I am addicted to twitter and reddit. Especially reddit. It often takes the place of reading, hobbies, quiet moments, improving my home, talking with my spouse, and playing with my baby.
When reddit records a click or an upvote, it thinks it has been a Good Product, and created Engagement. Reddit then takes those feedback loops and tunes the algorithm and feedback loops to create further engagement.
But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship between my engagement with social media and my personal human flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.
> I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.
You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.
You have a cognitive disonance, logical contradiction that you just need to bring to the surface and follow through. When you are about to reddit ask yourself whether you want to or not. Not some idealized version of yourself in your head. Just what do you want right now.
Then debug, introspect. Eliminate wishful thinking and accept reality - more time on reddit less time for other things. Do I want that?
Answer yes is perfectly fine. You do what you want anyway, but in my case simply bringing these contradictions to my conscious mind (and sometimes looking for a moment where it is exactly - like, I know that it's A or B I can't be spending time on both things at the same time, If I want to learn X it requires time) is enough to eliminate them.
I still spend time on reddit (not that much), but I don't think I'm doing anything I don't want to do or that it would be better to do anything else.
We are always doing what we want to. Telling ourselves that we don't is needless suffering.
Replace "reddit" with "heroine" and not much changes, except to the same effect.
I like to think of it as "I can't stop scrolling Reddit despite knowing I'm not enjoying Reddit". I deleted the Reddit app, and blocked reddit.com (which I found myself using next) to 0 minutes on Digital Well-being (on stock Android).
Addiction is just a pattern, a framework of looking at reality. You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love.
Addiction framework and associated solutions seem to be pretty effective for things like stopping heroin usage.
Quite likely it can work for reddit too, but I'm guessing PC already tried it.
I'm just offering a different framework and way of looking at things, which works great for me - or to be even more precise, removes some suffering. One may just decide she wants to spend a lot of time on reddit, but being honest with oneself and trying not to hold logically contradicting things in one's head seems like a good thing.
I think there's some value in most of what you're saying. Your overall proposal, etc etc.
But when you say "You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love", you demonstrate that you have no idea what addiction is. No idea.
With respect, I strongly advise you to not say things like that. It's super wrong (which is okay but sub-optimal), you look dumb (which is bad for you), and it's hurtful to other people (which is bad for other people).
I hope you can continue to be naive about addiction for your entire life.
I have seen some forms of addiction up close, but I think the term is more general and we shouldnt taboo every with which some people have extremely bad emotional association with.
IMO I should be able to say I was forced to do some work even if I wasnt in a concentration camp myslef. Or that it bugs me that something is messy even if I dont have extreme OCD.
Internet addiction is a normalized term and I think withdrawal fron losing somebody you love or even a place can be more accute.
Also I'm sorry about whatever you had to experience related to addiction.
It sounds like you're mixing up the casual, colloquial use of addiction ("I'm addicted to key lime pie") with the medical term ("i suffer from addiction"). The latter is not just a failure of willpower and is qualitatively different from the former.
You can use either, but if people think you mean the latter and you start arguing points that only apply to the former, expect pushback.
Its just your association with the term pattern. Or maybe mine. To me, love, death and myself are just some patterns too.
I mean just something that we name. If we look at a tree and I say its crown forms a nice sphere, I'm not treating trees like geometric objects and I can still appreciate its beauty and marvel.
Observing the same reality you can see it through different frameworks consisting of different patterns. The same tree can be seen as color palette for a designer, bunch of areas with different living conditions for microbiologist, shapes for painter, material for woodworker etc.
Once you divide reality to some patterns in a certain way (what I call a framework) when somebody suggests different division we usually don't throw away existing one, so we subdivide our patterns based on what's somebody is saying instead of looking at a whole thing and then the other framework usually seems like a detail, not important, worse, less useful.
Being able to abandon your preferred framework for a moment allows too see the same things differently.
E.g. I can have a long conversation with somebody who deeply believes in God, (we skip the church bit for a moment) and if I substitute just a name of the pattern, if I do s/God/Universe, it turns out our worldview is virtually identical despite me being an atheist.
Perhaps I should have added "given restrictions of reality"? I mean you can have diarrhea and be currently shitting your pants. And you may not want to do that. Seems like a stronger argument than equaling heroin to reddit. But in both cases your options are limited. From those, you choose what you want. And you are then doing what you want to do (with or without telling yourself that you don't really want to do that - whether that's shooting heroin, going to rehab or changing your pants). If your argument is that what you want was not available as an option, then your problem is wishful thinking. Reality is what it is. You are here now.
As far as I understand it, a heroin addict, at times when he's not craving and has some choice, has a choice to continue doing it or to go through hell and then some. I doubt there is much cognitive dissonance before dosing. But I just don't know this context enough (except for the fact that random dude view's on life are very unlikely to help).
But in general yes, if you murder people you can apply this thinking too. You will either decide that's not what you want or have less cognitive dissonance while doing it. Happily slashing without thinking that you don't really want to do that.
I'm not selling any cure, just suggesting that there seem to be no need to ever think "I don't want to do this" and then do it. And I mean it. From cleaning up shit from the floor, through putting your dog down to going to a funeral.
It seems that you may be unfamiliar with the concept of compulsion. All you've done is water down the word "want" to meaninglessness and uselessness. It distinguishes nothing in your theory.
> As far as I understand it, a heroin addict, at times when he's not craving and has some choice, has a choice to continue doing it or to go through hell and then some.
No, not at all. I think your understanding depends strongly on your ignorance on that subject.
As a married husband (almost 20 yrs) and father of five kids, allow me to share some wisdom. Spouse time is vital to a healthy, strong, vibrant, lasting relationship. Reddit doesn't care about you like your spouse does. And kids grow up way too fast. Treasure every moment.
>> Spouse time is vital to a healthy, strong, vibrant, lasting relationship
Hear! Hear! This cannot be overstated.
>> And kids grow up way too fast. Treasure every moment.
And this on the other hand ... works only if You somehow like children (and who does not like small psychopats with dictatorial aspirations). For the others (I believe most of people who lives in my housing estate can be counted) I observe that the moments they really treasure are those when their children are is safe distance from them taking care of themselves.
Interestingly, not caring about your children will likely result in little dictators. You might not want to give them attention, they do want it, and they'll get it one way or another.
Yeah it seems like with my own children good behavior is proportional to attention. They don't ask for much, but they don't like feeling like they're in my way. If I treat them decently, they'll let me do the things I need to do, and they know I'll come back to finish up with them later.
I find time passing subjectively much faster when there are close long-term daily social connections (even remote), although maybe that’s just me getting older.
could not agree more with this. social media exists out there, but spouse and kids are right in front of you each and every day. when done correctly, seeing the growth of your family and spending time with them can be extremely rewarding, even more than the dopamine produced by interacting with the social media
The danger is that the social media provides a moderate dopamine hit but at nearly no “risk” - whereas many other situations provide a higher hit but at a much larger risk: the kid may be cranky, your spouse might be having a bad day, etc.
We tune our activities for the minimization of risk. Perhaps adding a random chance to ban you for browsing would help add some risk back in.
I am absolutely caught in a loop between refreshing reddit, hopping to twitter, hopping to Instagram, and then back to reddit — a cycle that takes just long enough for all three platforms to re-popluate with more content.
It's not healthy, and I feel bad about it.
They have got me exactly where they want me.
And like you, it's very clear that this is not conducive to human flourishing. Unfortunately, I've been caught in this, and similar loops for so long that I have a hard time knowing what flourishing even looks like anymore.
EDIT: One thing that did help me, for a time, was finding a REALLY good book, one that completely sucked me in—in this case it was David Mitchell's latest, 'Utopia Avenue'. It's been a long time since I found a really fantastic book, when you do, there's nothing better.
And I realized that the next morning, when you wake up after a long evening of reading a good book, you remember it. You remember it as being a great use of time, something you can be proud of.
An evening spent scrolling through social media is never memorable. It's never something you're proud of, something you want to tell people about.
A good night with a good book is a good use of time.
The dangerous thing about reddit is the fact that it has these wonderful nuggets of information. Some really thoughtful opinion, or some unique perspective on things. I always use the example of someone writing essentially an essay on how to make neapolitan pizza [1], including a list of references, one of them being a scientific article. Where would I find this in a book or on the internet? Blog sites and similar things usually are only there to sell ads or something else, are padded with fluff or simply wrong. Here I have someone anonymous without any ulterior motive, without fluff, just exactly what I want: pure information in a useful structure.
Similarly you can sometimes find really cool answers on /r/askscience or /r/askhistorians.
Of course, this is in stark contrast to the vast amounts of low quality posts from people posting thoughtless one-liners while they are waiting on the bus, sitting on the toilet or about to fall asleep. Not to mention many toxic comments. But every now and then I find these little nuggets which keep me hooked.
> But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship between my engagement with social media and my personal human flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.
This is why "engagement" is something only corporate f---splats say under normal circumstances. Either they secretly know it's a form of psychological enslavement or they're oblivious to the problems inherent in trying to measure it.
I’m the same, and I’ve been struggling with it for a couple of years. I’ve even addressed it in therapy, and it hasn’t helped. The only thing that has helped at all is a site blocker.
Twitter and HN mostly fill me with frustration, loathing, and angst. Like the cigarettes I smoke fill me with tar and carcinogens. Reddit at least I occasionally find something interesting, due to carefully curated subs.
For me, reddit is the one that gets me angry. It's addicting, but also seems like teenagers and bots arguing with it each other. Instagram is increasingly inundated with ads, but at least I get to see thirst traps and cute animals.
Youtube is the only social media site that I think is a net positive on my life, because I learn so much, but I've started going for runs again because I really need time away from a screen and the constant dopamine hits.
> seems like teenagers and bots arguing with it each other
Yeah that helped me with getting over the addiction. Most people dont care about your opinion, you aren't going to change anything, if some dumb teenager thinks they're smart (even though they're wrong) just let them be.
There are a lot of incredibly frustrating, problematic, and exasperating opinions and personality types to be found on HN. The particular members of any of those sets will differ based on the eyes of the beholder.
There's no shortage of passive aggression, angst, oneupsmanship,virtue signaling, dogwhistling, etc. It just so happens that there's a sufficient about of incredibly useful opinions and comments from subject matter experts that make it worth consuming in spite of the fact that it's a forum on the internet, and all of the baggage that entails.
(side note: this isn't intended as a dig on HN moderation - you probably all do a better job than most other venues. kudos.)
100% agree, which I do not take for granted. Niche communities in reddit used to be that way. Not it's an overwhelming abundance of low effort content like "me too", "tree fiddy", "and then I took an arrow to the knee"
Everyone else replying to you is trying to convince you with arguments that reddit isn't a good use of your time. As you already know, this won't work. You're already convinced.
The only thing that works is a site blocker. It actually works. Convince yourself that the block is permanent. Delete the app. This of course won't completely stop you, because you could always unblock yourself. But it'll stop you from mindlessly pulling up reddit.
If you can't control your reddit consumption already I'd expect that the site blocker will end up disabled before long. I'd try to involve a therapist if the goal is getting to the bottom of this beyond even reddit or websites in general.
Sometimes a simple "pattern interrupt" can break the cycle. If you've a habit of opening the page whenever you hop on your phone, that extra effort may be enough to push back against the potential incentive
Anecdotally, a lot of digital addictions come down to ease of access vs dopamine hit. As soon as your access method is "futz with a hosts file" or "ask your wife to unlock the blocker" (I was pretty bad), it becomes easier to break the cycle.
More people need to utilise their tendency toward lazyness, I swear
Start a habit tracker tracking # of days not browsed reddit. you can trick your brain, since it loves streaks. also tie it to some reward mechanism so it seems like you're earning something by not browsing vs a punishment.
I'm addicted to reddit too. But before that I was addicted to newsgroups and other web forums. I dont think I can blame Reddit app, I think I just love talking with people online. What I've learned is that most people really dont care about my opinion. I now only comment on stuff that I have something useful to bring, and its a topic that is really relevant to the board/thread. Those rules can cut back commenting a lot.
I weaned myself off reddit by blocking everything except i.reddit.com in my hosts file. if i blocked everything, inevitably there would be some post that I'd need to read because i stumbled upon it on google or what have you.
Now, if I really want to read a reddit post, I can. but half of the links break unless you manually change the url to include the "i." subdomain again, the interface isn't so great, but I can access all the content if i really want to, it's just inconvenient enough that you're not going to mindlessly scroll for all eternity
I totally blocked Reddit in my hosts file. If I really need a post work purposes I go to Google translate, load the post and click 'see original'. Such a hassle that I hardly ever do it. YMMV.
I think its funny that we both stumbled on a similar approach
I would encourage you to not think of this in an addiction framework. Instead think of this as a self medicating framework.
Why are you choosing reddit over spending time your baby? Do you fear handling the baby? Does handling the baby make you feel uncomfortable thoughts or feelings?
Is there something, like ego, that reddit gives you?
This is a good problem for self journaling, working with someone, or whatever your preferred form of self introspection is.
It gives a constant stream of novelty and instant gratification, two things the human mind is deeply biased to crave, delivered through an interface produced by decades of A/B testing and applied behavioral psychology.
It tastes good. People really like it. Given the choice between rice cakes and chocolate, you'd probably choose chocolate. Chocolate manufacturers test chocolates and release the more successful ones.
Does chocolate have teams of behavioral psychologists designing every aspect of the experience of its acquisition and consumption in order to create a situation in which a huge chunk of our society is unable to stop compulsively consuming it to a point where it's negatively affecting their lives?
Chronic media consumption is not always based on avoidance. It is very easy to open social media during genuine downtime "for 5 minutes" only for an hour to pass before you know it. That is just bad self control due to dopamine addiction.
Others have said, but spending time with your spouse is important. But, equally important (and it's a big part of having a good relationship) make sure you're stepping up and pitching in around the home with the chores.
Nobody likes them, but if you're not doing 50/50 (or at least something mutally recognised as fair) and you don't occasionally overachieve to give your spouse a bit of a break, it can be a big issue. If Reddit/Twitter are prioritised over getting the basics done, get that sorted out.
my problem with reddit (and here i guess?) is idk what else to do with like 5-30minutes of down time. I dont really have my life optimized for constant activity and idk what else to fill that with now.
Be bored. I’m not good at this yet, but I’m practicing just sitting there in those idle periods. It’s what we evolved to do, and what our phones are breaking us about
I almost never regret time spent reading a book. But I frequently regret time spent on Reddit/Youtube/Twitter, even if I enjoyed the content at the time.
I'm more likely these days (as the decades pile up) to deliberately stop reading a book, if it hasn't engaged me by the time I've read 20% of it. Of course, many never get started, once I do a quick scan.
I estimated how many more books I would likely read before I die, and it's a shockingly small number, even though I read a lot! So - choose wisely.
I had a similar addiction to reddit a couple of years ago, especially while I was in college. It just became something I did as part of my routine. In hindsight I don't know why, since I rarely had a good time on there. It felt like everyone was an asshole, the content was all repeats of the same shitty jokes and fake stories from people desperately trying to farm internet points. It all felt pathetic, and I knew it at the time, but something kept bringing me back.
So one day I decided to just delete my account, and that was it. As soon as the account disappeared, so did my interest in the site. It was like a switch flipped in my head. I guess it was the internet points that were tickling the addiction part of my brain?
Next time I find myself wasting too much time on a social network, I'm just going to delete the account and move on. Unfortunately, I don't think HN lets you delete your account, so I'll need to get creative if I decide to drop this site too (maybe do something to get myself banned?)
>In hindsight I don't know why, since I rarely had a good time on there.
Someone told me once that addiction is built more strongly with negative experiences and it blew my mind. I think it's probably true.
Addiction isn't built by you getting a reward, it's built by you desperately chasing a reward you never quite reach. We call a book a "page turner" not because it's a satisfying book, but because every chapter ends in some bullshit cliff hanger. Same applies to TV shows.
I would suggest that maybe you weren't addicted to reddit because it was actually giving you what you wanted, but because you were chasing some satisfaction that you never quite got. Satisfied users leave a site happy after 5 minutes and get on with life. People who have spent 2 hours opening 200 threads and still haven't got the happy feeling they came there for stay around to open "just one more thread" another 50 times.
I logged off from Twitter and Reddit and blocked it with Leechblock NG [1] on my computer. That took care of 50% of the problem. I would still browse them on my phone.
When I switched phones I decided to not install Twitter or Reddit on the new one for a week.
After getting over some FOMO on the first week, I decided to extend it for 1 month.
I have been "clean" for ~7 months now. Except for the occasional direct link from my mobile phone, and fortunately thanks to the ingrate mobile experience their webs provide, I will probably keep doing this for a while.
I find other ways to distract myself, though (other websites, doing random queries in google, etc). I am working on the underlying problems I have. But for me getting the distractions out of the way first was easier than the alternative.
A possible experiment to try: what happens when you only browse Reddit through an anonymous, not-logged-in browser and IP address? And then only use your account when you are actually sure you want to post something?
When reddit records a click or an upvote, it thinks it has been a Good Product, and created Engagement. Reddit then takes those feedback loops and tunes the algorithm and feedback loops to create further engagement.
But in reality, there's almost no positive relationship between my engagement with social media and my personal human flourishing. I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.