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Ugh. I don't necessarily do "doom" scrolling, but lately I have gotten drawn into wasting time on these various stupid "shorts" or "reels" or whatever, mostly on FB. It's weird too... for ages I was vehement about never, ever clicking on any of that crap on FB or Youtube (and I barely use Instagram at all and don't even have TikTok). But one day, somehow, I got suckered in by a thumbnail of a cute dog or something, and lately I've been finding myself wasting an hour or more at a time, idly watching stupid videos of low value crapola. :-(

This is a habit I feel like I absolutely have to shed. Luckily, a lot of the impetus to do that will go away when I ditch FB, which I'm going to do as soon as I get my new personal website/blog set up.






I finally broke wasting hours on YouTube shorts (and youtube in general) by turning off the watch history on my account [1]. It completely removes all videos from the "homepage" (including shorts from the sidebar). There are still shorts in the subscriptions page, but I think this is an acceptable tradeoff. YouTube for me now has just become who I'm subscribed to, which is a much more pleasant experience - there's an "end" where I'm finally caught up and can move on to doing something else. This is also for my entire account, so it's not something I can just disable from my browser bar or that won't work on mobile. I don't need to remember to set it up on a new device either.

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en&co=GEN...


There is a great browser extension for Chrome/Firefox called "Unhook" which allows you to selectively remove parts of the YouTube UI you find distracting. Personally I have shorts and recommended videos turned off.

https://unhook.app/


I've always found "doom-scrolling" fascinating because, for all of my addiction-prone traits and ADHD-granted hyperfocus, I never seem to get sucked into it. I've opened TikTok a few times for some random video I've searched and continued scrolling the next few videos out of some UX-driven guidance...then completely lost interest after 4 or 5.

Funny/Memey videos with low content value are entertaining, here and there. A rapid succession of them does nothing to the reward center of my brain. Or worse, the video would clearly be better as a longer form video and now I'm just frustrated (this is more common with YouTube Shorts).

That being said, I probably have YouTube normal-long form content running in the background 4-8hours out of the day.


That counts as doom scrolling to me.

If while I'm watching short form content like Reels or YT shorts etc, I realize that if you asked me what I watched 2 scrolls ago and I couldn't tell you- I'm doom scrolling.

This is the case almost every time I open instagram.


I don't have any social media and don't travel that often. When I went on a trip this past fall and saw a very high percentage of people sucked in to these short form videos at any idle moment at the airport and out at public events, I definitely felt existential doom.

Couldn't help but look at everyone the same as all the people on the space ships in Wall-E.


Yeah, it's pretty depressing. It also adds another layer of difficulty to stopping your own doom scrolling/excessive internet usage - with so many people ignoring reality in favor of whatever the algorithm serves them up on their phone, there are far fewer chances to socialize in real life, social skills atrophy, and the cycle continues. It seems like it takes even more concerted effort than ever before just to have a real social life.

I know exactly how you feel, 20 years ago I went on a trip and saw almost everybody utterly absorbed in a newspaper, or magazine. Some even had books. I couldn't believe all these people were wasting their precious time entertaining themselves instead of staring blankly at the wall!

You used to see this argument come up frequently in defense of smartphones, but it's fallen off recently. In my personal experience, scrolling through short-form videos is 100x more soul sucking than reading a book, magazine, or newspaper ever is. They're just not the same.

In general, you're right, but this comment was about an airport. People are stuck there, sometimes for hours, with not much to do, and they can't really go far. And for all anyone knows, they could have been working, or reading, or who knows what. Anecdotal, I know, but my wife has crazy high screen time--like several hours a day, but it's because she reads a lot of ebooks, but doesn't want to carry a separate device.

There are all kinds of reasons a person may be looking at their phone, and to judge them for it, especially in an airport of all places, is kind of ridiculous.


They said

"When I went on a trip this past fall and saw a very high percentage of people sucked in to these *short form videos* at any idle moment at the airport and out at public events..."

Assuming it was all short-form videos (I'd bet it was), then it's definitely more psychologically destructive than them reading a book on their phone.

Also your mentioning of several hours a day being "crazy high" is slightly telling of your understanding of the relationship, especially young people have, with their devices.

For younger people raised in this environment, myself included, putting in 6-8+ hours a day into doomscrolling youtube/instagram/tiktok is really not that out of the ordinary;

"13- to 18-year-olds use about eight and a half hours of screen media [per day]"[0]

[0]: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/researc... page 3


I hear you but the magazine and newspaper can’t adapt to your engagement levels in real time to maximize their addictive potential. Many people don’t struggle with their screen time but it’s clearly a common problem.

Fair enough. I guess I was still thinking of "doom scrolling" as being specifically about scrolling for negative news. But from reading some of the other comments it seems that a lot of people feel like the definition has shifted. I can buy that.

No, the definition was always about the state of the person doing the scrolling, not of the content. For some reason it them changed, and now it appears to be coming back to the original meaning

That is not true. Look up the definition of doomscrolling and most sources (e.g. wikipedia) will say that it tends to be negative content.

Most sources, but not all! To me, watching 8 hours of puppies, kittens and rainbows in a day would have a pretty negative impact on my life. That kind of content is negative when it becomes excessive. Heroin feels really good when you use it too. Doesn't make it a positive thing.

You are free to use a word however you'd like, but that doesn't change the popular definition and usage of that word.

I'm not sure we can use such definitive language about the definitions of new words.

I had the same issue at one point. I'm not ready to delete some of my social media accounts as they do bring me real value, so I ended up blocking all shorts/reels/etc. on the services I use.

For YouTube there is Unhook [1], which allows you to block shorts. For all other sites I just use custom uBO rules. Both options also work on your phone if you use a browser that can install WebExtensions (Firefox on Android for example).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...


I was a heavy tiktok user for the last couple years, before uninstalling the app a couple months ago. It was a lot of fun, truly, but I felt the habit (and its side effects) going in a direction I didn’t like.

I still have IG and FB on my phone, and find myself impulsively reaching for those scrollable short videos whenever I have a spare minute. That format of “content” is just very addicting. I really wish I could go back 20 years to when smartphones were a thing, but there was a lot less to “do” on them. I don’t think I’ll be able to break the habit without a major reset, personally.

> when I ditch FB, which I'm going to do as soon as

As someone who has deactivated and reactivated my Facebook account several times over the years — just do it! Maybe it will motivate you to finish that other project if you have something you really want to share. But the whole “I’ll start that diet after the holidays” thing doesn’t pan out in my experience :(


> which I'm going to do as soon as I get my new personal website/blog set up

I understand why you want a replacement for updating friends and family, but that's a really effortful barrier you're placing in front of deleting Facebook. For this reason you will find it way harder. And it's already harder than you think.

Take any and all barriers away from ditching FB. They are your mind tricking you into staying.


Fair point. But it's not a pipe dream. I've already registered the domain name, stood up the VPC for the new site, configured DNS, installed Apache httpd, and configured the base VirtualHost. So progress is happening. All that's left is installing a blog engine (probably Roller), creating the landing page content for the static part, and create a cert using let's encrypt.

But again, your point is valid. Probably I need to set a "drop dead" date and tell myself "if this new site isn't up by Jan 31 (or whatever), then I'm killing FB anyway".


I used the SocialFocus extension to remove those kinds of features from sites when I was still weaning off the sites.

Removing the official apps was an essential first step. Then I progressed to using mobile web sparingly with SocialFocus to trim the experience.


That's called doom scrolling.

I thought doom scrolling was specifically about negative content, but now it just means any kind of mindless endless scrolling?

No, the original definition of the word always referred to the mental state of the user. Then the definition got hijacked somehow to mean "negative content"

I blocked anything to do with Shorts because of how addictive they are.

Is it possible to block just YouTube shorts and not YouTube?

I have watch history off on YouTube, if I go onto the shorts tab on YouTube it says "recommendations are off, we rely on your watch history...".

It still shows me shorts from subscriptions on the subscriptions tab, which I don't mind. If you scroll on them it shows you ones from other subscriptions before stopping and showing that message again.

In searches it does show shorts, but will only let you scroll through ~5 before that message comes up again.

I really like this setup because I can see my subscriptions shorts, which are generally fine, and it doesn't let me spend more than like 2m scrolling.


I blocked the right elements in Safari on iOS. I use Unhooked in Firefox on my laptop.

> lately I have gotten drawn into wasting time on these various stupid "shorts" or "reels" or whatever, mostly on FB.

Yeah, that's doom scrolling




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