Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.
Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it.
And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone.
It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I used to enjoy Imgur and Reddit, but both "communities" have become increasingly hostile and less inclusive. So now I avoid both and I mentally feel much more positive about people in general.
Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind
YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life
After having been away from Reddit for a couple years now, I think it was a good trade. But obviously that’s a very personal thing.
But it's good, it made me quit the motherfucker.
Still hanging on to HN, its weaker doppelganger, though :)
Not just the hivemind, Reddit has been thoroughly astroturfed for a long time now. The vast majority of large subreddits have at least 1-2 mods who stifle/amplify discourse in the service of companies, think tanks, and certain Levantine pariah nations.
> This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated.
But check out r/pics & r/interestingasfuck
They are crazy especially after Oct 7. Constant pro-pali posts.
/r/sweden is a leftie craphole. same with /r/tillsverige and /r/svenskpolitik
Worldnews bans you instantly if you disagree with Israel. That's a default sub, yeah? Left or right wing?
It can be, but it can also (still) be sanitized.
I typically visit old.reddit.com once every day or two on a desktop browser without ads to check the subreddit for the city I live in. No doomscrolling is really possible.
There's no way to consume meta/tiktok content in a comparable way.
a few withdrawal pangs, but the mainstream version is a nope.
I'll keep checking my city page every now and then as long as my self-hosted eddrit instance keeps working.
I really like this simple statement. It gets to the heart of what is bad about social media (at least to me). Its one thing if a site has the same content that I have to actually go and crawl through myself to find things that interest me, its another when the site thinks it knows what I want/like and guides me.
The former forces me to engage my brain and explicitly engage with content (good or bad) the latter enables my brain to implicitly engage with content (good or bad).
Thank you for the statement!
If the algorithm simply says "sort by most recent", then it is pretty good.
It is the profit driven algorithms that are doing the damage.
I run a simple badword filter on my rss aggregator and it already outperforms anything big tech can come up with by a very large margin.
Back when advertisements weren't 40 minute long I one time fell asleep while watching youtube on auto play. It was already very horny for Donald Trump as the US election was coming up but after watching a few of those the algo became convinced I wanted to watch nothing else. When I woke up ~8 hours later it had filled the entire front page and all side bar video suggestions with the face of that unbearable retard. I'm convinced this is how youtube changes all of us into ufologists.
After this came a period where I more-carefully picked the videos I watched. Before I would watch anything that spiked my curiosity. This changed into "Do I want this in my feed for the next 3 weeks?". I just looked for an example and my feed has a bitcoin video. I've been waiting for those to go away for 15 years. I don't question someone is interested in those.
My own word filter is like, go ahead, say it once, say the word, say bitcoin one time, try me. Oddly, if an article consistently calls it BC without explaining what it refers to it might actually be worth reading.
I suggest someone creates something like an app store or extension platform where the user can pick or buy their own algorithms each with their own exotic brand of configuration screen.
You could entirely create one that costs thousands per month to run and is actually worth it. Have it take in my browser history, my investment portfolio, the books I own, the conversations my phone listened in on, check my agenda how much time I have for doomscrolling and my activity for how much time I actually sink into it. Dump a bunch of llm tokens into the task. Run some complicated prompts.
And then, even if you did achieve a truly personalized feed, there will be accusations you're limiting your worldview to a filter bubble**. And sure, you are. Still beats algorithmic rage-baiting. It's up to you to figure out how much you wish to engage IMO, not some tech company or virtue signaling concern troll influencer.
*An LLM is an algorithm too, duh.
People will say Twitter is worse, but the Twitter algo with actually listen to you (in my experience) when you tell it what you do/don't want to see. My feed was nearly 100% furry artwork because I refused to interact with anything else.
It ended rather quickly with me staring at my own comment looking for ways to twist what I wrote into something ban worthy. Then it happened again! LOL!
1985 Johannes Paulus II visited the Netherlands and some comedians made a song about it that was on TV. The song text is roughly that he enjoys his job and that he has to visit NL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4QL5EnHgvc
This is apparently an extremely offending video according to some anon reddit inquisitor.
I took his advice, I wont let it happen again.
The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.
If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.
Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.
I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.
I wish I was in a financial position where I didn't have to bother about this.
I've been limiting my use of social media (aside Reddit and HN) for almost two weeks now and I've been reading books and doing other things with my time rather than consuming content that isn't beneficial to me.
Check out the Wikipedia article - The Shallows
"""
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The book claims research shows "online reading" yields lower comprehension than reading a printed page. The Shallows was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
"""
I've had the thought that if I were to start a business, social media manager (or a comparable outsourced gig) would be one of my first hires.
Like I'd far rather deal with tax minutia and skip on hiring an accountant in favour of being able to outsource social media use.
So we were pretty much a nation of coke heads. It's probably much more difficult to see the harm in things when its so normalized. But of course people did and so the tide gradually shifted against it. We're already seeing the exact same process play out with social media and, more generally, digital addictions. But it's a relatively unprecedented technology in that it's essentially a digital drug that can't be especially well defined. But I expect these things are well on there way out. The age restrictions will likely come with broader prohibitions if they are positive outcomes from such, and we're already seeing exactly that in places like Australia.
Government and intelligence agencies desire to use it for mind control or whatever will probably quickly fade once they realize the same concept (which I think is quite frankly absurd - hence my sardonic term) could just as well be used against them, were it possible.
That's a common misleading myth.
Early coca cola was coca leaves and kola nut. Yes, the former contained cocaine alkaloids. But it's different from saying you take a soda and mix it with cocaine. The dosage wasn't comparable to a snorted line today.
It was marketed precisely on this point; it being a "nerve stimulant", "brain tonic", cure all for hysteria, melancholy, and more. There's a great article on it here. [1] Coke also got defensive on this point because not only was it referred to as "dope" and other such drug implicit terms, but people also began pointing out the issues with coke and cocaine.
Nobody knows exactly how much cocaine was in the original concoctions, but it is known that they began rapidly reducing the amount once the issue started being discussed. Of course I can also see that being argued as evidence of them having a bunch (oyyy, shut it down!), or indeed having a negligible amount (bahh, let's nip this nonsense in the bud). Either way it had a very non-zero amount, and people were consuming it in absurd quantities. If you believe Coke's response, 90% of all businessmen were "constant patrons."
[1] - https://clickamericana.com/topics/food-drink/cocaine-laced-c...
I don't agree. I don't know anybody snorting caffeine lines and it doesn't have all the connotations of an illicit drug either.
> It was marketed precisely on this point
Sure, but that was then, not today. That mismatch is part of why this outrage is misplaced.
Its exact potency are going to be impossible to assess because the only people that knew how much cocaine was in each serving, early on, took it to the grave with themselves. But the thing we can say is that (1) it was very non-zero and (2) consumption of said non-zero amount of cocaine was relatively widespread.
Again I think it works very well as an analog to modern times. It's fairly certain that companies have run internal studies on addictiveness since 'engagement' is already little more than a euphemism for such, kept at arm's reach. Those studies will never see the light of day, and have almost certainly been long since wiped, so we'll never know exactly how much they knew. Other than they obviously knew and know that they're intentionally creating and providing a product that is extremely addictive, and exploiting that for economic benefit.
And we're doing it right now with alcohol.
> No for real! Even YouTube!
And yet here you are
When I'm traveling and I'm less online I don't miss either. Life feels simpler.
One thing I try to do more on lichess is to just do puzzles so I don't really get the same dopamine hit of games. I guess very long time controls might be better as well. I do make the excuse that it's at least using my brain and I have gotten much better at chess.
YouTube is really the other big problem. There is a lot of actually great content and then there's a lot of garbage. I don't do Reddit or TikTok at all.
I'm not a huge fan of heavy-handed regulation, but some clinical regulation like making "Explore" tabs or feeds irrelevant to your social networks, opt-in by default would have such a Pareto improvement to all our brains.
Instead we are getting endless whinging over water usage in data centers ironically flooding our algorithmic feeds.
During the marijuana prohibition days the resounding chorus in the discourse was that marijuana was not physically addictive like other drugs, and therefore we must treat it differently. There were problems with that argument if you got into the details, but it did establish the idea that not all drugs are equally harmful and therefore treating them all equally was not logical.
It’s funny now to see these equivalencies where we’re supposed to believe that social media is no different than extremely powerful drugs that have severe withdrawal syndromes and wreak havoc on their user’s bodies. The equivalence is obviously false to anyone who has been in the sad position of knowing an opioid addict.
It’s possible to make arguments about social media that don’t depend on obviously false equivalence to powerful drugs.
"Yes, I know heroin is scary, but no, I am using it as a metaphor, and that couple has very little to do with me and you, so whats the problem? It's not like they sold you or me off." Is probably what I'll say.
It also brings to mind the OG of drug metaphors: "Religion is the opiate of the masses" nobody really chided him when he wrote that.
For someone nitpicking on details surely you noticed that nobody said that. This is a strawman you created to drag the parent poster's point off-topic.
> "The equivalence is obviously false"
And Opium is obviously not an "algorithmic feed forensically designed to hijack the brain", so clearly the poster who "sees no difference" does actually see differences, just not in the point they are making.
People will consume thousands of hours of that stuff and not be able to solve one physics problem. Endless exercise and fitness science videos and still be out of shape. Watch language learning content and never speak another language. Endless programming tutorials without ever being able to program.
As the author of the article points out, Neil Postman correctly observed that the Sesame Street didn't teach people anything but how to watch television. People watch "education YouTube" but don't get a tangible education, they learn how to watch YouTube.
In general most that an edutainment can give you is awareness that something exists and a bit of motivation to get you going and there is some value in that. Whether on the whole it’s a positive thing is a bit harder to say.
Yeah, there's lot of junk on YouTube. You might even say 90% of it. But there's tons of useful content too if you go searching for it.
Edutainment is a spectrum, while you are correct that everyone should understand they can't "learn quantum theory" in a way that can be applied meaningfully by watching videos, sparking intellectual curiosity and learning new topics/areas of interest is a good thing in general. And most edutainment that isn't so flawed/simplistic as to be wrong is better than watching an influencer whose dayjob is churning out weekly content with some alluring hook to grab viewers and mostly just inane lowest common denominator filler around it.
PBS NOVA Documentary > PBS Spacetime on YT >> YT "Fun" Science Content > TikTok "Fun" Science Content >> YT Influencer Content > TikTok Influencer Content >> YT Ragebait/AI Slop > TikTok Ragebait/AI Slop
Sesame Street isn't nearly as harmful for young kids as 2 minute TikTok AI videos that next play into God knows what. It has interesting inoffensive characters teaching useful language and social skills.
(I can't honestly say that I go and start doing chemistry after listening to NileRed...)
Just last week, Youtube took even more steps in hiding your subscriptions homepage on iOS, and on desktop the shorts (content made for phones in portrait mode) is front and centre.
Also you cannot anonymously scroll on mobile browser for long, prompts to install the app.
Anxiety gone.
I was only having 2-3 filter cups a day, probably less mg than a single large energy drink but that was enough.
No more getting anxious and worked up about small things and picking fights with my partner.
When you are trying to have none, it's suddenly everywhere and in your face without realising it.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6069268
Or listen to just a few minutes of Patrick Boyle talking about them.
https://youtu.be/IUMUJgjDvU0?list=TLPQMDYwOTIwMjbX3y5H-uRecw...
I guess it works like putting bitterant in cans of compressed air to stop people from huffing them.
It started as you expect, with more and more bot accounts pretending to be real people to either act as sleeper agents for future causes or to actively promote politics and products, except they're now interactive so you're tricked into engaging with them.
But the tipping point for me was when real people started using AI to write their posts and comments for them. And I'm not just talking about randos but about real people you follow who have written tech books and such. I've seen a few of them admit to this when confronted and they use the same excuse, that these are their thoughts and they stand by them, they're just improved by AI.
And I'm not just talking about long posts or comments. You see it with one liner responses which leads me to think that their reddit experience has now been automated and that at the most they hit approve on a queue.
So I've become cynical, almost in a state of solipsism, about every post and comment that I see, assuming everything is AI by default until I've checked which is now almost impossible with the private history. And at that point being on reddit is just like chatting with an LLM but with extra deception.
Things were a lot better for the brain when information wasn't coming in as an unending stream that even sometimes responds to what you have to say.
I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.