How'd you kick it?

jumpman500 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wasn’t able to stomach the idea of Larry Ellison being able to silently nudge my political views so I just deleted the app. Without the allure of China being able to influence my opinion I lost interest.

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mtoner23 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The android app scrollguard helped me. Stops YouTube short, reels and TikTok from being clicked on. It has massive permissions to survey my phone which could be scary. But as an addict you have to admit when you need to check yourself into rehab. And the phone is the drug.

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iepathos 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Get a life that's more interesting than dish washing 4-8 hours a day.

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c-fe 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

uninstall the app. Works really well to me. The conscious effort of reinstalling it is enough to prevent me from doing it. Whereas using the awfully implemented screentime guards, I just find myself clicking on "Allow for 15 minutes" before I even understand what I do.

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sidrag22 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think im just less prone to doomscroll type addictions, but i found myself sitting on the toilet for longer than normal when youtube shorts became something tougher to easily remove from the base youtube experience on their app.

This caused me to disable the youtube app(literally can't uninstall it on a pixel stock os), and if i ever utilize youtube on my phone its through firefox instead.

I also got the extension unhook on my desktop/laptop, and now my youtube experience is more reminiscent of the early 2010s where I would just use it to look up sports highlights or music videos, and if i don't have a video or subject in mind im not force fed one.

This also just kinda shows me how terrible the search experience is on youtube. Feel like all of their effort is on their doomscroll / suggested content, rather than their search results.

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r_lee 4 hours ago | parent [-]

personally I haven't used tiktok ever but Instagram reels are the real thing

however, I must say that youtube shorts is the worst of the bunch, even if I'm trying to be entertained, it's full of just slop spam and "top 5" or something that I'm not interested in, while reels are actually funny

I remember I'd sometimes try and get into it, scrolling just to see if I can find one thing that's actually good and just quitting because I got frustrated.

it's truly the worst of the bunch in my opinion.

and they've definitely made the overall experience worse on youtube while focusing all efforts on shorts and funneling you to it.

	▲	pbhjpbhj 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tiktok, Instagram reels, Facebook reels/shorts, YouTube Shorts ... to me these are all equally bad. I'm sure there are many other sources of attention destruction.

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gh0stcat 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's bad I can't say that I did it with willpower alone but Brick helped immensely. Their product is great, not a subscription, and even though there are competitors or you could build something like this for your phone, they're good with customer service and I would recommend their product.

Also, Unhook for removing suggestions/comments/etc from Youtube, you can basically turn everything off until it becomes a search bar and your subscriptions.

Get a good website blocking browser extension. Remove anything that resembles a "recommendation" or avoid it like the plague.

https://getbrick.app/

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bilsbie 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me it’s kicking itself lately. The content has gotten way less interesting over the past few months.

Maybe it just has to run its course.

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pjc50 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you in the US? Lots of people have reported that the forced sale "ruined" their algorithm.

	▲	bilsbie 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s definitely part of it for sure. But beyond that, the most compelling content was probably the best all time videos which I’ve exhausted. Plus half the videos now seem to cut off before they answer whatever question they posed. Very frustrating.

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mosquitobiten 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I deleted the account, made a new one from a different location at a later date and then scrolled for a few minutes and realised I would need multiple hours of scrolling through absolute shit content I genuinely despise to train the ai back to what it was. And I gave up on that and deleted the app forever.

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PlatoIsADisease 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not OP, but my favorite book of all time is Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I quit every drug, stopped playing video games, quit social media for 3 years, started exercising daily.

I'm only back on social media because it actually made my life worse being off it.

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fragmede 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the depths of it, it's the last thing before I fell asleep, and the first thing I did in the morning, so the first thing was to break that cycle. Forced myself to have an independent thought for myself in the morning before I checked TikTok/Reels/YouTube shorts/Reddit/Hacker News. Then, not bringing my phone to bed at night, then just https://xkcd.com/386/ letting people be wrong on the Internet. Unless it affects my offline life in some way, it's just not as big a deal anymore.