People going 'monk mode' to limit social media use | Hacker News Reader

People going 'monk mode' to limit social media use

bbc.com

50 pointsbishopsmother66 comments

Today I learned that people pay money for an app that stops them from using a (probably expensive) phone. And not just a few people, but enough for the Freedom app to have 2 investment rounds and 11-50 employees[0]. Is it just me, or does that sound like something has gone horribly wrong somewhere? Why not just mute all notifications, or put the phone on silent or airplane mode, or switch it off, or even just replace it with a dumb phone?

And as an aside, I have a theory that the attention/distraction economy is not exclusively the fault of Big Tech spending billions working out how to "steal" people's attention, but also has an element of people being much more easily distracted nowadays thanks to rise of pointless jobs, unfulfilling personal lives, etc.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/freedom-2

Some people wants to consume being low tech and crying it out loud, not just being low tech.

Desire and willpower are actually quite weak tools to affect behaviour. I definitely fall into the camp of people who find it more effective to alter my environment to introduce friction against behaviours I want to reduce, and reduce barriers to behaviour I would like to engage in more.

Such apps are fighting a symptom and won't solve the underlying cause of their problems. It's a bit like the pomodoro technique. It can work for a short-term task but won't solve the problems in the long run.

> being much more easily distracted nowadays thanks to rise of pointless jobs, unfulfilling personal lives, etc.

There's this guy, about 150 years ago, that had a theory about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

100% agree. It’s interesting that people purchase an app for what is already included on a phone for free. If they have an iPhone, they can also reduce the time an app or website has per day.

I’ve never used Freedom but even at a glance it’s clear that the functionality is significantly different than the screen time limits on iOS

> Why not just

Anytime this phrase is used, you can bet it’s followed up with something fallacious.

Similar to the famous “why not just us rsync?” Comment about Dropbox.

Much like how most replies that start with "So ..." are strawmen. :)

> Anytime this phrase is used

Anytime this phrase is used, you can bet it’s followed up with some crazy generalization lol.

With Dropbox (and most other cases) you are paying for something you don't already have, but what is unusual in this case is that you are paying to remove something you do already have. Not exactly the same I know, but the two wrongs doesn't make a right reminds me of Juicero (that expensive juicer which only worked with expensive packs of juice), where reasonable followup questions would be "why not just squeeze the juice packs yourself without the expensive juicer?" or even "why not just buy an ordinary juicer which works with pre-juiced fruit and veg?"

And that is leaving aside the whole question of whether an effective solution to an addiction problem is to pay someone to try to stop you from accessing what you are addicted to.

You’re making a choice to view it that way. Try and phrase it like “you’re paying for a tool to help moderate your behavior”.

Or as an example using your lens. Paying for coffee is paying to take away your tiredness. You already have tiredness, tiredness is useful, sleep is good, why would you want to take away tiredness?

The best "why don't you just" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4EX4dPppA

"I'll buy another beer...that'll help my alcoholism".

I used one of these programs (a free one) to cold turkey quit Reddit after the API shenanigans.

Why not just mute notifications? I had already muted them, but found myself opening Reddit when I had downtime.

Why not just put the phone on silent mode? Because my job requires me to be reachable by phone, and I want some close family and friends to reach me. Also, I already muted the problem apps/sites- see above.

Why not just turn the phone off? See above.

Why not just replace it with a dumb phone? Because I still want email, general web browsing, music, podcasts, ebooks, maps, notes, password management, home automation, finance, and a good camera. Most of these things are either essential or enriching for my job and lifestyle.

I abolished the words "just" and "simply" from my vocabulary, because 80% of the times I used them, I sounded like a fool.

Well I "just" deleted the reddit app and it worked 100%

Oh, I never had the official app. I was using the website.

> Why not just mute all notifications, or put the phone on silent or airplane mode, or switch it off, or even just replace it with a dumb phone?

Why indeed - apparently people are aware and choose something else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> pointless jobs, unfulfilling personal lives, etc..

Basically distraction cycles in human nature are, imho, focused on as a natural byproduct of capitalism’s desire to keep workers from realizing they are distracted and therefore from realizing they are exploited.

> or even just replace it with a dumb phone?

They're not easily available anymore. My provider only has Android and IPhone, even the flip-phone that looks like a dumbphone is running Android.

Edit: Ah they do still have one brand of non-smartphone. It costs several times as much as the Android flip-phone, so I didn't see it at first.

Sonim sells "dumb" phones for professionals as well. As well as ruggedized Android smartphones with physical buttons.

In his Chaos Manor column, in Byte Magazine, in the late 90's, author Jerry Pournelle used to mention the “monk cell” where he went to write, upstairs his house - on a PC with no Internet access and just enough software for writing.

I wonder what percentage of successful authors have a comparable habit. I'd imagine it could be surprisingly high. The famous WordStar habit of George RR Martin comes to mind. [0]

[0]: https://jamesclear.com/george-rr-martin

Calling it that feels wrong to me. They're putting a label on people who ignore their manipulative trash. Plenty of people don't use social media, or watch news and movies, they're not in "monk mode"

Arguably the difference there is that the monk mode has made a sacrifice (did have, now does not) rather than not having in the first place.

Depends on how you define 'monk' I guess :)

The article unironically explains where the term originated:

>The term has gone viral on TikTok, where videos marked with the hashtag #monkmode now have more than 77 million views, up from 31 million in May.

I was talking about the definition, the parent commenter's definition at that, not the origin.

I'm not sure how that information fits in here, sorry.

The authoritive BBC are saying in short "your peers will call you a monk if you switch off" - they are branding those who choose to ignore media. I don't care where they say it came from, they are perpetuating it. (Also seems disrespectful to actual monks? I don't know)

Everything has to be a mode now, humans all have states.

How many of us are currently distracted checking HN rather than concentrating on our work?

Me, for sure.

Whelp at least I'm not currently distracted checking reddit

Just waiting for CI to finish running. It's the new "compiling" [0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/303/

Yeah the problem with these (pipelines, compilations) is they last long enough to take some of your time but not long enough to, say, read a full article, complete a tutorial, watch an educational video from the beginning to end etc. So HN somehow falls nicely in there.

> not long enough to, say, read a full article

> So HN somehow falls nicely in there.

Yeah, I don’t read the article way too often too :/

https://function.xkcd-excuse.com/media/4c4f504953-5741495449...

Exactly this, but my model is training.

I'm pooping on work time so...

I'm convinced that procrastination is not the problem with social media - it is FOMO. In this regard social media are not all equal, there is a hierarchy. In this way hackernews as social media is nearly a misnomer, I am not being projected upon by the perfect life of a billion people, algorithmically picked by my insecurities.

HN is much worse. Nothing gives me more anxiety than this place.

Why?

What if you miss out on some amazing kernel of knowledge (that also happens to confirm your biases)? You'll need to read every 500 comment threads to find out!

HN feels like a traditional php forum with old reddit code.

I'm distracting myself from the mandatory unnecessary meeting which is distracting me from my work.

Waiting on someone to join a meeting. Which, to be fair, since COVID is much less of an issue than it used to be, ±2 mins is pretty standard where as before waiting 10 minutes for everyone to find the correct physical room was pretty standard.

This smells like a thinly veiled attempt at marketing for Freedom, rather than solving the problem. Sort of like "it's ok to binge drink all weekend because of this app, but not on a work day!" sort of mentality.

Nobody prevents you from using Freedom in your free time as well. I have it blocking addicting sites 24/7 on all my smartphones, it has worked fairly well.

idk sounds kinda fucked up to need an app that turns a smartphone into a dumbphone.

I think you need an absurdist lens to not get lost here. Camus had a point.

Think about it, I could say I'm going to adopt a modal diet, which is really what monk mode is, a modal diet of information attention.

How would my modal diet work? One day, fasting, the next day, a steady stream of alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, and processed food.

Consistency is key.

As technical people, we know this from reading the history from Pirsig (ZMM) to Nielsen-Norman:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modal-nonmodal-dialog/

Asceticism has never scaled, much like the hacker news post today about intimacy not scaling, or the fact that modality in design was more about making it easy for implementors than making it easy for consumers.

Monks have been and will always be ascetic. There's nothing ascetic about taking a time-honored tradition and using it to mis-label the behavior of people who are overwhelmed by water they cannot breathe but cannot ignore.

> How would my modal diet work?

I imagine you just eat whatever pops up in front of you.

Wish there was a better way to do this that didn’t just let you delete the app.

Apple’s screentime UI is really limited and poorly designed IMO.

I just uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter apps. I can still log into the website if someone sends me a link, but there's more friction and there are no notifications pulling me in. Highly recommend.

I found disabling notifications and moving the app off the Home Screen did the trick for me. I unintentionally weaned myself off Facebook. Facebook did this to themself. When they started throwing irrelevant push notifications at me I couldn’t turn off, I just disabled ALL of them. That was a dumbass invasive move on their part which I’m sure hurt more than it helped their engagement.

It's possible that they found out that the vast majority of users don't disable the notifications so you would fall in the minority who do. Still worth it for them

Based on pretty much every screenshot of a person's phone I've ever seen posted on the internet, I would bet a fair amount of money that this is the case.

I'm not even convinced the vast majority of users know that disabling notifications is possible.

You’re probably right, but these decisions compound over time. Each time they lose x% of users. Eventually they’re left with a much smaller, very active (and profitable) user base which has endured enshittification of their service for so long that they’re inches away from leaving. At that point a light breeze can topple it. It’s the normal business life cycle, and I think Facebook is well into the product decline phase.

I've succesfully rolled out a (IMHO) better version of the "Freedom" app, that comes with a load of other benefits like being cheaper and even more effective. My phone can only make calls and texts because it's a dumb phone, and I have to go to my computer if I want to waste time on the internet.

Can we have a look at it ? / Give it a try ?

Sure. https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?&_nkw=nokia+105&_sacat=0

YMMV, depending what cellular bands are available in your country.

The Apple watch with cellular has been awesome for limiting social media use.

I frequently leave my phone at home and while I don't use Social Media that much, it's great to never be tempted but still be contactable, have all the useful info I like (stocks, weather etc) while not having anything from Meta anywhere near me. Not having browser is wonderful.

Apps shouldn't be able to "notify" you (by default), in the same way your home appliance are not interrupting you.

They can’t. But they are very clever at getting you to opt into it.

What works best for me. Leaving phone at home when I meet people. It's not always possible, obviously, but if I know the address, I might take a db phone for emergencies. Or even, just a paper with the phone number.

I uninstalled social media from my phone (I still have them on my desktop PC). I still have wahtsapp, but I turned off the notifications.

Yet another newspaper talking about a new trend (that they possibly made up by cherry picking).

Not a new phenomenon, lots of influencers and movements like the stoicism movement and trad wife movement and etc just as some recent examples but the urge for young virulent people to “get back to the roots” goes as far back as I can tell. Safari hunt anyone?

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