Every time I get slightly tired or bored I open up 4 new tabs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Gmail.
The muscle memory is baked into my hands from years of checking these feeds.
What do you scroll for? What are you hoping to find?
I can feel myself being radicalised by the algorithm. I thumb to a clickbait tweet about immigration gang wars back home and within 24 hours my feed is full of anti foreign profiles and racism. If I’m not careful, I’ll be dragged further into this train of thought and mistakenly think these beliefs are my own.
Twitter: Deleting Twitter from my phone has already saved me hours of scrolling. I may download Twitter/X again at the weekend but it feels hopeless to try and catch up, so I don’t even try. This is good. I end up deleting the app again.
Youtube: I found a script that hides videos that are less than ~45mins in duration from the home feed. It doesn’t work on mobile but, as a result of me only clicking on and watching long form videos, my mobile syncs with my new forced preferences. The only issue now is how to remove Youtube shorts from my phone. Shorts are the worst time killer.
Another trick for Youtube is a Cloudflare worker that that I wrote to scrape the captions from a video based on it’s share link.The code spits out the script along with an in depth prompt that I paste into GPT for a deep dive into what the video is about.
This stops me from binging on videos for the sake of it. Most content is repetitive and as you can imagine you’ve heard it all before. My watch later list now contains mostly long form tutorials on tech that I’m interested in learning, but haven’t had time to dig in to.
The perfect time to scroll is when I’m tired or can’t muster up the energy to read technical content. With the above measures in place, my phone has become pretty boring. I’m stuck with the Apple books app as the only source of entertainment. “I might as well read a few pages” is the default response now, but this feels like a chore, for now.