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Comment by cjonas | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, the permissions required to make this work are scary and require a lot of trust.

The fact YouTube and Instagram don't allow you to disable endless algorithmic short form content is straight up evil.

I'd recommend just uninstalling the apps. I'm still able to get the content I need, and scroll mechanic doesn't work as well on the websites so a lot of the temptation to doom scroll goes away.

This is the way.

The way that all these tech companies decided that the users couldn't simply turn those features off is maddening. And the "See this Less Often" option doesn't seem to do anything at all on apps like Facebook.

There should be legislation that requires company's allow "opting out" of individualized algorithmic feeds. I'm fine if you want to show me videos similar to channels I've explicitly subscribed to. But tracking my every interaction and using that to serve content I never asked for is everything that's wrong with modern social media.

Maybe we need an initiative like "stop killing games".

They have a tremendous disincentive to do this. Endless scrolling, combined with a massive amount of algorithmically fine-tuned content to satisfy preferences that you didn't even knew you had, is effectively a digital version of cocaine. Giving you the right to reclaim your attention is a pathway towards healthy use, which for most is no more than a couple minutes per day for any social media platform.

Your dealer would be the last person you'd expect to teach you about addiction avoidance.

If you turn off YouTube view history, it breaks Shorts. It also breaks a lot of other shit (e.g. back button after you've clicked a video from a search).

I understand the privacy concerns. I did my best to address it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44943215. I completely agree with your second point.

Which is why I use modified version of YouTube on the web and on Android. I don't watch videos on iPad unless I have to. (I happen to have an Android tablet so that works well.) Although I know this is not a solution for everyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com