I second that request and opinion.
Nostalgia isn't anymore what it used to be, but I quite fondly think back to the time where I really dove deep into learning computer science and technology. That was 20 years ago, and already back then I considered myself to be quite active on the internet:
Back then it was still dial-up – well for me ISDN, but still dial-up, with the connection metered by the second. Most "consumers" back then just installed their ISPs software on their machine and actively chose to "go online".
For me it was a little bit different. I had a small Linux box running in the cellar (which also worked as a Fax gateway for my mothers small business (thanks HylaFax)), which was essentially a communications hub. It ran an MTA+IMAP (somehow SuSE made creating a sendmail.cf manageable, on that box I never touched that part directly), a NNTP cache (Leafnode), Squid HTTP proxy. And a little script that would actively pull a set of predefined URLs (news sites) and domain local followup links into the Squid cache.
Dial-up happened on demand whenever a request could not be fulfilled from the local cache. And if a connection to the internet was made, all the caches got refreshed and mail fetched and sent out. The upshot of this was, that while you were working on your computer with an open browser, MUA and Usenet client, you might have the impression, that you were actually "online", but as a matter of fact, actually getting connected to the internet happened only sporadically.
But for this to work, you had to predefine, what you'd be interested in, so that it would be cached. For anything outside of the cache you'd hit by the time-it-took-to-dial-up penalty, which kind of discouraged mindless browsing between work.
So maybe that's a way to tackle this problem: Instead of blocking "harmful" websites, just add some significant delay to loading them and make them load slow.
I have always seen my PC more as tool to actually get work done and my smartphone primary as a communication and entertainment device. I think we can all agree that it is very difficult to get actual work done on a smartphone, so perhaps the form factor itself is what makes me more inclined to mindlessly browse.
- Consider using a tool like Dash to create an offline cache of docs so you can turn off WiFi and still program effectively https://kapeli.com/dash
- What freelancer community did you join?
I've heard the advice for writers of "turn of your wifi and just write without distractions". But, coding requires the internet in most cases. Hacker News is simultaneously enriching and distracting for me. Youtube is the source of all knowledge, both useful and incredibly banal.
I started using hnwatcher.com to notify me when certain topics I care about come up on Hacker News and that was a big level up in being more smart about time spent on here.
Reddit I have no idea how to use. I have the feeling I should just permaban it from my life, but it does have it's uses. Same with Twitter. Youtube has probably sucked more of my life away than anything else watching dumb videos that aren't useful or even entertaining/relaxing. It's one thing to do something to relax, but some of my internet surfing seems to fall into this weird middle ground of neither productive or fun, just addicting.
Perhaps one option is, as someone else mentioned, more curation. I don't usually have to worry about reading the news even though I do, since I know I'll get word of important things from my friends who do read the news a lot.
I recently joined a private freelancer community online, and that has replaced a lot of what I used Reddit effectively for - finding new ideas and rubbing shoulders with peers.
I'm also a fan these days of mailing lists since they are not sources of infinite content like Youtube/Reddit.