YouTube is addictive..

[Ethan1]

Today I decided to remove the YouTube app off my phone and to take a break from it. I realize this is my main addiction of all distractions that I have. I spend roughly 5 hours per day on this single app. Not sure if I am more addicted to my phone or just the YouTube app. I spend an abnormally large amount of time on that app. It's crazy how easily I can dissociate while watching simple videos. Especially most of the content I consume is primarily for learning and growing. I plan on limiting my use of YouTube to my laptop and enabling the DF YouTube extension to avoid getting distracted on the website.

Curious what other people think about YouTube as an addiction. Especially other websites like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and any other addictive sites/apps.

It's a great website to learn new things but the amount of endless content can become a major distraction.

[Jacob Morres]

I know the feel I spend like many hours, it's embarrassing to saw how many hahahha. I find that when i have some goals it takes a lot of time away from youtube 

[Ethan1]

@Jacob Morres True that, it sure can be embarrassing to admit how many hours one spends on the app! Thanks for saying that lol 

I once told a buddy of mine how many hours I spent on youtube.. It was around ~40 hours. He kept giving me a hard time about it being my full time job to watch videos on there.

[EnlightenmentBlog]

Everything in our day and age is designed to be addictive. Especially American stuff. 

[integral]

@Ethan1 There is a chrome extension that blocks out youtube recommended page and send you strait to subscription page. 

This solves the issue in a way, as long as what is subscribed to is tame. 

[Roy]

Yea YouTube can be crazy addicting but also crazy beneficial if you are mindful of what content you watch 

I'm extremely selective with my subscriptions. I've actually only been subbed to the same 7-10 channels for like 10 years.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Roy

[hyruga]

4 hours ago, integral said:

@Ethan1 There is a chrome extension that blocks out youtube recommended page and send you strait to subscription page. 

This solves the issue in a way, as long as what is subscribed to is tame. 

I spent more youtube time on phone than on desktop though.

Currently trying to use appblock or stay focused but both are buggy and don't work well.

[lmfao]

@Ethan1 My main addiction is to lots of technology crap and distraction there. 

I don't mean to dramatise it and make it sound theatrical, but these sites were designed to addict. They're all trying to compete for your attention, having designers who had in mind "How can I get people to spend the most time here?" 

 

Scrolling is a low level gambling mechanism. Most of the time you click and scroll, you don't find anything very entertaining/funny/interesting. But sometimes you find something good. 

Uncertainty in reward raises dopamine higher than certainty of reward, experiments on monkeys with levers showing iirc. 

[Hap E-Boi]

For me the whole internet is like heroin even though I blocked half of it using ad, social media and distraction blockers, sometimes custom scripts. My YouTube looks like this:


Only a search and side bar, I did this through custom scripting.

I'm not going to share mine as once a certain amount of people do this they will probably fix it and I'd have to re-script.

If you want it, write your own one.

Strip the UI's of distractions for every website you use often using custom scripts.

Facebook, Instagram, etc. is fully blocked and I have to do a complex procedure to unblock them.

What I do too is only booting my phone for verification codes and often unplugging the internet for several days

Also I never take my phone with me. Thoughts like, I might need my phone if I'm in trouble are self deceit of the ego. Know the ego will always find excuses. Your phone and excuses actually limit your creativity when you are in trouble abroad. For a million years humans have survived without smartphone.

If you need your phone for work you can always get a dumbphone... or another job.

It's important to torture ones ego with boredom.

For example to watch your clock one hour a day, be masochistic about that. It's better for you than 5 hours of YouTube as boredom will give you your own creative insights and solutions. Eventually boredom will cease to exist.

Other things you can do is putting a timer one your wifi router, giving you only 1 hour a day and/or intentionally getting a slow internet connection.

A internet fasting day every week can help too.

As well as deleting all social media accounts you don't need.

Keep fora though as they give less instant gratification.

Also you can turn off any notifications of messaging apps not required for work, not auto-launching them by booting your OS, etc.

Relaxing wallpapers help too, mine are of Japanese gardens.

Hopefully any of this can be helpful

Edited April 28, 2021 by Hap E-Boi

[hyruga]

Besides youtube,

I am also addicted to:

Facebook.com

Quora.com

Goodreads.com

Redcafe.net (football)

Plus some others.

I used an app called appblock or stay focused to block some apps or websites from time to time.

 

 

 

 

[Andrey]

Attention engineers are probably the best on the planet when it comes to youtube. But lets say you remove all distractions. Then what? Working non stop on a skill? You will soon grow to hate whatever that is. And just sitting and staring at a wall won't cut it. Maybe taking life a bit more relaxed is not so bad.

[hyruga]

On 4/30/2021 at 2:00 PM, hyruga said:

Besides youtube,

I am also addicted to:

Facebook.com

Quora.com

Goodreads.com

Redcafe.net (football)

Plus some others.

I used an app called appblock or stay focused to block some apps or websites from time to time.

Besides YouTube,

I am also addicted to:

Audible/Audiobooks/Video courses/Zoom/Webinars

Facebook/Instagram

Quora.com

Goodreads.com

Redcafe.net (football)

Netflix

Actualized.org

TV

I used an app called 'appblock' to block some apps or websites from time to time.

[Podie45]

Youtube is the only thing that's keeping me addicted to the internet 

[Gladius]

As always, the key is balance.