I believe most articles about smartphone addiction are missing the more important half of the issue: the addictive substance is the internet, rather than the enabling device. Certainly the phone allows more opportunities, but the actual substance is the internet. Most people will do fine for a month with a dumbphone and an internet connected laptop. Now try to live a month with any fancy phone and laptop, but without any internet connection whatsoever. The smartphone without internet is barely more addictive as a dumbphone.
I agree, for me youtube is incredibly addictive, I'm even working with a psychiatrist about it (and other addictions of course). She was mentioning "the youth on tiktok" and I told her, youtube is the exact same thing for 30+ YOs. Her "key" is to be busy with some other activity.
Subjective. I can't stand using it for some reason, and when I have to, I hate the experience. There's something I can't grasp that makes me want to stay away from it.
I salute those who have the stomach to sit in front of it for hours.
Yes same here. I just really dislike video content.
I much prefer a long read / deep dive written article because it's much more accessible. I can read at my own speed of comprehension (generally much faster than a video) and I can easily jump around without losing context.
You can very "effectively" waste time reading articles daily, literally no different from the time wasted on YT. The only difference is reputation of "printed letters" is higher than of "video". But the mechanism is the same - wasting time on some quick entertainment (yes, reading longform articles is also a quick entertainment) for a dopamine hit, then switch to the next one. I do it for years now.
I don't think this is a waste. When I read articles linked here from HN I actually learn something.
On Youtube it's mostly vacuous showmen like Linus tech tips and Mr Beast crap. I don't think there is much worth watching there except perhaps EEVBlog.
I thought I was addicted to the internet too yet it turns out I'm addicted to information whether that be short, long, audio or video content.
The insatiable desire to be up to date with current news, happenings in my fields of interest or social circles became unmanageable. Furthermore, the teams of people with doctorates employed by tech companies to make their product even stickier with each iteration made my battle all the more challenging.
By creating hard boundaries that were non-negotiable such as limiting time on the top (n) sites, banning certain apps on the phone and deleting accounts helped me immensely.
Being online is hard to avoid such as banking, portfolio management, booking medical appointments and acquiring entertainment to consume are now ingrained in modern society yet learning the skill (or art of) disconnecting to enjoy non-online or 'outside' activities and controlling my compulsion to surf aimlessly (laptop or mobile) from one site to the next took weeks to get under control.
Training my family and friends to not expect an instant reply to messages also took a long time and surprisingly difficult.
Today was a public holiday where I live and I'm happy to say I spent it offline. I did however listen to the news and the footy on the wireless. Only now in the late evening for 20 minutes am I replying to my messages and 'online'.
She explained that some activities (active ones, social ones, etc), once you are used to planning them and doing them, actually reward the brain a lot more than scrolling, and eventually you don't go back to the addictive behavior anymore. It's a form of CBT. I'm going to try it because I have nothing more than her word for it.
Me too, but is it an addiction? Typically one would classify it as an addiction when it stops serving your interests.
Ads are the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of content out there that doesn't look like an ad that has ulterior motives. Not all of it is nefarious, but there are way too many smart people working on such things to believe that not seeing an ad is equivalent to not being influenced by marketers.
And while they may differ on many topics, one thing marketing agrees on is that you should be engaging with as much marketing-influenced content as possible.
So returning to my "is it an addiction" question... Broadly speaking it's fairly obvious whose interests would be served, if not yours, by spending an unhealthy amount of time on HN. I'm sure it was a conversation at one time, back when someone was deciding whether or not to build HN. It serves ycombinator's interests to have us here.
I'm not saying it's necessarily problematic, especially in HN's case, but one does feel like a rat in a maze at times. You gotta wonder if there's a different way, one with fewer maze designers and more cheese.
So my point is that we could still have engaging information available without it being engineered for engagement. We could design instead with dopamine hygiene in mind. And that's a situation with less addiction potential.
There are plenty of posts here pushing a product aka advertising, even if the way they get to the front page isn't directly by the company giving money to YC.
if we go one layer deeper, perhaps we can attribute that to the fact that people just aren't willing to pay for stuff, which leads companies to have to figure out how to monetize their services. that road inevitably leads to ads as the simplest, easiest and most obvious solution.
I agree but I'd go a tad further: Why do Ads even work as a monetization strategy? Either we've collectively been convinced that paying for ads is valuable in some way, or that on some level they work at convincing people to spend. I'm worried about the latter, because it means people are highly impressionable.
Perhaps we need to ban ads targeting children for starters, like we did smoking. Unfortunately with "ads", there is no easy "here look at this cancer-ridden black lung that was directly caused by smoking"-equivalent.
Completely cutoff from the internet is probably not feasible for most of us, but many cases of access are probably far less urgent than we pretend them to be. Barring work, for me the vast majority of necessary access (such as financial administration) could probably be batch processed once a week.
I'm in vacation in a remote area and only get data in some places around the house (an less than 1mbps). I often reach for my phone, put it up to my face, see "no signal" before even know why I reached for the phone in the first place
Addiction is not the internet alone, it’s having internet in the pocket and always available. Setting up times in the day to access it through a computer is way different.
I think most of us have gone through this rollercoaster. The iPhone was my first smartphone and I was like a kid in a toy store. I simply couldn't get enough of discovering new apps in new categories and the instant access to all the news, posts, etc. that I wanted.
Luckily for me, I was never hooked on the social media apps. In fact, I deleted my Facebook account when it was at its peak.
My crack/dopamine/heroin has been news and related apps. At one point, I was consuming content from 15-20 news sites on a daily basis. Likewise, I was heavily browsing Hacker News and LinkedIn.
However, as I turned 50, I took stock of my habits and how they are impacting my health, especially eyesight and sleep. I decided something needs to change.
So, I have uninstalled all my time-wasting apps and have installed the mLauncher from F-Droid. Also, I now read books mostly on my Kobo.
These are small changes and I still go back to my old ways, once in a while. But, I'm determined to kick this addiction.
I’m similar. I’ve just done a few things to dumb down my iPhone. No notifications etc.
I could happily avoid social media but safari is by far my biggest time wasting app. News as well as googling random interesting things all day and then ending up going down random rabbit holes on niche topics. Also not a great use of time because I end up learning a little trivia on lots of stuff, nothing particularly useful.
I want my phone so I have a good camera on photos of my kid, managing my business, maps and small daily things like being able to sign my kid into daycare. I can delete the time wasting apps… except safari is the main offender.
Wow, we definitely had a similar path, though my internet addiction started in college where I would download freeware programs and games via ftp or browse through gopher. Used to write long email messages often.
News was a big problem for me, especially in the 00s when the housing bubble was roaring and I wanted to buy a house and trying to figure out if we really should spend 10x what our parents had ever earned for a condo…
Today, forget Insta and Snap, I follow HN and a parenting blog way way too much, and ads are not really part of the equation.
I wonder what drives this compulsion? Anxiety? Lonelines? Actual addiction (alcoholism is common in my family). I know my dad felt compelled to watch the evening news EVERY night and some people ready NYT cover to cover, is that similar?
I spent 10+ years without a smartphone, from early 2010s to early 2020s. Nowadays I can barely book a train ticket without one, and so many little things require a whatsapp number or some app that I bought one refurbished. Also it's hard to find a decent brick phone that can store enough SMS, one that I bought with an additional SD card will not store SMS on the SD card, so I'm stuck with a massive SD card and a 300 SMS storage limit.
Now I have to turn it off outside of job breaks to avoid looking at it every 5 minutes. I also have people getting angry at me because I do not answer their messages within a few minutes. Helps me select toxic people I guess. Some just get crazy with this thing.
The endless content available on the internet is a time sink on a regular desktop computer, more so on a laptop – but paired with a smartphone, this time sink is suddenly available all the time! There is no friction. It quickly becomes a habit.
And now we are all addicted, which most of us still refuse to admit, because we don't see the negative impact it has on our lives and our loved ones – like with any addictive behavior.
I've done something similar recently. Purged quite a lot of apps on my phone when I decided to be more minimalistic about it. I wanted to improve device performance (and thus reduce the desire for an upgrade) as well as decentralise some of my reliance on apps.
The stair stepping in this is from already having removed social media (and Youtube) from my phone. For me, if I got sucked into a feed, I'd be in it for hours and feel awful. There's no such thing as moderate usage for some.
It almost became a fun game to see how many apps I could get rid of! The biggest holdouts I haven't been able to get rid of have been around banking and insurance. Too many new age fintechs, even in South Africa, are convinced that actively ditching web is the best way to grow.
Saying Zuck et al knew what they were doing is misleading, and gives them too much credit. They are no experts in how dopamine works.
Tech makes it easy to build things quick. Some things gets popular more by accident than design. Zuck didn't build insta, or whatsapp or tiktok. The reasons for popularity and what is working is generally discovered post facto.
Popularity attracted funding. Things scale up (scale is the only thing tech brings to the table). That attracts financial engineers of Wall St. They take over and control how firms are managed. Cuz most creatives, engineers and scientists have no training in finance or business. And that sets up where the story goes.
The financial engineers aren't programmed to design goods or improve quality of life. They are programmed to capture market, as quickly as possible and collect rent from as much of the market as possible, getting the cheapest rates on interest/labor/forex/tax etc.
Market capture tactics increasing rely not on product, or quality of product, but on arbitrage capability, taking out competition AND outspending the competition in Marketing/Advertising/PR (ie Demand Engineering). Demand engineering works cause people have finite Attention bandwidth. As long you get your signalling and messaging into that finite bandwidth you win over the people who cant.
The technologist, the financial engineer, the demand engineer are all furiously optimizing what they are individually good at.
When they come together we end up with a very efficient corporate machine. When a whole herd of these machines, all copying each others behavior, run around the individual human being has less and less control over their own environment.
The machine herd will capture your kids in some other way if you get them off smartphones and social media. The only solution is to change the behavior of the machine and the herd.
I have two kids, with the elder one approaching the age where smartphones are starting to appear in their peer group (~10-11 yrs). Does anyone have a recommendation for a flip phone with coolness factor? Maybe ruggedized, with a compass built-in (non-GPS), something with “tool” aesthetics.
The hard part is denying your kid something that the other kids are using to actively communicate amongst each other (peer pressure).
Depends a bit where you live I think. Here in Switzerland smartphone ownership among kids is less prevalent than say in the US. There's mostly consensus that we're not doing the kids any favors. But the peer pressure is just there. Also it doesn't help that some schools use WhatsApp for in-class communication.
i cant really recommend a specific phone but "dumb" android phones do exist, so they can tkae pictures, send texts etc. to their friends but you can prevent them from scrolling through tiktok
I learned about the finder from the paper "Swapping 5G for 3G: Motivations, Experiences, and Implications of Contemporary Dumbphone Adoption" at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3637402 . Its list of "dumbphones" includes this rugged flip-phone:
and the Mindful phone, at https://greentouchstore.com/products/mindful-talk-and-text-m... ; the latter is based on Rabbinical Guidance ("Based on their policies the phones will not feature any internet or entertainment apps besides Text message app and Offline Music Player")
There's the Light Phone II - https://www.thelightphone.com/ ("a premium, minimal phone. It will never have social media, clickbait news, email, an internet browser, or any other anxiety-inducing infinite feed.")
Most posts of this kind are completely void of thoughts on how society - including public institutions - require you have a smart phone nowadays.
I don't use my smart phone that much (probably more than I think, though). It's practical as a portable music/podcast player, a camera that's always with me etc. Occasionally I read a programming book, or blog post. I would love a good feature phone, with fantastic battery life.
But what I absolutely need a smart phone (and their secure enclaves) for are all the connected systems my country implements without hesitation: electronic authentication (most public services, such as healthcare, bank, taxes etc), public transport (they had seconds thoughts, though, and a plastic card is available). It's frankly dumb, and nonchalant to build societies like this. I can go into a train tunnel a lose coverage. Rural areas are not always covered, yet we (at least here) build systems depending on internet as if we all lived in the densest part of a large city.
That's primarily why I can't (currently) use a feature phone, not because I lack in self control.
He covers the personal bit but the difficult question for me would be the practical bit. I wouldn’t be able to pay for a lot of things (apps only), would be really hard to know when the train comes (time tables aren’t on posters any more). I couldn’t park my car (meters are app only). I couldn’t pay my bills etc. The list goes on and on. Being bored is the known factor. That would be hard. But the practical bit would perhaps make it impossible.
I wish I could buy a dumb phone which would nonetheless have a great camera. No browser, no email, no apps, god forbid. Maybe also support for Signal instead of SMS. I know it’s not going to happen, but one can dream.
