For full disclosure our product turns the Internet off until they complete goals like studying, completing quizzes, commiting to GitHub, etc.

Our first launch was a DNS only solution which we assumed lacked usage because people had to change their DNS address to one we spun up for them. It lacked usage and we assumed it was because it was "too technical" for parents.

Next we create an iOS app that worked out of the box as a VPN without any setup. We don't even ask the users to register in any way or pay anything.

Lastly we created a Chrome extension because it's the easiest way for tons of kids with Chromebooks to use.

Long story short, after multiple re-launches and trying to get feedback the overall result is that it's an almost impossible task to get parents or kids to change their habits, even if they "want" to. They will make up excuses and quit nearly instantly.

What makes all this Hard is the plethora of legitimate use. When I canceled home internet, I was unable to log in to work from home (five minutes a day in the evenings helps keep the compute cluster rolling). When I switched to a flip phone I started cooking less- the smartphone had made planning meals & shopping easier. When I remove Chrome, inevitably a week or two later I'm on the road and want to book a hotel or find a campground or check on road construction. When I switch my phone to greyscale, weather charts & maps become impossible to read.

Personally, if I was working on code & my goalposts were a commit to GitHub- well, without access to stackoverflow I might never be able to finish.

All that said, thank you for your perspective. It is not hard to believe many people do not actually want to change.

It's definitely a tough market. I suspect that it will be the larger corporations with enough revenue that can release such products into the market - and probably even release them as free features of an existing suite of products (e.g. iOS with Downtime, Disney's Circle[1], etc), as opposed to a standalone product.

[1] https://meetcircle.com/time-limits

I've lost weight with a phone app. I never could have done Weightwatchers or something like that before.

Also fitness apps are great in gamifying exercise a bit. Again another app has really helped me.

Actually gamifying good habits might help more than trying to remove bad habits with an app which might be the issue with apps to try and reduce digital addiction.

It's freemium and only a one time payment for pro (ie - not investor friendly) but I really enjoy being able to work on improving it every day. I sometimes get nice emails from people which helps motivate me more.

My app is called Cold Turkey (https://getcoldturkey.com). It's for Windows and macOS only, because of the security restrictions on smart phones. It uses browser extensions (with native messaging) to do the blocking, but if you disable the extensions during a block, Cold Turkey closes your browsers until you re-enable them.

On internet use restriction the best solution so far has been to use a simple electronic plug timer connected to a laptop without a battery. Zap - no internet for you.

There ought to be a solution that installs itself into the computer's firmware though. Most of us on HN install new operating systems at a much higher rate than the typical user so having a persistent solution would be huge.

This has been a known challenge for centuries. How did you address it during design of your product?

Making an anti-addiction product is by its nature the opposite of a sellable product. And the people who have the frontal lobe to willingly go against their addiction, have already solved their problem.

I think you could make the argument that weight loss products could fall into this category. There are a ton of diet books/advice, and Weight Watchers has a market cap of 4.4B.

As for actual products, I know there's the kitchen safe:

https://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Safe-Locking-Container-Height...

Also 700k+ people have installed StayFocus (a website blocker) for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

It's not an easy place to build a business, but there are lots of resources spent on these problems now. They affect families, businesses, and individuals. Figuring out how to line up these things and make a viable business is complex, but some people will figure it out.

But then on the other hand: http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructur...

But ... you can sell to parents. Their _job_ is to place helpful limits on their kids due to the fact that the kids' frontal lobes can't (yet?) do it for themselves.

And "tech addiction" is a huge problem among teens.

I recall the studies showing the difference between Vietnam veterans who got hooked on dope and those who didn't, as well as Bruce K. Alexander's Rat Park experiments.

The other thing I've learned is that control or blocking tools can be self-defeating, since they transform fighting the addiction into a perpetually unfinished task ("It's been Y time since I did X") that naturally remains to the forefront of your brain and leaves you vulnerable if you end up in an environment without those restrictions. It's ultimately easier to address the underlying causes of trying to escape through technology.

Shit television or movies are much more entertaining when drunk or high. Social engagements that are not mentally stimulating to me are much more bearable when in an altered state.

I picked up a few hobbies that I really enjoy and I no longer feel the need to hit the weed vape pen 5 times on my walk home from work. I paint, do yoga multiple times a week, read a lot, and I'm more selective about the social events I go to because I've got other things I can occupy my time with.

I realize I'm just one data point but I think a lot of people use their vices to stave off boredom and make a life that is not all that interesting, interesting.

Tech addition is a bit different because it's hard to unplug entirely because many of us need to use screens for work. Removing all the social media apps from my phone and limiting my screen time at home has been huge for my ADHD brain. I don't have to have my phone at my side constantly anymore. I find myself enjoying experiences instead of trying to bottle them up for presentation on an app.

Maybe I sound a bit anti-tech but I believe a lot of people have gone too far down the rabbit hole and haven't realized it yet.

Started for my Dad with email, then the blackberry, now the iPhone/FB etc...

Before that you could argue cable tv (for most kids after school)..

Don't forget about Netflix binges today etc...

It increasingly looks to me like the problem with vices like this (anything from Facebook to pot) is exactly what you describe.

Too often, we talk about them like they ruin people's lives directly. There are a hundred thinkpieces taking correlations like "men who work shorter hours play more games" or "unhappiness is correlated with Facebook use" and concluding "therefore games drive you to not work and social media makes you unhappy!" But we're not talking about things with physical mechanisms or direct brain-chemical impacts here, and I wouldn't expect all the Skinner Box design in the world to make "flashy lights on a screen" more compelling than a tasty dinner or a good hug.

Rather, social media, games, or endless Reddit scrolling slot all too easily into downtime and unsatisfying situations. My experience with them has always been that of a mild sedative; they create a tolerable baseline state for what might otherwise be intolerable situations. (I think the analogy to drinking prior to a crap TV show or a boring event is a great one. It's not alcohol addiction or abuse in any standard sense, but it's still alcohol legitimizing some other bad situation.)

That can still make tech a problem inasmuch as it stops people from breaking out of those situations. But if the situation is externally imposed then it's playing a positive role, and if the situation can be broken with an offering tech doesn't interfere with then it's not playing a negative role. I do think there are people who would benefit from cutting back on tech, and I think we underestimate the impact of push notifications and instant focus switching on our attention. But I also think we neglect a lot of cases where tech is a palliative for some other problem we would be better off attacking directly.

My wife and I recently bought a house and I've been finding that I'd rather spend time fixing it up than playing games or doing other stuff with electronics much of the time.

That doesn't mean that I've quit wholesale, though. I eventually get physically or mentally tired and want to just relax, and it's back to the games I go.

My point is that tech isn't what drives my life, it's just one of the things that I enjoy. And actually improving our house has proven even more enjoyable.

I don't think the "solution" for "tech addiction" (as most people see it) is limiting phone time or focusing on the tech at all. Instead, the solution is for people to find a hobby that doesn't require an internet/cable connection and enjoy that instead.

And if they don't, it doesn't bother me a bit. People can do what they want, so long as it doesn't harm others.

People who have an actual "addiction" should seek professional help, though. Not some random guy that's making a startup, but someone with an actual degree in a profession that can help with mental issues.

Plus you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

That was what completely killed my interest in any amount of game grind- it hit me mid-game that if I spent that time grinding my actual corporeal self, I'd have something to show for it after.

I've since improved my AeT mile pace (your "all-day" level) from around 15:00 to 10:00ish. (My dream/goal is to get to 7:00-8:00 at that level of exertion)

It probably helped that I did just enough game design to be acutely aware of even less-obvious time sink mechanisms, but I don't think it was an essential feature of what changed. Even simple puzzle games and other things that aren't manipulative started to pale in the face of the realization that "hey, I could go fix a broken shelf or read a book or exercise and get a lasting benefit".

It's not a sense of duty or anything else people would describe as "not being lazy", doing something fruitful just started feeling better. I still play games, and I'm happy with that, but the set of games has shrunk to things with ongoing interest and no grind, and the timing to stretches where I'm tired, stuck (e.g. at an airport), or playing with friends.

I don't doubt that addictiveness is a real factor, but I think lots of horror stories about gaming and tech addiction grab the wrong end of the stick. I've seen a half dozen people take "young men now work fewer hours, and game for a similar number more hours" and say "obviously, games destroyed their will to work!" Meanwhile, half my friends have gamed heavily when they had crap jobs, short-term rented apartments, etc, and then stopped as soon as they got bored and found opportunities for lasting improvements. Games are a fantastic way to kill a lot of time comfortably, but that doesn't mean they override all our other impulses.

And that's okay. But getting myself to believe that was okay took some doing. I struggled with it for years before I finally found a good balance that didn't make me think I should be more production instead of relaxing.

I wish I could relate to this. IRL grinding seems hilariously inefficient and unreliable, which I think is why people enjoy their gaming grinds so much.

That might have been easier for me to sign up for now that I am older, and more comfortable thinking about multi-year horizons.

(2) Even those who can easily afford the best professional help, e.g., Ben Affleck, end up having to go back into an in-patient addiction treatment center multiple times (3 times so far for Affleck, the first time's being in 2001), which casts doubt on the effectiveness of professional help.

(3) Some people need to advance in their career before they can afford professional help, but addiction makes it harder for a person to make progress in life. An affordable tech solution or partial-solution to addiction can help break this vicious cycle.

Moreover, treating the symptom without treating the disease will be an inordinate struggle until the underlying issues are understood, processed and addressed. This will leave most of the afflicted no better off, and in some ways, significantly worse for the failed effort.

Mental health is costly and difficult. There is no shortcut around this. You can't replace it with an app, or we would have replaced it with a book.

Addiction is an obstacle to learning and (more generally) to making progress in life because a large fraction of one's potentially-productive time gets absorbed by the addictive behavior.

Replacing an iPhone or Android phone with a phone that is even slightly less addictive (if such a phone existed) would allow a person and those who care about the person to engage in the probably-years-long process of learning and trial and error faster, resulting in fewer years lost to addiction (statistically speaking).

* * *

Seeing concrete examples of lives ruined by addiction (or by some other illness) makes a person uncomfortable. A natural human response would be for me to reduce that uncomfortable feeling by telling myself it will happen to me because, e.g., (a) the sufferer behaved immorally whereas I am moral or, e.g., (b) the sufferer did not obey the rules of society whereas I do.

Are you sure that you haven't reduced your discomfort around addiction by telling yourself that it cannot happen to you or those you love because you and those you love are willing to do the hard work of getting to the "root cause" of the addiction?

(Or maybe you believe that it can happen to you, but that you will be able to fix the root cause before a large fraction of your life is ruined by the addiction.)

I ask because your comment skates close to what we might call "essentialism", in which you argue that it is useless for you and I try to help the addict because what is wrong is something essential to the addict, so of course only the addict himself can help.

However, we know that is useless and wasteful to treat a symptom of addiction as if it was a disease - milquetoast penny pragmatism notwithstanding.

I wonder whether this next would be considered by you as merely treating the symptom of addiction:

Joe notices that most of the time he spend on the web is wasted time. So he cancels his home internet connection and relies on his connection at work to get done everything that needs to get done on the web. For example, at work he downloads movies and TV shows from the iTunes Movie Store (or whatever they're calling it now) onto his MacBook for watching at home. (or he uses youtube-dl to download Youtube and Daily Motion videos.)

Is that in your opinion uselessly treating a symptom of addiction?

If he was, he found something else to replace it, and is no better off.

I propose that most of the hours lost to tech addiction will be lost by people with a severe life problem (e.g., they're paralyzed and in a wheelchair; e.g., they have an incurable disabling illness; e.g., they cannot get a job because they're ugly and have an IQ of 70) in addition to the addiction. Most of them will not be able to find anyone trustworthy and sane to marry them. Most of them will not be able to buy a house.

It is natural for a person to respond to the assertion that X is dangerous (or pernicious) by focusing on how dangerous X is to people sufficiently like themselves without considering the danger (or perniciousness) to people in different life circumstances.

Edit to add:

I should have clarified/furthered my thoughts - and it's true you shouldn't by default trust a startup to do things safely or ethically, you should certainly do your due diligence that they aren't making claims that can't be backed up, nor are following processes (etc) that can do more than what is a pre-existing level of acceptable risk/harm.

Presumably however, if they're/a startup is expecting to survive in the long-term they'd need to be leveraged and connected with safety and people with the appropriate knowledge, because they should be scrutinized more thoroughly if they're involved with health. Otherwise they're going to die off - and hopefully without hurting too many people or getting too big, like where we could reference Theranos.

This is crankery. Not all doctors are the best medical practitioners, but I will always trust a random medical doctor more than a random “health” startup.

That's a very risky assumption to make. Ethics are often secondary considerations for engineer and business thinking (for better or worse). To the point that people advocate the removal of ethics courses from university STEM curricula (not sure how widespread this viewpoint is, but I've heard it my entire adult life, so this whole century).

Presumably however, if they're/a startup is expecting to survive in the long-term they'd need to be leveraged and connected with safety and people with the appropriate knowledge, because they should be scrutinized more thoroughly if they're involved with health. Otherwise they're going to die off - and hopefully without hurting too many people or getting too big, like where we could reference Theranos.

Do you have much experience personally dealing with healthcare systems to reference?

I want to address your point here, but I have no idea what it is.

There is also a difference between healthcare in countries like Canada vs. the US, where you can compare how "free market" the different systems are - see where more innovation has occurred or stagnated due to policy or other.

My point is that it's dangerous to blindly trust professionals - professional titles that were/are created and maintained through systems that include indoctrination - and just because they have a degree in something doesn't mean you should trust them (on a simpler level, just because someone has their driver's license - doesn't mean you should assume or trust they're a good driver). And obviously I'm not relating this type or level of trust to say someone who's gone through schooling who's a brain surgeon, to trusting someone else who just claims to be a brain surgeon but has no references or experience.

The problem with indoctrination is there is new knowledge and tools being developed every year, however that knowledge is not distributing - it takes far too long, in part, because of indoctrination.

There's indoctrination within individual organizations/companies as well, with like Theranos, where the VCs and controllers must not have understood the science themselves - or had trusted parties they could refer to outside of the company - and so it could grow to the scale it did.

The free market can counter these complexes, it's just not going to be a simple endeavour, it will be complex. And just because the free market can solve these issues, doesn't mean there shouldn't be societal changes and rules enacted, and doesn't mean that this same free market and say health-care industry can't be part of creating problems that then need to be addressed.

I assume the exact opposite of nearly every startup.

“They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”

And once again, Facebook et al, ties into health as social is health. Facebook did some experiments/research specifically to see the impact of showing more positive or more negative posts to people, on a large scale, and without people expressly knowing or asking to participate. They should have gotten into huge trouble for this. How would you prevent this otherwise than having good whistler-blower laws, along with substantial rewards for doing so? Is the best option have someone else notice the problems and develop competition that is a better solution? It's difficult of course to compete with things like network effect and economies of scale, so then it will take more effort, more ambition, more passion, and perhaps more resources and time to reach the same scale - if that scale is even healthy.

23andMe were shut down for a period by the FDA.

There are of course plenty of healthcare startups that are working within the established boundaries of the existing system, but if you want to push those boundaries, it's going to take a while for regulations to catch up, and in the meantime caveat emptor.

A month or so ago, I took a two week trip across France and Spain, it was one of the most lovely experiences of my life, staying in great places, eating amazing food, etc. It was honestly about as wonderful and stimulating of an experience as I've ever had.

About halfway through it I started to realize that I was still attached to my phone. I was sitting on trains reflexively checking Twitter for the disastrous updates in American politics instead of looking out the window at the Pyrenees, or in a museum constantly reaching for my pocket.

In my personal story I took drastic action. I added parental controls to the phone, deleted some apps, made a commitment to keep the phone out of the bedroom, and other stuff, and have noticed a drastic improvement in mental health.

I don't discount your experiences, they likely work for you and I believe you. Just like how many people can go into bars without becoming alcoholics, but there are other people who need to take affirmative steps towards abstinence, and avoid certain people places and things, as they say.

But that's the nature of an addictive cycle. Not sure it actually in fact matters how great your life is, once you've acquired that addiction it's a habit that requires being affirmatively broken.

But were they really?

The thing I'm no longer afraid to admit about myself - I don't enjoy such stuff. I don't derive much pleasure from views of nature, don't like typical tourist destinations (for instance, last year I went to Pripyat, and liked it much better than Lviv or Kiev). I don't enjoy eating local cousine, I prefer regular commercial-grade pizza, thank you. I tried pretending that I like "normal" things for a long time, but this cognitive dissonance isn't worth it.

I still agree with GP here - if the things you do are fulfilling, you'll be less inclined to pick up the phone. For me, it won't be France or Spain, but it will be a programming side project. It won't be hiking, but it will be going out with an air gun and shooting a bit. I don't feel an addiction to tech then, but get me back to the office, and suddenly the addiction is back too.

To be clear: I'm not discounting the addictiveness of consumer-oriented tech - but I do feel that it's often easier to break the feedback loop by fixing the other end of it.

I just disagree with this whole idea that there HAS to be some "missing hole" that phones fill. These apps are addictive, that's not really a secret they are designed to be by teams of brilliant people.

It's possible that many heroin addicts have "holes" in their life that they fill, but it's also pretty much a certainty that if you take a random person and unwittingly feed them heroin for awhile telling them it's harmless, they're going to have withdrawal symptoms if they stop.

I'm aware of the Rat Park study and it's interesting but it's pretty isolated and hasn't been replicated, and either way it's just one intriguing counterpoint, not dispositive.

It's often a misconception that 12 step programs talk about getting to "root causes" first. They do, to some extent, but they always focus immediately and completely on total abstinence until that has been achieved.

Then, the "root causes" stuff is really better described as picking up the pieces of a broken life, and specifically a ton of broken relationships, since the one thing all addicts have in common is a large number of close relationships with people that they have ruined.

Sobriety in that context really isn't about getting to and fixing "root causes" to be honest. It's more about setting up a set of current habits, and social support, that are based around non addictive behaviors.

What point are you even making here? You know there's a difference between physical dependence and addiction, right? Someone who isn't a heroin addict can easily stop taking it if they are weaned off. And heroin addicts relapse all the time after physical withdrawals have subsided.

That's a bit dubious as a blanket statement. Perhaps you're creating a distinction without a difference?

My point pretty much sums to "addictive things are addictive"

Yes, addiction is more nuanced than that, some people are exposed to addictive things and don't get hooked.

But it seems like people in this thread are trying to advance this idea:

addiction = addictive thing + preexisting problem

Therefore, the solution is to get rid of that preexisting problem and voila, addiction is fixed.

I'm not sure I buy that. I'm sticking with the idea that certain substances, or technologies, are inherently likely to create habits and dependency in most humans who are exposed to them.

I count social media and heroin in that category.

There is certainly a difference. Your body, physically, will be fine without heroin. But emotionally, you feel empty without it, and as soon as some emotional trauma - stress, sadness, fear or despair rears its head, you relapse. I guess you could argue that emotional need is no different than physical need, but I don't think that's quite the point you're trying to make

> I just disagree with this whole idea that there HAS to be some "missing hole" that phones fill.

I don't think there is one either. I think there's a general sense of ennui growing in our society that is partly responsible here.

Have you considered you like commercial grade food because of the possibly addictive ingredients they use, like excessive sugar and salt?

I realize now that using the phrase "commercial-grade" might have implied I mean stuff like frozen pizzas in grocery stores. I did not mean that, though there are some brands of frozen pizza that taste quite good when passed through oven.

When comparing natural and artificial stimuli I like to refer to this comic, which lays out the issue at hand beautifully: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/supernormal-stimuli/

You said: "but there are other people who need to take affirmative steps towards abstinence, and avoid certain people places and things, as they say."

To clarify, you each are saying two different things; with Bakery addressing the disease, and you common symptoms (of failed attempts at trying to cure symptoms).

For example, let's say you're an addict of some sort and you get "treatment" (e.g., 30 day detox). But the problem is, you drink because X happen to you as a child. You "addict" (so to speak) to mask that pain. But the detox treatment never addressed that root cause. Quitting the habit doesn't eliminate the need that created that habit.

After 30 day you check out. For a moment, you're clean. In your mind, you've got it beat. However, humans are also creature of habit, as well as creatures of conformity (i.e., we "default" to the norms around us). When it comes to basic behaviors context matters. A lot.

You return to your old neighborhood, old friends (likely some are also addicts), etc., old TV shows. More of less, the same routine. Keep in mind, you're not cured, only __temporarily__ clean. In no time at all you're off the wagon. Why? Because your root problem was never cured to begin with. And being human means you assume the "norms" around you.

Sure, you can abstain from your device. But you still haven't solved The Problem (upper T upper P intentional). You simply grabbed a balloon. The root cause is now likely to pop out somewhere else.

The device enables these things - take the device away and they will still exist - it does not create them.

It doesn't make sense to blame the device for what is ultimately a human behavior issue. The abuse of the device __is__ a red flag for "we have a problem here" and that problem is not the device. "Curing for the device" will not solve the root problem(s).

For those people, the device itself, and the relationship with the device, is the place to look when trying to improve the situation.

There is also an issue of practicality here. Even for people with significant issues that need to be addressed, it may be practical to do things like adjusting how one uses the phone, as a stepping stone to actually fixing the deeper issue.

Yes. But don't you see the irony in that statement? How "normal" can you be if a device and a few swipes "makes" you into something else? Sure, maybe without the device you could bottle it up? But for how long? And at what cost? Where does that "energy" go (to other bad habits)?

If what you said was true then EVERYONE would have this problem. As it is, that's just not true. In fact, the media often spins reports of those not on social media as being abnormal.

Don't get me wrong. We do have a collective problem. But it's bigger than just these devices, and simply blaming the devices is not going to help solve for the root.

Your depiction doesn't match common usage of smartphones -- people check them 150+ times per day, and saying "it's just a swipe" is meaningless. But regardless, why don't we sample the population and find out? It's my understanding that the current scientific consensus is that modern media and tech is having noticeable adverse effects on individual well-being and social relationships. If this is not the case, I would like to know!

I don't see any irony. There are inherent difficulties involved in being human... I wouldn't find it surprising if regular people are susceptible to sophisticated tech that takes advantage of cognitive characteristics to maximize time in app purely for advertising dollars, and that this may have adverse affects.

> If what you said was true then EVERYONE would have this problem.

This may be true, to varying degrees. This is something we need to research and take seriously.

I think there are many amazing, good things about modern technology and even social media. But we shouldn't turn a blind eye to potential negatives or blame completely normal individuals for being affected by these massive, unprecedented changes.

> But it's bigger than just these devices, and simply blaming the devices is not going to help solve for the root.

I agree there are many factors here, and I was not saying we should ignore all the other factors.

By the way, I'm not proposing any specific remedies, if you are worried about that. That is a different conversation.

When traveling, thus far I've skipped getting local service. At least where we've been, WiFi is scarce, and as a result the phone remains a valuable planning tool but becomes useless as a dopamine drip.

It's more like how I imagine a pocket computer "should" be- you can find WiFi & make a video call back home, you can look up information about the town, you can store maps and boarding passes, play music, snap reference photos of signboards, check in with your bank, etc. But 98% of the time it's slumbering in a corner of your luggage (and getting great battery life)

FWIW, this ultimately led me to a relatively low-data plan at home, 500MB/mo, both to save money as well as to slow the drip.

dopamine receptor abuse by these giant companies with a large line item for psychological research.

A lot of the time, though, we have to quit dysfunctional behavior before we can identify what functional behavior looks like.

I totally agree with you that there is a chicken and egg problem. My typical advice for folks is to quit the behavior completely: you're correct in identifying how blocking tools cause their own problems and just mimic the same addictive behavior.

Then, at that point, it's going to be necessary to find some other behavior, but that's often a lot easier once you've got to do something... you just have to make sure that the things you choose to do are good.

Like, I gave up my codependent relationship with my ex wife, and that made it possible to give up drinking, but I still have to play a shit-ton of scales on guitar and piano and about an hour of yoga or I get weird.

Or I quit facebook, but now I do a a daily run of Kahn academy and working on electronics projects; that's a symptom, but it's a symptom that I enjoy.

Found this very refreshing. I think 'eccentricity as medicine' may be a component missing from modern mental health treatment. Seems like the societal pressure to 'not seem weird' could exacerbate mental illness and stress. Perhaps if people with behavioral dysfunctions were encouraged not to "act normal" but "act weird in productive ways" it could be beneficial.

Meditation is supposed to shine a light on that. Since few people ever just sit down without entertainment or work, the meditation posture becomes a way to notice (and subdue) one's constant tendency to reach for something to enjoy or accomplish.

This craving comes as part of "attachment", the way our minds are hooked up into all kinds of duties, relations, plans, hopes, fears, etc. Mental life is like swinging from branch to branch in a jungle of obligations, desires, aversions, gossip, anxieties...

In modern parlance it's the phenomenon that makes us feel constantly stressed about all kinds of stuff, in the most general sense, up to and including the end game vision that one day we're going to die, so we better get to work.

Every time I check something off my todo list, two more things appear...

Without buying into Buddhist metaphysics, I do think it points out something that's extremely palpable in these days, thus the recent (fading?) trending interest in meditation and mindfulness.

Another lucid perspective on it is McLuhan's, like in a brief essay called "The Agenbite of Outwit."

http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...

With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.

Mental health in the age of the internet indeed seems like a major topic.

But on the other end of the spectrum, Sugata Mitra, the educator, likes to say humanity has just uncovered the ability to murmurate like starlings, thanks to the hyperconnectivity the internet enable. It's still early days and pretty chaotic and mad, but just like a crowd has some magical self organizing ability to synchronize their clapping, who knows whether this hyper connectivity is on the verge of producing the same. I'd like to think we will get there, and are just going through a temporary bumping into each other phase. The talk for anyone interested - https://youtu.be/upg8LlJZtas?t=3567

For example I remember when I was living at home, me and my brother and sometimes even my mom, we would chat on some instant messenger (or IRC) instead of talking...

That can be framed as some kind of dystopian nightmare, but it's also just two people talking using a textual medium, and why is that bad or unnatural?

What if we could have both meditation retreats and something like online immersion retreats?

What if a couple relationship can be improved by using social technology, what if that stuff doesn't only ruin our natural wholesome way of being but can instead really bring us closer and allow for whole new ways of understanding each other...

Which it probably is if you're striving for the kind of nirvana that Buddhist monks strive for...

But "laypeople" shouldn't get meta-anxious about it and try to achieve a mental peace that's impossible in their life situation.

Even in Zen they have the saying "no work, no eat."

But yeah, maybe we spend 98% of our waking life in attachment, when a better ratio would be, say, 80%?

And the insidious thing about "tech" is that it's constantly available. It's almost like having a schizophrenic voice in your head that interrupts every quiet moment.

I think everyone has their own little ways of getting some daily quietude, but I do also think that with the current state of advanced distraction technologies, it's not rare for someone to spend a whole day "online."

So the least I can do is instruct my smartphone to limit my usage of certain things which I find reduce my quality of life but are very distracting.

I see it as elimination through substitution

Here's a well made video [0] on this exact topic from, "Kurzgesagt," a YouTube channel.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg

"I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good."

First, This requires users to setup this software. Then, there is nothing stopping them from working around or disabling it at anytime. If the software can’t be disabled then the user will switch to another product.

If someone is really trying to curtail their software addiction, actual dedication will be required, not just the activation of some tool that they can easily disable with a few taps.

And because these tools will likely not work for the majority of people, Apple and Google have every incentive to incorporate them into their operating systems and gobble up the market share (which they are already doing in their latest operating systems).

A more traditional and therapeutic approach to the problem makes more sense to me, though it won’t scale well and the market doesn’t seem very big

Sure. But I think there's a bit of false dichotomy in this comment: you're either free or addicted with no control. There's a whole spectrum of behaviours. I do sometimes sink more time than I'd like into some service, and blocker apps solve that issue for me. Even a reminder: "do you really want to do this" would be enough in some cases. People I know have also been happy with a Facebook app blocker that monitors usage time.

You can uninstall all of that, but none of the people I'm taking about are completely out of control - just want to improve our lives.

If someone's literally addicted with no self control, that's a completely different issue though.

Tech is a convenient scapegoat for environments unconducive to focus and lack of interest in the task. It can also help with emotional state management which is useful over just banging your head against the wall. One use I find for HN is that it is usually pretty good at getting me in a rational and focused state of mind - it is similar to the benefit of a dedicated office vs your home PC. Productivity research in general suffers from a beancounting mentality in treating everything like it is turning an oar.

1. Get a kitchen timer, use pomodoro technique.

2. Realize that overcoming something is a not a viable longterm solution. If you overcome something once you have to keep overcoming it. Better option is to spend your energy figuring out how to achieve your goal by not overcoming, eg: to replace netflix, develop a passion for cooking, replace netflix with cooking.

Get people to pay for an app? Any price other than free means crossing a pretty major psychological barrier.

Oh wait...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/09/08/t...

SOCIALIST: late capitalism has created a moral rot that pervades our entire society NEOLIBERAL: but imagine if we monetized the rot

https://twitter.com/trillburne/status/750721471157198848?lan...

There's not a lot of money to be made in stopping people from self-abstaining from pleasure. If someone wants to quit drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, then they can do so without having to pay for much (assuming they're not vulnerable to D.T. health wise). And while there's marginal amounts of money to be made off of nicotine patches or AA literature, these products pale in comparison to the amount of money generated by the alcohol and tobacco industries.

am i a silence addict? if i enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers everywhere i went and talked their ear off in a friendly manner, would i be a social addict? some people enjoy looking at text and images on a screen during downtime in their day, it's a habit. a potentially useful one that helps connect to a world outside of immediate physical space, should _we_ disincentivize public escapism? what about reading or drawing in public then? perhaps it's dangerous if people look at each other too much. and why don't _we_ standardize clothing so that everyone feels more equal. and do _we_ really need so many words, how about _we_ reduce it down to a few hundred useful ones and just stop teaching the others. who is we, we is us, and us is we.

if you give people freedom to do a lot of different things, they may not make good individual choices which can lead to bad collective actions. if they were individual choices they will be individually self-corrected. do you value freedom or outcomes? because you're going to need a big hammer to get all your outcome nails nice and flat. alternatively you need to build your civilization on a different moral foundation, something like social harmony or public good. you might find a strong central government, no immigration, with an insulated and culturo-ethnically homogeneous population with a tendency towards being socially and fiscally conservative, family oriented and not prone to large unfunded liabilities in domestic ponzi schemes and international military escapades; as pre-requisites to your social engineering utopian fantasies. america is about fuck you and fuck you too.

Apple's business doesn't. I think Screen Time and App Limits will likely become two of Apple's main competitive advantages going forward because of it -- there's no way Google or Facebook could offer such a product for their services in any meaningful way without destroying their core business.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/6/17655520/google-digital-we...

I have it on my Pixel 2 and it works great.

Sure Apple depends on screen addiction too. Why would somebody buy a $1000+ phone and then not use it?

You eventually just get an unhappy userbase that’s about to burn themselves out of your ecosystem with the latter. Think this is what the OP is hinting at since Apple has pricing models that are less reliant on the latter.

The driver of the “phone addiction” problem is obviously direct economics. Companies are organized around profit, and more phone time means more profit (especially in ad-driven models like Facebook).

So how about addressing the problems by looking at root causes?

Here are some things I did and the results.

1. Hacker News "noprocrast" setting. This is something underrated in HN, but I have set it so I can only visit every 6 hours and that my session can only be 20m long. That basically means one visit per day. I find myself not going on as much because I am "saving" my one visit for later.

2. Android "Digital Wellbeing" timers. I set a timer on my phone to limit me to 1hr of Google Chrome per day. This is my #1 most-used app. The first few days I was always hitting my limit. After a week or two my brain subconsciously started knowing about the limit and now my natural usage is < 1hr.

3. Work Profile + Do Not Disturb + Grayscale. At night my phone goes full grayscale and turns off all non-urgent notifications. My work profile also turns off. The combination of these three things makes me much less likely to engage after 9pm and get ready to wind down for bed.

4. I made an app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.habosa.not...) that helps me take control of notifications. Instead of blocking them, the app puts them in an inbox-like format. I can check them all at the end of the day without missing them entirely or letting them bother me at work. I do this for apps like NYTimes that surface interesting things but that I don't need to know about urgently.

Overall I am seeing a lot of progress! I find myself more able to, for instance, wait for the bus without playing on my phone. Hopefully over time I'll get better and better.

Actually implementing such a thing in a way that's performant and trustworthy and marketing it to people who maybe aren't consciously aware of how easily the brain can be manipulated involves a number of tough challenges, but it seems like it'll have to happen eventually.

AI "friends" could be terrific in teaching children, but there is a danger in consumers taking the short-sighted approach and buying the A.I. which is most likable. Imagine how spoiled kids will be when most of their "friends" always agree and serve them like butlers. People love to pay for indulgence, but never want to pay for tough-love.

There are far more dangers than just that, but what if you've been brought up by an AI that taught you the self-control to avoid them?

The AIs will fight over their ability to influence you. The hope is that the ones that use truth and reasoning will have an advantage, but there will always be the groups that are stuck in some fantasy.

Soon you'll hate that "social" interaction game. It's difficult but not impossible on HN :^D

I tried disconnecting a while back, but felt like those were the things i was lacking because I was using a flip phone and was really frustrating. I have actually been considering picking back up this idea to focus on modifying to allow for curated list of allowable apps.

You could say the same thing about eating, "if you're not happy with your weight then just stop eating so much" The fact that's technically true doesn't mean there's no market for diet books or people should have to do it all on their own. Weight watchers, for example, has a 4B market cap.

2) Personal Anecdote. There's no way I can stop using the internet right now and keep my livelihood, but I've had some success over the last week cutting my reddit usage down to 0 non-productive minutes.

Every time I navigate to reddit, unless it is very explicitly work-related, I close the tab immediately and log the incident in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet records date, time, duration, how I got there, and (most importantly) what I'm going to work on instead.

This is my second time quitting reddit. The first time was cold-turkey with no process, lasted over a year before I got sucked back in via the subreddits. This method gives me more a feeling of control and forces me to be mindful of my usage.

Wish me luck.

I recall an application made for college students that rewarded them for not using their phone during their lectures. I believe it it called Pocket Points [0].

[0]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocket-points-college-reward...

However, it was really susceptible to being gamed. I remember walking to campus right before bedtime, locking my phone, and then going to sleep, giving me points all night. Eventually they tried to fix this by giving more points during "peak" hours (normal class times) and drastically reducing points given during off hours, but it was still pretty easy to game.

My college self really appreciated the discounts, but I don't think it was a great business model (I have no idea how they profited off the app) and I'm not sure if they're still around.

The biggest issue we ran into was that we didn't have API access to build something effective (at least from limiting smartphone access). We had to hack something together and it didn't work out long-term.

If the tech giants cared enough about this, they would create APIs and empower devs to build stuff to help.

I agree that food could a useful analogy, but I thought the consensus was that diets don't (in general) work. Paying for a personal trainer isn't scalable, and I don't see creating a job as a Personal Anti-Technologist as a salable solution.

If you want to gain weight, you'd have to change your diet to eating more for a specific period. Vice versa for losing it.

If you want to change the way you eat, that's not to diet - that requires a lifestyle change in the way you see food. Meaning, you have to discipline yourself to eat well for life (generally).

Considering the massive flimflam industry around dieting, deceptive food company practices to make unhealthy food seem healthy, and the proliferation of ‘food deserts’ or parts of the country where finding healthy food at the grocery store (let alone a restaurant) is a challenge, dieting seems like the worst possible analogy.

Unless it is an analogy for how to create an industry to profit off of human weakness and struggle without actually solving the root issue. Then it is an excellent analogy.

It's pretty sad that a lot of the best and brightest software engineers of our generation are working at places like Google and Facebook whose ultimate purpose is to push as many ads as possible.

[0] https://humanetech.com

[1] https://community.humanetech.com

> Dieting may be the most helpful analogy here. In the US, many of us have poor diets either on occasion or frequently. Few of us have the discipline to eat well for long periods of time to optimize our health. When we gain too much weight, we pay for a personal trainer or a diet program or a book or an app to get us back on track.

Is this article real, or a brilliantly crafted satire of Silicon Valley VC culture?

The weight loss industry is worth $66 billion and obesity in the US has never been worse than it is today. Arguing that we should let unfettered capitalism solve tech addition like it's solved obesity is... I don't even know how to finish that sentence it's such an inane fly-in-the-face-of-reality statement.

> People that use those solutions to effectively curb negative habits will end up happier and more prosperous than others, just like it’s always been. How’s that for incentive?

Completely insufficient is how it is. If long-term incentives were enough to prevent people from making poor short-term decisions, we wouldn't have addiction or obesity in the first place.

The tool that has been effective at getting a large number of people to make choices that favor long-term outcomes over short-term ones is culture. By attaching a heavy negative moral weight to a poor short-term choice, we leverage the emotional wiring people already have so that they are able to push against their urge and do what's best for their long-term health and for society as a whole.

Cigarette use has cut in half over the past fifty years. That didn't happen because tobacco startups invented innovative technology, and it didn't happen because we outlawed them. It happened because we shifted the culture. Instead of cigarettes being cool, sophisticated, and intellectual, they are gross, selfish, and dirty.

I'm not sure about that. Seems like most developed countries, with all their different cultures, are following the obesity trend. Obesity became more accepted after it got more common (because shaming every obese person became non-viable), it seems, not the other way around.

Well, sure. But I don't think it's useful to compare obesity in one country that has a surplus of easily available food with other countries that don't.

Hypothermia is rare in Samoa, but I don't think Sweden can learn much from them about that fact.

The Hollywood trope of needing to hire a thief to catch a thief is a strong one, but there's also a reason for that.

> The tool that has been effective at getting a large number of people to make choices that favor long-term outcomes over short-term ones is culture. ... Cigarette use has cut in half over the past fifty years. That didn't happen because tobacco startups invented innovative technology, and it didn't happen because we outlawed them.

This is correct, but maybe overstated.

Would it be too much to suggest that part of what contributed to the decline in the use of tobacco was the emergence of a competing substitute that worked better? You can almost directly correlate the slow decline of smoking culture with the slow emergence of coffee culture. It was easier for society to move from one stimulant that helped you get work done and had a social component in exchange for another that offered similar benefits than to simply abandon it.

It's not like coffee killed nicotine or caused it to decline, but the market did provide substitute experiences which I'd argue contributed to getting smoking down to the level that it is today, even if individual consumers didn't consciously look at it that way. Culture doesn't emerge entirely independently of market forces, there is a complex interplay between cultural developments exposing market opportunities, and the market discovering and enabling cultural expression. E-cigarettes are now further chipping away at the market for combustible tobacco, by providing a more precise substitute to the holdouts. The same can be said for the astonishing success of smokeless tobacco in Scandinavian countries (look up "snus"). Our culture is pushing back against the lack of hygiene around digital devices, and there are a lot of opportunities to engage with that culture as a business person, some of them could be totally orthogonal and it could take entrepreneurs to risk capital in testing some of them out.

Obesity isn't worse than it has ever been; it seems to have peaked in the US and has been declining for the last few years. A lot of the $66B spent on weight-loss is wasted, but this is usually how markets work, and the search space for solutions to a complicated problem can be large and can seem wasteful until previously unrecognized solutions become more widely adopted. The US market (both in commerce and ideas) has innovated like crazy in fitness and food culture over the last 2 decades to the point where it is almost unrecognizable. The cultural shift represented in cooking shows, Michael Pollan, farmer's markets, and shopping at Trader Joe's/Whole Foods, are probably having a slow but larger positive effect on obesity than a lot of snake oil out there – but a lot of failed approaches have also been discarded along the way, and the culture that develops around that and counteracts against obesity requires the failed approaches to develop. Is the emergence of athleisure like Lululemon as the dominant fashion trend and the culture and marketing around in the last decade culture? Or is it actually part of the market solution to obesity? It's not easy to disentangle.

Anyway, apologies for the long and late reply. I had your comment open in a tab from yesterday and thought you made a very compelling point, and felt compelled to add my thoughts while relaxing over a 3rd wave coffee instead of a cigarette.

I clicked the link wondering how they were going to differentiate addiction from reliance; as in, if we were all EMP'd tomorrow and set back to agrarian days, a lot of people will die, and not just from starvation.

The device is very attractive at boring moments, like standing in line at a grocery store, or waiting for someone. Which causes a habit, when then interrupts you when you're actually doing something useful.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/web-junkie/

I find that when capitalism spurs innovations, those innovations work toward the sustenance of capitalism as a system, which I take some issue with. If some plucky startup solves tech addiction, it will be in a way that makes you a more effective worker or consumer.

Well, that might not be ideal, but it might be better than the alternatives. My last employer paid me a dollar for every day that I tracked a workout meeting certain criteria and synced it with the insurers app. Employers save on insurance by having healthy employees, so they pass on the incentive. Not exactly utopian, and there are privacy concerns, but overall it was positive, even if the motivation behind it wasn't really because they care. But now try to think of an alternative. No one else has the incentive to do it, except government. And if government did it, it would probably end up being a complicated tax deduction only taken by wealthy people who hire accountants or would involve some Orwellian government-backed tracking app.

I'm not really afraid of capitalism doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. The beauty of capitalism is how often self-interested people are incentivized to work for mutual benefits. If the free-market actually has incentives to fix smart-phone addiction, that's great. If the incentives aren't strong enough, then we'll probably end up with a government solution involving GDPR type clumsiness, but that might be the best we can do.

P.S Not advertisement

I promise no phone signal for 30 days.

This is a problem I've been toying with for more than six years, ever since I realized that tech's purpose is to gain control of as much attention span across the planet as possible. It can't help it.

Since I teach how to organize project/product/org information, I played a little mental game: what is the minimum amount of tech I would need and still stay connected to the rest of the planet?

My answer? A piece of hardware that displays plaintext, in e-ink format (to prevent the necessary communications around "upgrade your device now!"). Plain lists of stuff I consume that I can manipulate with my fingers (to prevent keyboards, audio sensors, kinnect, etc from getting their foot in the door). No visible O/S or apps. (No updates, patches, app-store chicanery etc.). Important: no way to install anything or to consume any other content besides what's on the app. No links, no follow-ups. Just what I have predetermined I want to see.

UI? A plain, unadorned list and for each list item some more plaintext.

But what about conversations? Saving stories? Doing research? Well, most of that is social-media addictive nonsense (you really don't need to Tweet "OMG!", but some it is required. For that we have buttons and a microphone. The microphone (and WiFi) have real, wired switches to turn them off and on that can't be disabled by software. (More telemetry problems here).

Four buttons. That's it. The device should try to sort your list and associated text, so you need a way of saying "I like this kind of thing" and "I don't like this kind of thing" so it can learn. You need a way of saving something for later to download, research, study, reply, and so on.

The fourth button was controversial. I felt there were times when an immediate response was needed. So you push the button and speak. No writing. No speech-to-text. You say in your own words what you want. (Lots of problems here about nuance in text and non-verbal communication) Somehow that gets to the other person. Never worked that out.

At this point you have enough features that I'd argue you could support 80%+ of the activity people use the net for. Would you still need to research stuff? Sure. Play games? Sure. Converse in realtime about things you're interested in? Sure. But those are different physical units. You need to make both a mental decision and a physical effort to do those things. It should be apparent visually to yourself and others that these are the types of activities you are now engaged in. There can be no confusion, either internally or to an outside observer.

Tech is supposed to be about helping others. Instead it's become about making more tech. This was a fun exercise. Made me realize how far we are, and continue to go, from what we really need.

It may be an unappreciated market, but a lot of other folks have tried and failed. I got zero interest in this, aside from people who also had a problem with tech addiction. I believe the problem for most is: where's the payout? To be done correctly, this may work best as a philanthropic effort, not a startup. This isn't an under-appreciated market. This is the place with the greatest current gap between human suffering and people willing to help end it.

( This is when I started writing about the problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349447 I even made a crappy demo video as part of my first "real" F# project: https://vimeo.com/14460868 )

Even for the hyper-capitalists of HN this is beyond the pale

On the contrary -- innovation spurred by capitalism is what sublimated the addictive aspects of human nature into a profit-making mechanism for the tech giants.

On Instagram you can pilfer videos by sending them to Telegram and downloading the MP4 straight to your device. On YouTube you can pilfer videos by downloading them with NewPipe. On Twitter you can collect the best GIFs from @archillect by forwarding them once again to Telegram.

Once you're outside the grips of the ad industry you can once again enjoy this tech without feeling bad you haven't hit your 5000 friend limit on Fakebook.