YouTube addiction, one month sober

It’s bit weird, but I feel like this conversation about screen time and digital addiction dropped out of the public consciousness during Covid, never to return. Apple released their screen time features in 2018, so this issue was just starting to hit critical mass right as Covid hit and dumped us all deep down the digital rabbit hole.<p>Now I notice even more social proof to keep going deeper into the digital life. Public shaming over green chat bubbles and genuine confusion if I tell someone I’m on not on a Meta owned social network.<p>I wonder if we’re all so addicted now that it’s no longer social acceptable to talk about our addiction. I wonder if we just started talking to each other less as well.

I’m so addicted to the internet that when I block social media, I find I get quite the similar fix from work Slack. Like browsing channels I have no business being a part of and constantly checking for validation of my comments via emoji reactions.<p>Does anyone know of ways to be a successful work-from-home knowledge worker while also locking down Slack to not be another slot machine??<p>Does anyone else feel conflicted about the internet as both a means to a comfortable&#x2F;lucretive career but also the ultimate drug?<p>I’ve thought of only allowing Slack for 10 min each hour to make it more like an IV drop of info, but what happens when I actually need to DM in real time?<p>meta P.S. I’m refreshing this and reading the replies — what a rush! So much more rewarding than what I should be doing. :)

I haven&#x27;t needed to be so drastic, but removed the YT app from my phone. There is a fair amount of good content that I find very worth consuming from YT (mainly educational videos) and would not like to miss. But, the mobile app makes a <i>very</i> strong effort to push you to shorts, which is the real danger. Shorts are proficiently engineered to just suck my brain into a doom scrolling comma. I tried removing shorts from the app, but it keeps pushing them in your face, so I ended up deleting it and watching via browser, logged out. I&#x27;ve heard several acquaintances having the same experience &#x2F; solution.<p>It&#x27;s a pity the YT PMs insist on designing the app like a Vegas casino, I&#x27;d really like to use the YT app for healthy usage, but well.

Good to see someone talking about it.. I used to spend my free time watching Youtube, these days it&#x27;s only during dinner before I put on a TV show (and just before bed where very long LPs put me to sleep in minutes). What helped I only notice in retrospective: I got diagnosed and medicated for ADHD.<p>Now I actually have the focus and drive to do the things I <i>should</i> be doing, rather than lazying my day off on YouTube with a hidden yet growing shadow of worthlessness and self-hate. In fact, now that I have improved focus, I don&#x27;t have the patience to sit and watch Let&#x27;s Plays any more. I either zone out, doze off or think about stuff I should be doing, and I just turn it off.<p>YMMV.

One thing that made a huge difference for me was turning of my watch history. If you do that you get a message on the homepage saying that it can&#x27;t recommend videos until you turn on your watch history. Not very visually pleasing but it keeps me from scrolling through recommendations and now I only watch videos when a channel I follow puts out new content or when I choose to specifically search for something.

For me, doing stuff like that only replaces one thing with another. If I block youtube, I&#x27;ll be spending that time here. If I block HN, I&#x27;ll stay on reddit. If I block reddit, I&#x27;ll spend time on Skyscrapercity.<p>The real solution seems to be having stuff in life that actually gives you self-actualization and spend least possible time at work fucking around.

Great post and parts really resonate with me. I got addicted to World of Warcraft. It was contrary to my own self image that my brain could do something to me that I didn&#x27;t endorse, but post WoW I recognized that it did exactly that.<p>I started sliding down that slope with No Man&#x27;s Sky but have since corrected (fortunately NMS isn&#x27;t as well put together as WoW or it might have been worse).<p>The key for me is running away from something you feel you have no control over feels like a better solution than dealing with the pain. Escaping into a world that has expected behaviors that you can understand is, for me, less painful than a world with people advancing bad agendas for self serving reasons.<p>The pain is real, the fight doesn&#x27;t stop, every day you shoot for &quot;well I didn&#x27;t give in to my fears today, on to tomorrow.&quot;

The problem I see with YouTube is that I always start on low-regret content like lectures, or a news clip about a current event I want a summary of. Or a video that a friend said was funny (that&#x27;s good signal).<p>But then rather than recommending more content along the same lines (which I would probably bookmark but not be encouraged to click), there is a short low quality video that somehow slides under the radar of &quot;not worth my time&quot;. And then this chains together, and what started out as a low-regret interaction has spiraled into a high-regret one.<p>uBlock rules for the shorts, recommendations, etc. basically solved this problem for me. I think there is a ton of potential with the alternative YouTube frontends too. We have access to an unprecedented amount of information, it&#x27;s just hidden behind malicious interfaces.

Not to downplay the levels of addiction and how challenging it can really be for many. But one thing I&#x27;ve done recently is use `AdGuard` on my iPhone to begin blocking specific domains that distract me too much, and it was amazing how in a few of those cases, the problem just went away immediately.<p>I was expecting it to be a fools&#x27; errand to be my own gatekeeper. But just getting a &quot;page won&#x27;t load&quot; error a few times, and suddenly I&#x27;m not scrolling Reddit etc. for an hour at bedtime. I also find myself gravitating towards more productive things to do. I&#x27;m equally as bored, but the quick jolt of brain drugs I get from Reddit now has to come from working on my purely-in-software microwave or whatnot.

Youtube killed my addiction themselves, they removed any kind of recommendation to my account since I opted out of all tracking, now when I go to youtube.com I get an empty page, unless I know exactly what I want to watch I don&#x27;t even bother

Everyone will have their own solution dependent on their own habits and brain quirks. But, some things which worked for me which you might wish to try. I found some things are useful to have, but distracting in other contexts.<p>As an example, people often text me a tweet. I want to be able to read the tweet, or look up certain sources of information. So I don&#x27;t want to block twitter. And being logged out prevents reading a thread. But I also don&#x27;t want to scroll my feed. Solution --&gt; stay logged in, but with my work account which has a dull feed.<p>Instagram is a waste of time on my phone. But I need to login occasionally to check messages and I like seeing the odd update. Solution --&gt; use nextdns to block on my phone, check on computer in browser.<p>So on my phone I identified instagram, youtube and twitter as the things where I waste the most time. NextDNS blocks youtube and instagram entirely, and the for twitter I use the login solution above.<p>On my mac I&#x27;m most likely to waste time checking various websites. So I just put anything I want to check into Netnewswire. It gathers it all, it&#x27;s quick to go through, and then when it&#x27;s done there&#x27;s nothing else to check.<p>I also catalogued &quot;what do I actually <i>want</i> to do on my phone&quot; down to the level of even reviewing the modqueue on reddit in the browser. Then I made homescreen shortcuts for any of it, so I have an easy thing to tap which lowers friction for doing something I want, rather than something aimless.<p>Also sounds funny but I made an effort to close all tabs and open loops on my mac before starting my day. Have always been the type to have too many tabs, and it sort of takes up mental RAM.<p>There&#x27;s no single big solution, but by chipping away at the problem and checking &quot;what do I find unsatisfying&quot; and &quot;what do I want to do, where?&quot; I&#x27;ve made a system that actually works pretty well for me.<p>I&#x27;ve tried cold turkey before, and it works great, especially if it&#x27;s only for a single service. But the thing is it&#x27;s kind of inconvenient to totally block youtube or twitter or anything as they often have useful info. Corraling them has been more sustainable for me.

I am beginning to go on a tirade against short-form and never-ending-video content&#x2F;social media. TikTok, Insta&#x2F;FB Reels, YouTube Shorts, etc.<p>This stuff is <i>dangerous</i> for a large percentage of individuals. And AI generated video content is only going to make it worse.<p>Imagine you&#x27;re wearing your Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest or future VR headset, watching a 180 degree &quot;immersive&quot; AI generated video. The eye tracking system notices your eyes fatigue slightly and it determines your attention is lacking. The algorithm instantly tweaks some settings and modifies the inputs to the AI video generation tool based on what it thinks (knows) will make you pay more attention, as it inserts subtle adverts here and there. AI video generation isn&#x27;t free after all.<p>Five years ago this sounded like dystopian science fiction - but it&#x27;s basically already possible with <i>today&#x27;s</i> technology.

In 2015 or so I quit Facebook. I had also quit smoking and drinking about 3 months earlier.<p>The feelings and withdrawal I went through were exactly the same.<p>Ever since I’ve been convinced that social media are not passive or even active sources of content. They’re much better viewed as addictions like smoking or drinking.<p>And just like smoking or drinking some people may be able to use social media responsibly, but many others are gonna be badly addicted and even the ones who do it responsibly will largely be worse off for it.

I feel like something bad is happening and I am unsure how much of this is me being negative. I &quot;quit&quot; the internet in late 2018 due to severe addiction and years-long disengagement in my hobbies (reading, programming, thinking, music, art, ...) and only recently have started reintroducing it into my life, for example, catching up with what people do on YouTube, trying to get an idea of &quot;what people are talking about&quot;. It feels like a fever dream and I am unsure whether this is due to me picking up my extremely unhealthy internet browsing habits that I had pre-2018, and I wonder whether there is a &quot;healthy&quot; internet that I am not seeing.<p>I made a twitter account recently and followed Jonathan Blow, Sebastian Lague, and 3blue1brown. I just scrolled through the default twitter page and I got karen videos, a naked woman in a car caught cheating, israeli soldiers harassing someone, a police dog mauling someone. I made an instagram account to see 3blue1brown videos on my phone and went to the default page (I assume it knows nothing about me) and I was given videos of disabled people doing sports which are clearly meant to be &quot;funny&quot;, with extremely hateful comments apparently from children, spelling out the N-word with separate letters, etc. That was in 3 minutes of using Instagram and I gave up. I am interested in game development and a google search of &quot;game development&quot; gives me absurd &quot;industry knowledge&quot; youtube videos and r&#x2F;gamedev. r&#x2F;gamedev is just &quot;meta-commentary&quot; pointing out &quot;societal problems&quot; of game developers, you won&#x27;t make money, noob assumptions, angry at the world, even mixing in discussions of depression, self-hate. It is a mess. Where are the people talking about neat collision detection tricks? I am aware that this is the &quot;surface level&quot; and I will eventually need to find and curate a variety of incoming &quot;feeds&quot;, such as group chats with good engaged people, great forums, etc., but I just don&#x27;t feel like it is &quot;natural&quot; to find them. I feel like I need to start a project for myself to intentionally build my own &quot;algorithm&quot; which leads me to find enriching content. I feel though that that is actively going against what &quot;the internet&quot; wants me to do. It is so easy to find such hateful things, and I am worried it will bring me back to being as depressed as I was before quitting the internet.

I used to watch between 45 minutes and two hours a day of YouTube when bored at work. At my last place of employment, this skyrocketed though; I was very bored that that job.<p>In January of 2022 I decided to take a YouTube &quot;fast&quot;, kicking YouTube for a while. I couldn&#x27;t bring myself to commit to more.<p>It was waaaaaay hard to stop. I got on Nebula as a sort of Nicorette for a while, a month or two. I can recommend Nebula as a sort of sieve for really high quality content btw. I stopped my subscription, but it was great to only be able to watch videos that didn&#x27;t feel like they were trying to hook me, all while getting some really good stuff out of it. I particularly liked Half as Interesting, RealLifeLore, and Johnny Harris, all of which were on Nebula. These videos didn&#x27;t contribute to the &quot;hooked&quot; feeling, giving me something to use to wean myself off YouTube.<p>After my fast was over, it was so hard to stop that I didn&#x27;t start again.<p>I will still watch the occasional YouTube, but it&#x27;s usually either shared by friends or specifically searched for by me.<p>I have gotten looser in the last few days, but I have regretted it. I started swearing in my head less when I stopped watching YouTube. I had fewer intrusive thoughts. I had a clearer head, and I want to keep that.<p>My Psychiatrist has told me no screens two hours before bed. I started living by that too, and have found much more rest when I do. I discovered by doing this that I have a screen &quot;budget&quot;, that I can&#x27;t go over that without restless leg, twitching, and pain at the end of the day. Now that I know this, I am less inclined to use that budget on YouTube.<p>I miss a lot of creators on there, but I went back to watch some of them recently and was disappointed. Other mediums simply provide better content. Blog posts seem to be the best for this.<p>There are still some creators that are amazing, and I am truly missing out! I miss watching Primitive Technology videos for example. I still allow myself to specifically search for these, by I try to limit myself to one or two videos a day or less. I find that to be the sweet spot for keeping off of being hooked.

YouTube, like the entire Internet, is such a mixed bag. There is some really first rate content but most of it is total junk. Like Little Richard says &quot;It ain&#x27;t what you do, it&#x27;s the way how you do it.&quot;

To me, the most difficult part about quitting youtube, twitter or reddit is that these websites are incredibly rewarding and an incredible waste of time at the same time. Reddit has great discussions on careers, hobbies, whatever you do not stumble upon elsewhere, but the rewarding content unfortunately always comes in packs with some mindless scrolling and mediocre memes – I&#x27;ve never managed to have one without the other. Quitting them means to forfeit a huge, valuable chunk of input and I am yet not sure what&#x27;s better.

I&#x27;ve had good results recently by deleting all my social media apps from my phone, BUT allowing myself to use them through Mobile Safari. And I did not bookmark them; e.g. for Instagram I type &quot;in&quot; and then Enter.<p>This gives me some friction, without having to go cold turkey. All the popular social media sites have mobile websites that are &quot;good enough&quot;, but slightly clunkier than the apps, and also they can&#x27;t send me notifications.<p>My phone screentime per day has dropped by about 1&#x2F;3rd.

Anyone else use YouTube as basically background noise? When I&#x27;m working I live putting on some ASMR and just listening to it in the background.<p>I find it less distracting then music or podcasts.

One of my best friends is definitely addicted to YouTube. I am starting to suspect my wife is too. YouTube is great for music and educational videos, but let&#x27;s be honest the bulk of content is not that.<p>In the early days of YouTube I would say I was addicted, or spent a lot of time on there. At one point I realized how much of a waste of time it was and now only look up car repair videos.<p>I hope everyone can get out of the YT rut.

The YouTube addiction is definitely real... but it&#x27;s quite sad since mixed in with the entertainment it&#x27;s one of the best sources in the world for education (video lectures, how tos, etc)<p>One thing that worked well for me is having two separate profiles, one for educational and one for everything else. That way the education one didn&#x27;t get as polluted with the most addictive recommendations<p>(little self-promotion) One thing I found to be useful was to try to focus on learning more actively, so I built a tool that turns educational videos into mini-courses where it will ask you questions about the content and then use spaced repetition to help you actually remember the information.<p>One of the other parts is to ensure that the suggestions&#x2F;feed is focused solely on education, and that you don&#x27;t fall into the addicting videos trap... (I have the v1 but still working to make this better)<p>But I think if the addiction is bad enough as in the post, it&#x27;s probably a better idea to go cold turkey<p>(link is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.platoedu.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.platoedu.org</a>)

I have done the same thing with YT. Notice my first post on HN is adding this website to my hosts files because I found it too addicting. As of date, I have unblocked YT but kept almost all of the social media sites. I watch Twitch for background noise nowadays. I find it to be less addictive since it feels more ephemeral to me.

My favourite extension for customising YouTube right now is Unhook.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unhook.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unhook.app&#x2F;</a><p>I hide all recommendations and suggestions, so basically all I can do on YouTube is look at channels I&#x27;ve subscribed to, or search for videos I need.<p>I use it on mobile (Firefox on Android) too.

My solution has been to redirect the YouTube home page to the subscriptions page. This prevents me from watching recommendations.<p>I also created a new YouTube account (note this doesn’t require you to create a new Google account), and manually added all my subscriptions. This means it has no data on what to recommend me and so the recommendations are terrible and I never even want to click them.<p>This encourages me to carefully curate my subscriptions, so I only watch high-quality videos from consistently high-quality channels.<p>I also have nebula but I find increasingly many of the channels are too low-quality for me. I think this is because my standards have been raised and my detection of low quality has improved. I’m now not sure that it’s worth it for me though.

Are you addicted to YouTube or everything else kinda sucks? That&#x27;s the case for me. I&#x27;ve been watching a lot of YouTube cause I can still find things worth watching over there, no matter how hard they try to push shitty content and shorts down my throat.

One issue for me is that everything leads me back to YouTube. When I want to cook a meal, there was this great YouTube video with a recipe from a while back I need to rewatch. Do some crafting work? Gotta check these videos about woodworking first to make sure I know what I’m doing. Somehow the visual content can bring the right information and nuances that a cookbook or manual can’t. Especially with food, like when does it look done. A video is like the picture of a thousand words, but times a thousand frames.

Related:<p><i>YouTube dominates TV streaming in US, per Nielsen&#x27;s latest report</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;youtube-dominates-tv-streaming-in-u-s-per-nielsens-latest-report&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;youtube-dominates-tv-strea...</a> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39463296">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39463296</a>)

YouTube has been getting really aggressive about recommendations lately. They’re easily the majority of my homepage, and you can’t watch a single video on a new topic without getting flooded with related suggestions. Never mind there’s dozens of channels and topics I have enjoyed in the past, they rarely show up in the suggestions.<p>It’s gotten to the point that I use incognito mode for random video links to avoid wild swings in recommendations.

I&#x27;m tempted to follow. Doomscrolling YouTube Shorts seems fun at the time, but wastes hours of my life. When I stop, I feel like I&#x27;ve lost control; regret.<p>Google want my eyeballs for 2 solid hours, but I wish they&#x27;d let users focus their viewing time with a few basic controls. I&#x27;d disable Shorts in a heartbeat.<p>What an I waiting for? There&#x27;s still plenty of long format content I genuinely enjoy. Perhaps it&#x27;s time for an alternative client.

I wish I could block shorts. Christ sake I’m already paying for premium. Let me block it, and not just from the mobile client - everywhere.

I guess this is an adhd &quot;superpower&quot; of mine. I leave youtube on 24&#x2F;7 and pay almost no attention to it.<p>A big reason why I can ignore it though, when it&#x27;s on 24&#x2F;7.. mine plays the <i>exact</i> same documentaries, almost always WW2 or US Revolutionary War stuff over and over and over again. I watch a LOT of history documentaries but I have absolutely no interest in either of these time periods and have probably never searched for or liked any American history video. I&#x27;m a swords and shields guy.<p>The last month straight it&#x27;s been on a revolutionary war kick with some 3-5 hour long George Washington documentary in between another one about how Goebbels ran off to argentina and his wife wouldn&#x27;t join him so he married his dead brothers widow. I know everything about the guys now.<p>My theory is it plays the same stuff over again because it&#x27;s already cached and saves them bw, them assuming you&#x27;re not actually watching anyway but they can still pump viewership numbers for advertising.<p>RE: Thread.. I&#x27;m awful at getting off the computer after work. I&#x27;ll move on to personal projects and everything else and just sit here for the whole day. My adhd + being able to instantaneously get dopamine has me chained, I like to go camping to detox.<p>Been forcing myself to go for a walk at 5pm now that it&#x27;s not pitch black out then anymore.

YouTube&#x27;s excessive ads (disabling adblock serves as a forcing function) and them no longer recommending stuff with the right settings applied solved the YT problem for me. While I&#x27;ve never shared OP&#x27;s state, I too sunk too much time and attention on that platform.<p>It is still there for those rare occasions I need it. But I no longer get pulled in.

I deleted TikTok and Instagram, and my screen time dropped by 4 hours a day. That&#x27;s 28 hours a week. I didn&#x27;t realize how much time I spent on it, but it makes sense because I would watch it as soon as I woke up and before I went to sleep. I was gobsmacked at how much time I saved.<p>Now I spend all that time playing Baldur&#x27;s Gate 3.

Does anyone else not seem to be super susceptible to the dopamine&#x2F;attention hacking that plagues modern social media? I watch YouTube occasionally, but I often run out of interesting stuff to watch, so I just go read a book or something. I have ADHD (non-medicated) so you think that this would be a nightmare for me.

YouTube is amazing, just stay away from content that encourages you to buy stuff. The free documentary channel is amazing (check out their Apollo series) but lately once you’ve seen all the amazing education videos (think vsauce, smarter every day, David butler) it does turn into a nervous tick constantly opening the app.

If you are using Arc, I created a boost to block Youtube. You can add a custom message to yourself in the CSS settings.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arc.net&#x2F;boost&#x2F;208CA384-0BC8-4EEF-A944-BC551D4AD48D" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arc.net&#x2F;boost&#x2F;208CA384-0BC8-4EEF-A944-BC551D4AD48D</a>

yea, this is pretty extreme, but 8-10 hours a day is a lot. I did a version of this with facebook and reddit for a while, I noticed I was wasting a lot of time on them so I uninstalled the apps off my phone and blocked the websites with the 1blocker, for facebook it was easy bec they made the desktop site so unusable I tried to use a few times and now basically never go there. reddit was harder but once the api thing happened, that gave me the motivation to just stop scrolling endlessly, I still have it accessible on my pc bec it&#x27;ll sometimes pop up in search results, but I no longer spend hours scrolling, reading comments and getting in stupid slap fights with strangers.

Just realized when I logged out from YouTube I got automatically logged out from Chrome as well. There is no other way. How is that even allowed, that google single-signon infiltrated my browsing experience. Something has to change.

<p><pre><code> The counsellor... well, let&#x27;s say they have a specific task at hand. </code></pre> LOL I assume this went like the scene from &quot;Half Baked&quot;: &quot;You ever SUCK COCKS for YouTube? Get outta here!&quot;

This is an eye opening article.<p>My list of vices: Youtube X Hacker news Telegram “news” channels

I&#x27;m so glad he wrote this. I wish more people would talk about it. YouTube and especially TikTok are totally designed to fuel addiction and there must be a lot of people deeply affected by it.

I just wish YT thumbnails were selected from a random point in the video.

Nice to see this post. With all the discussion and borderline obsession on here about ad-blocking and YouTube I can&#x27;t help but think of the role addiction plays.

Once I was aware of the amount of psychology tactics that goes behind youtube channels, I&#x27;ve come to the realization that I&#x27;m not &quot;chilling&quot; while on Youtube, more like being targeted by psychopaths.<p>I heard MrBeast on a podcast (the flagrant) describing the formula they developed to manufacture `captivating` content, how they make multiple thumbnails and A&#x2F;B tests which one is more engaging, and all the effort and psychology manipulation that goes behind the scene. It was a huge turn off.<p>I never watched MrBeast content personally but I&#x27;ve since noticed the same patterns implemented by &#x27;Education&#x27; channels like Veritasium who I previously pictured as innocent &amp; informal. They actively hunt and bray on you consuming their content.

I wish I could disable shorts on Android.<p>I have a watch later playlist that I want to get through but I find myself scrolling on shorts.

I can put away social media. But I can’t put away my phone due to how everything is digital now - bank, health, travel.

the only thing that has been stopped me watching youtube is stopping my premium sub and seeing all those ads every 5s, drives me crazy enough to stop watching all together

Absolutely baffled by this.

Youtube is not a big thing for me, but Reddit and Twitter shutting down the respective clients I used for each got me off both platforms permanently. Enshittification can be a good thing.

I&#x27;m sorry, but this is nonsense. An addition to information in the informational age sounds really nonsensical.

Avoiding clickbait is easy, you just need to realize that some scumbag is trying to get you click on their trash so they can make money. So why would you do it?