than just reflect. One of IJ’s main and most likeable characters, Mario, is basically a walking sentiment of this. Infinite jest is surprisingly preachy in this regard; “this is water” and some of his other essays are even more so in this regard. that’s why literary critics argue that Infinite Jest doesn’t belong to the postmodern, but rather to the post-postmodern, sometimes also called the metamodern, or the new sincerity. Like a hybrid of modern and postmodern that oscillates between the hip and the banal, between cynicism and hope, fiction and truth. Here is Wallace on this subject: “Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
• znnajdla 29d ago
  This is an article about declining literacy in the West. But this is notably a Western decline problem. In some other parts of the world, literacy is improving. One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Ukraine in 2020 was that even the political jokes that you see on television have real highbrow wit and humor, which assume a high degree of literacy to understand. Even talking to some kids who were 14 years old, I was surprised at how they had memorized poetry in multiple languages and could write beautifully in cursive. You don't find that anymore in the West. Sure, kids over here doomscroll themselves on TikTok as well, but they are not illiterate.
  • deleted 29d ago
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  • mrheosuper 29d ago
    I believe there is a lag between the Western and other, less developed part of the world. Anecdotally, i live in a 3rd world, developing country, and the situation is not that better than the Western, "Ipad kid" becomes more popular than ever here. In the next few years, i believe we will encounter the same problem.
    • znnajdla 26d ago
      Maybe it's a lag, or maybe it's just that other parts of the world have their own trajectory.
• RetroTechie 29d ago
  What he found was that as cable marched across Norway intelligence fell in its wake: “for each year that their hometown had full coverage, IQ dropped by 0.08 points”. “Higher exposure to commercial television”, Hernæs’s study bluntly concludes, “reduces cognitive ability” No doubt that effect is real. But I think of it as this: some activities excercise your brain in ways that improve it, make new connections between neurons etc. While other activivities don't. Or worse: degrade your brain. Aaand: which is which, also depends on what you've done before. Or how often you do it. Or in what environment. People who read books all day, every day, may become walking libraries who know all their classics. Are they smarter? Have more 'agile' brains? I doubt it. Perhaps the brain specializes on that activity & becomes veeery good at it. Potentially becoming worse at other activities. Granted: there's probably a lot of 'unused' capacity in most people's brains such that improving one area doesn't come at the cost of other abilities. But I do suspect there's the rub: a healthy brain must be excercised regularly. Not just by doing again & again something it's already good at (however challenging). But also by trying new stuff. Activities not done before. Explore new subjects in entirely different fields. Especially stuff that promotes imagination / creativity as opposed to more passive consumption like movies or music. Couch potato? Move your muscles! I'm not sure whether there's a way to max out that brain excercise part (if healty, and assuming it's possible in the 1st place). But chances are reading would be part of it. Longreads & a broad range of fiction in particular. Some puzzle or exploration / building type games could be. Mechanical construction stuff a la Lego surely is. As well as a variety of sports (doing, that is! Not watching or discussing). Socializing in various ways: in moderation. As for people choosing (?) to spend a big chunk of their lives on passive consumption (great Dutch wording: "je leven wegflixen"): let 'em. If post-scarcity, information-overloaded society moves the masses' lives there, so be it. Personally I prefer a hike up a mountain, improving a hands-on creative skill, a thoughful discussion, or a deep dive into an interesting new subject.
• czhu12 29d ago
  One thing that recently clicked for me was making podcasts for my girlfriend / friends / parents on the subject, highlights of books I’ve read. It’s like a virtual book club. Somehow even though this adds a gigantic amount of burden to reading, it taps into a “productivity” seeking part of my brain that can then create a sense of focus and accomplishment after each book. Since then reading has been a lot easier and I can usually get to 1 hour per day. Still really underwhelming but it’s way more than I managed to accomplish through sheer force of will in the past
• podgietaru 29d ago
  Reposting something I put in another doom scrolling thread quite a while now. And have had periods where I've done it almost religiously. It is addictive. And the effects linger a lot longer than the period of scrolling. There is a thing I generally believe about neural pathways. That the road we most travel is the one we'll keep going back too. And doom scrolling makes me walk down those paths. To the point that it impairs and guides my thinking even after I stop. And I have stopped. I have had periods where I have blocked Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. I will find myself walking those paths regardless. And then, after a time, I start seeking out the doom again because it's comforting in it's discomfort. It's probably the worst moment in recent history for this. The constant barrage of information whether it comes from AI, climate disasters, politics or any of the other myriad things that are occurring right now. It feels impossible to break from that cycle. I'm trying. I want to be present and live in the moment. But it's hard to feel powerless. And Doomscrolling, while it absolutely doesn't bring power, brings a comforting illusion of it. I am aware of it, so I am at least a little in control.
  • Balgair 29d ago
    > it's comforting in it's discomfort What a strange phrase! But so true. The only thing I would have to say is that you must keep doing the little and noble things that will bring no renown. It's small, but we all add up at the end of every week.
• woopah 29d ago
  I suspect the author is reacting less to the decline of literature and cultural elitism specifically and more to the general decline of those critical thinking skills that you gain by engaging in difficult works. I actually don't think anyone needs to read all of "the classics" and there's no point gatekeeping "intelligence" behind Shakespeare. If you feel like you had your brain expanded through, I don't know, Marvel movies, then the more power to you, but the key is that you are able to actually reflect on the work instead of just saying "well that was fun." What is happening, however, is that people are getting increasingly acclimated to consuming easily-digestible content because our lives are ruled by a couple of companies who make money off of your attention and the human brain struggles to sustain focus through friction, even though the way we actually learn and question our lives is through that difficulty. Unfortunately, social media isn't the only culprit because almost all media that gets sold suffers from forced participation in the attention economy, although social media is probably one of the worst culprits just because the form factor makes it so easy to consume brain-rotting content. I guess all that to say, I think the problem is fundamentally structural and thus essentially bound to happen because of the way our society and economy is organized, so I'm not sure what there is to do about this. Maybe we can all collectively decide to power through the lack of dopamine and actively choose content that is more difficult but also more edifying to force the algorithms to optimize for something more substantive.
• feelamee 29d ago
  I think its deeper than "reading books" vs "doomscrolling social media's". Books can be fast food too. And, probably, in our time more and more books will become fast food. There are a lot of good staff in format of short essay or in blog posts and even in videos. So, its a bit incorrect to say that reading is better than watching. Or that people was more intelligent due to reading. Question here is not how, but what to consume. But I think even consuming high quality/professional content, with deep research and etc etc, can be addictive and lead to problems described in this post. I don't really know how to classify this problem, but maybe - "producing ideas by yourself" vs "consuming someone other ideas"? With reading we consume ideas. But because reading is boring (rating by speed of receiving information), we also have lot of time to think, to produce new ideas. And what with watching videos? especially short - you have almost no time to think about 15sec video content, because it already gone up and you need to forget it and see next... So, reading and watching, doomscrolling is all about one, but on different stage. And all this about competing two's: create it by yourself or listen it from someone other. P.S. this is even make sense.. look: the more you do something, the more you skilled in this. And vice versa. So, when you stop thinking by yourself and start listening, your intelligence go down just because intelligence is about thinking, about analyzing and about your own sight, not someone other.
  • deleted 29d ago
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• bethekidyouwant 29d ago
  People love to say that this is the end of X, where X is something that humans have been doing for less than 100 years.
• buxwash__5 29d ago
  "I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier." - Jefferson letter to John Adams, 1812.
• Animats 29d ago
  "It is notable that the era of peak democracy in the Anglophone world, the mid-20th century when the working class had the most political power, was also the peak of literacy." That's the most significant line in the article. That was the peak of union power, and unions routinely had meetings and votes which mattered. What organization do you belong to today where the members can fire the leadership by a vote? When did you last go to a meeting run under Roberts Rules of Order, as almost all union meetings are?
• hexapus 29d ago
  I switched to a Minimal Phone...it's terrible, and that's the point. The friction of everything being so clunky keeps me from picking it up and staring at it, it's unpleasant to look at and scroll through anything but text. It functions enough to let me acknlowedge a page, pay for parking, or disable the alarm system - but anything other than that is just not appealing. I'm trying to read more, but it is definitely a struggle when I used to consume books voraciously. I'm definitely getting better though - for instance, I finished this article, at least. Beats scrolling thru /r/funny or something. I'm trying my best to reclaim my brain.
• ygmelnikova 29d ago
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• elias1233 29d ago
  I would consider myself doomscrolling HN sometimes...
  • ggm 29d ago
    Yes. that has to be borne in mind, discussing social media as if HN was some other "more elevated" platform. What I have noticed is that doomscrolling is like MSG. It's a great hit on the appetite, but it doesn't last. Maybe all sugar hits are like that. Unlike MSG, it will I think continue to be a root cause negative on attention span. MSG is just very rapid "yummy" and all the negative flak was like the yellow rain of bee shit, not actually chemical warfare as we were told by the doom scroll of the day: TV news.
• mermadicsolutio 29d ago
  Often time I just found myself unconsciously take out my phone and start scrolling for no reason. Was not a conscious decision just muscle memory. Stop scrolling isn't really an option for me because a lot of info are genuinely useful, but I do fall into rabbithole of some of the most random stuff. Feel like that's how most people start doom scrolling
• jan_m_savage 29d ago
  If you have ADHD, it's particularly damaging to doomscroll. It worsens my ADHD I've found; hence, except Youtube, I am off all social media of the Tiktok/X type. I use Youtube for long-form video and only select videos, and XCancel/Nitter for specific feeds by certain people, which I read according to a predetermined schedule.
• amai 28d ago
  Why do we scroll and not swipe? Scrolling is not a god-given mechanism to read web pages. Swiping/page-turning would be easier on the eyes (text lines don't move) and would probably be less addictive.
• xtiansimon 28d ago
  I’ve eliminated TV from my life for over 20 years. I feel social media has taken some of that space back. It’s very compelling to watch videos about things you like—hobbies, arts, culture—and from people you know personally. I’m not sure how I feel about it all.
• kart23 28d ago
  wasn’t there a moral panic in the 18th and 19th that kids were reading too much? that books would rot the minds of the newest generation. i’d like to see that history addressed a little better. Part of me is sympathetic to this, I do agree that movies, media has gotten painfully simple. But at the same time, young people are working incredibly hard, richer than older generations were at their age, and technology and culture is definitely moving incredibly fast from my POV.
• dzonga 28d ago
  mass literacy without critical thinking begat communism - which had massive detrimental effects on the world. maybe the elites like the journalists e.g author above - who wanna control thought & media - in a roundabout way unleashed a beast they can't control - social media - which turns people into passive consumers. now the people can't be controlled at all - massive apathy due to social media. Trump 2016, Brexit etc was the result.
• coip 28d ago
  The Entertainment, from infinite jest, often comes to mind
• Quadrixx 27d ago
  I think there's an interesting middle ground between “just use more discipline” and completely blocking/deleting everything. I've had the same thought that the real problem isn't necessarily the existence of Reddit, YouTube, etc., but the moment when you open them almost automatically and suddenly realize you've spent far longer there than you intended. I'm actually building an app specifically around that idea called *Attention*. It doesn't block anything or hinder you — you're always in full control. Instead, it tries to help you become aware of what you're doing during those moments, so you get a chance to consciously decide whether you actually want to continue. The app is currently in beta testing and completely free. What I find interesting about this approach is that the goal isn't necessarily “use your phone less” or “never use social media again.” It's more about *stopping yourself from using it without consciously choosing to*. I'm hoping that building that awareness can eventually help people develop healthier habits rather than simply relying on increasingly strong restrictions.
  • henno4e 27d ago
    I've built something exactly like that. Beta testing going well for me.
• etcetcetcetceta 27d ago
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• hoherd 25d ago
  I recently blocked youtube.com on my home network so that my whole family could take a break from it. It broke my work e-mail login, because gmail sends you through youtube.com in order to set login cookies.