I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

I ran a website for youngsters several years ago. One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards. Some kids were difficult to manage and would not accept to be banned (via email&#x2F;IP&#x2F;or whatever solution) and would keep recreating profiles.<p>Ultimately I dealt with those ppl by “greylisting” them. Added a sleep() prior each page rendering of 5 to 25 secs (actually it was more sophisticated and would stream chunks over TCP so the slowness feeling was even more real).<p>Worked like a charm. Few days after the recalcitrant would no longer come on the website.<p>I called this “moderation by degradation of user experience”, and was pretty effective like the solution described in your post.<p>Think about page load if you need to restrain visits.

This is brilliant! I&#x27;ve been suffering from work related anxiety for years which I&#x27;ve learned to douse with Youtube, Reddit or HN. This became a huge problem for me recently and so I had to try to break my habit loops (Cue -&gt; Action -&gt; Reward).<p>I cannot quit cold-turkey because all the methods that I can think of to block the websites I can undo in the mania of anxiety.<p>Youtube always gives you an option to look for more content, either on the side of the video you are currently watching, on the screen immediately after you are done watching or by going to the home page and giving you the options. Using Origin ad-blocker I removed all the immediate suggestions. And also the youtube home button, the only red element of the Youtube gui that catches your notice, that you click on to reduce your anxiety. That you then develop a habit on, just like the suggestions. On mobile I uninstalled the app and used the ad-blocker to render it useless. All external links play videos and the search still works.<p>For reddit I force the old view, without the infinite scroll, just like the author. I also removed the &#x27;all&#x27; link from all the pages as I had formed a habit with that as well. And I limit the number of posts visible at any given time.<p>I have, other than the author&#x27;s solution, no counter for HN.<p>For other websites, I&#x27;ve similarly blocked such habit forming gui features. And the most important bit has been deleting websites from the auto suggest feature of firefox. I&#x27;ve deleted a good number of the common offender websites form it, but I still don&#x27;t know how to disable those ~10 websites that show up when you go to type something.<p>The Key has been disrupting the &#x27;cue&#x27; of the habits. It leaves you a little confused when you don&#x27;t find your habit enabler on the websites, but then it gets better. Or like me you form other new habits. The solution author suggests will definitely be of help.<p>Edit: Words. Also, does anyone know how to disable the dropdown suggestions in the address bar? The one you get when you haven&#x27;t typed anything, because I&#x27;ve got a habit with the dropdown button as well. There is nothing in the options, but what about the developer options?

I&#x27;m a self-diagnosed completionist and I hate the infinite scroll so much that I developed a mental habit that helps me work around it. When I visit a site with infinite scroll (e.g. YouTube or new Reddit) I immediately scroll down until the first loading spinner (e.g. by pressing the End key). At this point I stop and go back up processing the items in reverse order. This might sound silly, but it gives me a sense of completion and a natural exit point once I get back to the beginning.

This is a funny and particularly well written post that touches on a serious topic. Tech addiction and attention seeking are not yet being self-moderated. We are living out a massive social experiment of sorts because of the rapid advancement of the internet. I believe it is a certain net-positive on society, but we need to pay more attention to the cons.

Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear.<p>They are astonishing surprises.<p>It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two new tables.<p>Ordering things and how they appear basically I am a small-scale sorcerer.<p>On the road I press the button and the music goes.<p>Air conditioning gas pedal restaurant take-out etc.<p>It is my will being perpetually sated.<p>Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.<p>Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.<p>— Emily Bludworth de Barios, from the preview page for issue #31 of Forklift, Ohio (and, indeed, the issue itself, if you have it):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forkliftohio.com&#x2F;index.php?page=freight-31" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forkliftohio.com&#x2F;index.php?page=freight-31</a>

This is actually a brilliant idea, but I want to ask about something slightly off-topic, hope others can chime in as well:<p>&gt; Withdrawn mostly from Reddit <i></i>in favor of early 2000’s style forums that I pay money for<i></i><p>I&#x27;ve never heard of such forums. Does anyone have any examples of these? In particular ones that you pay for, but I&#x27;m interested in free ones too.

Here in my country (a developing country in Africa) internet speed is so bad you don&#x27;t have to add any latency filter - just thinking out loud.

I&#x27;ve been thinking of these types of quotes for a while now &quot;Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%.&quot; (from this first link in the post)<p>And kind of thought that no one believes in that anymore, that it was a 90s thing - at least when considering the absolute mad UX that is prevalent today. Some sites must deliberately pretend to process your decision for close to a second just to annoy you.<p>100ms latency is bad but privacy banners with stupidly obvious dark UI patterns (where they are even deliberately breaking the law) are worth it? In what universe does that make sense? There is something seriously ill with the web today.<p>Maybe this article is a cure. Not one I imagined but I&#x27;m intrigued.

I wrote an extension for this since I couldn&#x27;t find a good one for Firefox. Feature and pull requests welcome<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;delaywebpage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;delaywebpage&#x2F;</a>

This is fascinating.<p>My laptop died during this one month of travel I’m doing, and I’m stuck doing everything on mobile. (No apple licensees where I am.)<p>I bought a keyboard for my iPad, it’s still painful AF. So I began avoiding and canceling unimportant tasks because of their inconvenience.<p>And then I realized: how much of this mindless garbage do I accept on my plate just because I am trying to „optimize my productivity“?<p>(Typed with two thumbs. Perhaps hypocritically?)

A couple of years ago I was pretty addicted to Facebook and would compulsively open a new tab and start typing &quot;f...&quot; in the address bar. Even if I had another tab with Facebook open.<p>I tried blocking it for lapses of time but it didn&#x27;t reduce my addiction. What did work was logging out of Facebook. The annoyance of having to log in and stop my flow was enough for me to stop using Facebook. Now I use it less than once a month when I want to contact some company that only has a Facebook page.

Another from me: blacklist the recommended questions from other stackexchange sites! I always get distracted by some juicy story on workplace.se or interpersonal skills or academia or worldbuilding or politics. My monkey brain will read those questions and think about the answer, then I have to click and see what others say. But Stackoverflow remains productive if I block this box.

You don&#x27;t need a fancy solution to randomly add latency -- just do what I did and sign up for Cox Internet.

Low-latency isn&#x27;t the only problem, I think. The small-enought latency seems to be worst: you click somehing and wait for the reward just few ms later. Incresing this wait to seconds prevents this effect.

I just use a VPN connecting to a far away server so that the latency does go up and at the same time confuses the sites I’m visiting.

Nice! I recently launched a similar Chrome extension (free, open source, no tracking or ads) that also includes a greyscale option to make the websites less interesting &#x2F; addicting once they load <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;get-your-focus-back&#x2F;hgokmjffmfnkaofmgjekjpiiocfafdoc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;get-your-focus-bac...</a>

This is a great idea. I know various types of addiction have a negative impact on the prefrontal cortex, which handles your ability to focus and manage time. I would like to see research investigating the relationship between internet addiction and one&#x27;s attention span - I feel like my ability to read difficult literature and focus on creative hobbies like music is worse today than it was when I was in middle school.

Any recommendations for a Firefox alternative to Crackbook Revival?

Not simulating slow connection but delaying page display via JS&#x2F;Tempermonkey.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;16yuzxLr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;16yuzxLr&#x2F;</a>

Something I&#x27;ve found beneficial is to self-enforce a &quot;search-only&quot; usage of social media (youtube, twitter, etc). Essentially, don&#x27;t allow yourself to mindlessly consume feeds, but if you&#x27;d like to search for something specific, go ahead.<p>It might be worth writing some sort of extension or wrapper website to enforce this.

I&#x27;m late to the party, but this article inspired me to write this script to slow down connections to reddit<p><pre><code> #!&#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;env bash DEV=enxe04f439470d2 DOMAIN=reddit.com LATENCY=5200ms sudo tc qdisc del dev $DEV root # Ensure you start from a clean slate sudo tc qdisc add dev $DEV root handle 1: prio sudo tc qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:3 handle 30: netem delay $LATENCY for IPADDR in $(dig @8.8.8.8 +nocmd $DOMAIN any +multiline +noall +answer | grep -E -o &quot;([0-9]{1,3}[\.]){3}[0-9]{1,3}&quot;) do echo &quot;Slowing down connections to $IPADDR on $DEV&quot; sudo tc filter add dev $DEV protocol ip parent 1:0 prio 3 u32 match ip dst $IPADDR flowid 1:3 done</code></pre>

Another suggestion: Limit your browser use to only one tab at a time. Or, allow yourself multiple windows but only one tab each.<p>If it takes 8 seconds to load a website I could see someone just opening a bunch of tabs and coming back to them later. This suggestion avoids that (among other accomplishments).

LeechBlock NG (the browser extension) has a &quot;delay&quot; mode of blocking. Make sure you enable &quot;count only active tab&quot; or it will waste much RAM and CPU.<p>With full blocking I used to cheat by disabling the block, and then &quot;forgot&quot; to enable it again.<p>With delay-based blocking I&#x27;m also cheating: instead of waiting for the delay I get up and do some minor chore. I used to feel smug about how clever I was, sabotaging my own block. Until I realized what a positive change this was.<p>PS: I&#x27;ve waited 40s to submit this comment. You&#x27;ll need another plugin to recover the text if you submit and then hit the delay page. Or submit before the timer runs out.

It seems like this kind of thing is much easier if one has a considered purpose and direction in life, that let one derive joy from making stepwise progress toward those: a vision, strategy, goals, tasks. We all have to choose what we love the most, and implement that in our daily decisions &amp; acdtivities. Whether one is religious or not, I have written about this more, at a simple, I hope skimmable, site: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lukecall.net&#x2F;e-9223372036854588981.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lukecall.net&#x2F;e-9223372036854588981.html</a> .

Exception: If I’m researching technical topics I want the fastest computer, browser, and internet possible.

I get the sentiment, but I do not agree at all... similar to putting fences around all the coastlines of the world, I would rather just teach my children to swim.<p>I had to go back and make sure what was being said was actually the case which now makes me question what one does with all that latency time... just sit and breath and try not to totally freak out? I don&#x27;t want to come off as too crass on this, but this type of self-regulation is just totally missing the mark (unless I&#x27;m missing something here).

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xkcd.com&#x2F;862&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xkcd.com&#x2F;862&#x2F;</a> &#x27;s alt text<p>&gt; After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn&#x27;t do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my &#x27;productive&#x27; computer use was unaffected.<p>And: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.xkcd.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;distraction-affliction-correction-extensio&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.xkcd.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;distraction-affliction-corr...</a><p>&gt;At various times, I thought of doing it with an X modification, Firefox extension, a Chrome add-on, an irssi script, etc—but none of them worked too well (or involved a lot of sustained undistracted effort, which was sort of a Catch-22). Then I hit on a much simpler solution:<p>&gt;I made it a rule that as soon as I finished any task, or got bored with it, I had to power off my computer.

There&#x27;s an analogue for consumerism in young single adults who haven&#x27;t settled down: Next time you move, put everything you own in a box. You can only take something out of the box to use it. After 6 months (or a duration of your choosing), simply discard the box and everything still in it. The theory is that you won&#x27;t miss anything you didn&#x27;t actually need.

Interesting. I&#x27;m surprised this actually works for people. For me it would it would just make me waste more time, and turn browsing into a stress multiplier instead of a stress reliever.<p>I favor extensions that give an alert or block the site after a certain time. More effective and less anger inducing for me personally.

Network Link Conditioner is new to me. (I’m not a developer.) I find it strange that this exists, because as a mobile application consumer, it has been my experience that many apps don’t seem to consider network quality in their implementations. (Again, just based on my personal use; absolutely zero rigor in my method.)<p>I suppose this the result of a feature of the human being: be lazy as possible. Rather than write code for poor quality networks (which in my experience are prevalent in rural areas and in older parts of cities) simply declare “we need faster mobile networks for all!”<p>I suspect this will be a never-ending battle, and developers might consider caring at some point, to reach those eyeballs that will never have the cutting edge mobile networks.<p>Or, don’t, and said eyeballs will be slightly less likely to become addicted, if this article is to be believed.

I’m still surprised that this type of findings hasn’t had more of an impact on commercial design. It is not uncommon to find Fortune 500 sites with load times over 20 seconds. I get it that it is hard to write and maintain clean code, still, repeated studies have shown the value proposition is there.<p>Here is a little proof of concept I did awhile back to see how tight I could make a responsive page with a good amount of graphics. The whole page is two server calls (one is for the fav icon). It loads in about 400 ms total from github or in less than 200 from Godaddy shared hosting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbskidd.github.io&#x2F;cockenoe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbskidd.github.io&#x2F;cockenoe</a>

I was recently looking at getting new hardware to improve Chrome loading times. (This is a somewhat theoretical affair for me since my desktop is already pretty fast.) But, now I wonder if I should downgrade.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s good not to upgrade to the latest iPhone?

You can use a somewhat similar method easily on your phone, using iOS’ Screen Time to “block” certain apps. Then it’ll pop up and tell you you’ve “reached your limit” and gives you enough time to think about what app (or web&#x2F;Safari) you’re about to use in order to interrupt any default undesirable patterns (also related maybe to the psychological concept of Delay Discounting). I’ve found it very helpful to reduce my app usage - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nexle.dk&#x2F;5-simple-steps-to-improving-your-mobile-phone-productivity-and-calmness&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nexle.dk&#x2F;5-simple-steps-to-improving-your-mobile...</a>

I dropped my phone a while back and the screen now has issues. It gets &quot;streaks&quot; all across the entire screen. It&#x27;s harder to see content, but you can get by. My first inclination was to get it fixed, but I&#x27;ve now had it this way for several months. I find I use my phone a lot less and now sort of consider the streaks a &quot;feature&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve investigated going to a true dumb phone, but that&#x27;s not nearly as feasible now as I would prefer. The Nokia 3310 is the only reasonably priced option I can find; and all the boutique, low volume dumb phones are absurdly expensive.

Source code for the Chrome extension mentioned is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Ishmaeel&#x2F;CrackbookRevival" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Ishmaeel&#x2F;CrackbookRevival</a>

I use wondershaper:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;manpages.ubuntu.com&#x2F;manpages&#x2F;xenial&#x2F;man8&#x2F;wondershaper.8.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;manpages.ubuntu.com&#x2F;manpages&#x2F;xenial&#x2F;man8&#x2F;wondershaper...</a><p>And limit my speed to 256KB&#x2F;s which sounds like a lot and 15 years ago that was really fast, but it&#x27;s enough to stop me from gorging on YouTube videos, which interestingly are less addicting when viewed at a maximum of 480p.<p>Adding latency is not necessarily the best route, because some apps (looking at you, gmail) send tens of requests in sequence just to load the main page.

&gt; Android is the hardest to do this in.<p>The Firefox addon LeechBlock NG can delay access to sites. Of course, that can&#x27;t stop you from opening Chrome - which as far as I can tell, you can&#x27;t uninstall from Android.

Is there any Free software alternative to the proprietary Charles Proxy?

This happens naturally for me. The worse a website is, the more javascript it uses. This is a pretty solid correlation. So I use a browser that is meant to browsing websites instead of one that&#x27;s meant to run javascript applications.<p>This makes going to web app sites (the bad sites) fairly slow. Especially when I have to serially temp-whitelist 4 domains each requiring a reload of the page every time I visit.<p>But normal web sites that don&#x27;t suck pop in instant and fast.

What about making it so that the amount of latency added is dynamic? It could be set up so that frequency of visitation leads to greater and greater latency. Something like exponential growth of 1.5x every time the site is visited with an exponential decay function applied since the last time visited. This would encourage slowing down, and would most heavily penalize the most heavily used sites which seems coherent with the goal.

The author&#x27;s description of this as &#x27;watering down&#x27; the Internet, as if some élan vital is absent, I think is potentially misleading. As the author makes clear, this is working to minimise the addictive aspects of browsing, not to block the content. All the content is still there, just organised in a way that forces you to acknowledge that you can&#x27;t and shouldn&#x27;t deal with it all at once, or non-stop.

There are ISPs that do this to customers who sign up for low price unlimited bandwidth deals and then hammer them for torrents. Traffic shaping them down to 1Mbit&#x2F;sec or lower means they&#x27;re likely to move onto another ISP within a few months.<p>Legally dubious, but no other way of managing the 1% of users who are using 95% of the bandwidth in a way you&#x27;d not provisioned for (because then your economic model is broken).

I was really hoping this was more of an attack on the site, a way to get back at sites that don&#x27;t work well due to too many ads&#x2F;tracking. We should all really slow play the connections and data rates from advertisers&#x2F;trackers - make them pay in latency. We need a tool to slow-play ads&#x2F;trackers that happens in the background, where the user experience is blocking them anyway.

I have been using a chrome extension called waitblock [1] which does something similar and it did wonders for reducing my addiction.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;waitblock&#x2F;kcnjfeppclpdinikcljfjigoongebpkh?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;waitblock&#x2F;kcnjfepp...</a>

Linus Sebastian says that making his phone slower to open made him enjoy it more[1]. One easy way to make your phone slower to unlock is to give it a long password, this has the additional benefit of making your phone more secure.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WGZh-xP-q7A?t=305" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;WGZh-xP-q7A?t=305</a>

The article mentions that he has &quot;Withdrawn mostly from Reddit in favor of early 2000’s style forums&quot;.<p>Which good ones are still around that are not specific to a certain topic? I am interested in this.<p>Since he said &quot;that I pay money for&quot;, I&#x27;m assuming somethingawful maybe? Are there any others that are still good and active?

Does anyone know any free&#x2F;open-source alternatives to Charles? The closest I could find was this [0] but it doesn&#x27;t look like it can throttle connections for specific hosts<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sitespeedio&#x2F;throttle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sitespeedio&#x2F;throttle</a>

I&#x27;m wondering what are those &quot;early 2000’s style forums that I pay money for&quot;. A few months ago I stumbled into such a website mostly for programmers and the style is completely different from HN or Reddit or whatever sites I&#x27;m on. Sadly I lost the website during a laptop breakdown :(

This might be a good alternative to tools like Leechblock. Instead of blocking sites, give the &quot;bad&quot;&#x2F;timewaste sites a bunch of random latency. It might discourage but not stop usage, which is useful when you need to use reddit or something to do research but not get distracted.

&quot;You get the web from 2 basic kinds of nightmare rectangle: laptops and desktops, where you control a material portion of the computing environment, or mobile and tablets, where you control less.&quot;<p>Gonna start using &quot;nightmare rectangle&quot; instead of &quot;computer&quot; from now on ...

Another good way to reduce time spent on social media is to reduce the number of connections on each platform to less than 100 people&#x2F;brands. All platforms struggle to find new crap to feed you with once you go below this threshold (except YouTube)

Interesting approach. I have gone one step further: I have simply blocked major sites I visit regularly. Every time I try to visit one of the sites I am reminded by the blocker that I should not.<p>(HN is one of them - but only on my mobile device)

This sounds a lot like what Apple slowly does to iOS to make you buy a new phone...

If you need this, consider just getting cheaper and slower Internet connection :)

This post has some pretty good suggestions. But I always get frustrated with this issue and honestly there will never be a great solution to it.<p>The underlying problem is that addicting people is core to the business model of facebook, twitter, and many other sites. With the web coupled to the profit motive there will always be infinitely more resources put towards making sites addictive than making them user-friendly, ie, encouraging healthy user habits. If the web was treated as a shared, public utility with no-strings-attached funding for developing shared tools like social media as well as supporting user-written clients for everything, effective tools for this that anyone can easily use would proliferate and web addictiveness and these clunky solutions would be nearly a non issue.<p>This is basically the dream of socialism. Utility set free from the malignant requirements of profit. I think it&#x27;s much closer to people&#x27;s original dreams for what the internet could be before venture capital crept in and came to rule everything.

&gt;Android is the hardest to do this in.<p>I don&#x27;t know a lot about Android development but could you use the Android VPN APIs to add latency to requests? I might use an open source app that adds this kind of functionality.

My internet addiction was at least 90% as bad even when I only had dial-up. Unfortunately, tabs make the latency thing an ineffective deterrent.<p>(In the dial-up days, before tabs, my workaround was to have 20 IE windows open.)

&gt; Coerced old-style on Reddit without an infinite scroll<p>This is why I deleted the reddit apps and use the mobile site instead. Having only one page at a time really helps from sitting forever in an infinite scrolling list.

Does anyone know of a 2G&#x2F;3G cell network in the US? Its would be cheaper and I know I avoid my phone a lot when it reverts to 3G when I run out of 4G data. I still want email, uber etc though.

&gt;Deleted all variable pictures from YouTube with my adblock. The avatars of the people, the teaser images with people making obnoxious faces on them, the logo, etc.<p>invidio.us with &quot;thin mode&quot; on

I also deliberately slow down certain sites! It&#x27;s wonderful.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jtolds&#x2F;twitoderm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jtolds&#x2F;twitoderm</a>

I wonder if Apple would consider adding this to the Screen time feature? Otherwise I don&#x27;t see how you can apply it on the iPhone for just certain websites or certain times of day.

Lag is absolutely infuriating on a web browser.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;no_internet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theoatmeal.com&#x2F;comics&#x2F;no_internet</a>

Blocking comments from various sites is an amazing idea.<p>Are there any extensions anyone can recommend for doing this comprehensively across all the popular sites &#x2F; 3rd party comment engines?

this is a fascinating idea but I had never heard of Charles Proxy

My household has too many devices to setup individually. Anyone knows a good router to do this on? My router can blacklist ips and urls, but cannot just add latency to them.

This is an excellent mental trick and I would love to be able to configure gradually increasing latencies as I sit on the internet for an extended duration

This is actually a really brilliant idea. Just make an addiction inconvenient instead of denying yourself. You could apply this to all kinds of stuff.

I took similarly extreme measures to end my video game addiction many years ago.<p>I played MMOs compulsively. They basically hijacked the reward center of my brain to the point where what happened outside of the game seemed completely irrelevant to me. I didn’t even see the point of showering.<p>During “moments of clarity” I understood perfectly well exactly what was happening to me, how the game was specifically designed to put me in that sort of state, how fake and toxic it all was.<p>So during these “moments of clarity”, I would take some of my life back by deliberately sabotaging myself inside the game so I wouldn’t want to play anymore.<p>I destroyed all my valuable items and deleted my characters.<p>When I came back, I told support it was an accident and they recovered the items and characters for me...<p>So then I gave all my valuable items to other players, thinking support couldn’t take those back from those people, because that would be creating free duplicates.<p>So I told support it was an accident, and they recovered the account and created duplicates of all of my lost items.<p>So I did that again, this time handing all the items to someone I knew.<p>Support again recovered the account and created duplicates of everything, but warned that they wouldn’t be able to do this a third time because of concerns about in-game markets being disrupted by duplicates.<p>So I did it again.<p>This time they recovered the account, and some of the items, but none of the most valuable ones.<p>Even then, I still wanted to play.<p>So this time I did the same, deleted all my items, deleted my characters, and created a new email account on yahoo.<p>I made that yahoo account’s username and password both something complicated I would never remember. I changed my game account’s email to that yahoo account, confirmed the email change, changed my game account’s password to something long I would never remember, changed all the game account’s personal and contact information to nonsense, logged out of the yahoo account, logged out of the game account, and closed the incognito tab.<p>I tried, but I never figured out a way to recover that account.<p>So I created a new account. Several times, but always repeatedly sabotaged myself during moments of clarity. Eventually, after a few weeks, I completely lost interest in trying and could finally do other things with my life.<p>I’ve used this same tactic with every game since. Total gameplay hours over the last 10 years have been maybe 50 hours or so for Fallout 3, and that’s it.<p>I don’t play anything anymore. Life has turned out unreasonably good since then, too. Career in software exploded.<p>Maybe because of redirected compulsivity.<p>Now I’m having a similar problem with workaholism.<p>I guess the real-world implementation of my prior solution would be to give all my money away, burn all my bridges, and go meditate in a forest somewhere. That doesn’t seem like such a great idea, though, especially with people depending on me. I’ll have to figure out a different solution for this one..

&gt; Used an extension to remove all the comments from Youtube<p>it&#x27;s enough to block all cookies on YouTube and comments stop loading

I&#x27;ve been using this since this morning and can already feel the benefits. It&#x27;s a great idea&#x2F;extension.

The artisanal &quot;slow internet&quot; movement. It&#x27;s like slow food movement, but for your data consumption.

Would a 25-minute latency be a good way to incorporate this tactic and Francesco Cirillo&#x27;s Pomodoro Technique?

This is a great article to explain the dopamine fueled feedback loop. It&#x27;s a simple way to fight it and win.

I add 1 second of latency when a Chrome user visits my website.<p>And I already convinced my boss to switch to Firefox.

reminds me of The Disconnect, the web-based magazine that you can only read when you&#x27;re offline: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedisconnect.co&#x2F;one&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedisconnect.co&#x2F;one&#x2F;</a>

Amazons underlying revenue comes from you paying for faster servers...

It&#x27;s a common practice to put title in URL to boost SEO, but the URL seems to convert all space (%20) to 20 and I doubt it would still be useful...<p>&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;12&#x2F;I-20Add-2020-20Seconds-20of-20Latency-20to-20Every-20Website-20I-20Visit.html

i&#x27;d like to do this on a home router for certain domains like reddit, facebook, instagram - are small devices capable of such selective buffering for long periods of time?

hello Howon! Hope you&#x27;re doing well. :-)<p>️ from Vinay (an old friend)

For anyone who wondered why large tech companies pay Software Engineers so much, this is the reason. Software quality and performance translate into quantifiable dollar amount, and that amount is quite high.

So how do you calculate the expected added latency?

2007: Breakthrough Internet Communicator<p>2011: Black Mirror<p>2020: Nightmare Rectangle

Alternate solution: downgrade to a dial-up ISP.

this is why I still use old iphones. They&#x27;re slow and I have javascript turned off so the web is WAAY less addictive.

&gt; Reddit with 150ms latency feels like cocaine: Reddit with 8000ms latency feels like coffee.<p>Reddit with Spectrum internet latency feels like water.

why this application suggested on Blog read the Browser History.

So you’re intentionally wasting power and time. Cool. Maybe just go outside.

I also use Comcast.

Or, move to Australia to curb internet addiction.

This rules.

&gt; Withdrawn mostly from Reddit in favor of early 2000’s style forums that I pay money for and HN<p>What are the names of these early 2000&#x27;s style forums? I would like to join them too.

I&#x27;ve had similar addiction, 22 hours of AoE out of 24. But if you&#x27;re addicted to just regular web, maybe you should go see a therapist. You might be trying to suppress something.

In remembrance of the dial-up time where, during load, you&#x27;d decide if you liked the content you thus far saw. Or, where you&#x27;d load some websites and disconnect internet to read offline.

The only time I want latency is when I have diarrhea.

You might find freedom.to useful. You can block websites for certain times of the day and it works with all devices.<p>I&#x27;ve found that if you can break the habit of reaching to some site when you&#x27;re bored the addiction falls off pretty quick.<p>Programming has a lot downtime sometimes - waiting for a build or a long test run - and there&#x27;s sometimes a steep context switch to working on something else. (At least for me if I start something new I&#x27;ll forget what I was working on before) It&#x27;s those times when I found myself on Twitter or Reddit.<p>One thing I&#x27;ve been trying to do instead is read an actual book - non-fiction does ok, I can usually follow the argument reading a few paragraphs at a time. And Kindle makes it easy to read in your browser and pick up where you left off on an e-reader.<p>One tricky thing though: I blocked YouTube only to be reminded that Google&#x27;s login still goes through a YouTube domain, so I inadvertently made it harder to login :(.