Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

Fortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy.

My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...

So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png

Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.

It boggles me that anyone is able to get used to phone screens as a serious device for consumption of just about anything, let alone creation (e.g., typing).

consumption is easy. I read alot of Webcomics and well they are literally made for the Phone. Mangas are usualy also fine. Watching Videos also.

The Creation point I completely concur, I hate typing on my phone.

I sometimes edit photos I took right on the iPhone while on the bus or in a coffee shop and one time I edited a gaming clip through iMovie on the same iPhone. It feels good to use that processing power for something that isn't mobile gaming or reading reddit.

for typing I use the swiping keyboard if I am typing in a language it supports, but I concur it sucks using the mobile keyboard in either horizontal or vertical orientations.

I am not a big fan of reading manga on the phone on the other hand, I much prefer doing it on the tablet. Although I used to read webtoons a lot back when I was still on iPhone 7, which feels tiny in 2026, but felt gigantic back then.

Fairly enough I do have a natural advantage for reading small stuff on my phone. I just put my glasses up on my forehead and have the advantage of my diopters working like a zoom lense.

Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero.

I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.

Same thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.

This is the simplest and most effective solution, Cheers

These also remove suggestions and comments

You don't want any recommendation or algorithms at all. This is intended to make you waste time.

If I want to watch a video I go on my subscribed list, check what's new and decide what to watch. Don't need some fancy algorithm to tell me what I should do.

Just add channels you like to your rss feed. It works great with freshrss.

Or if you want to get fancy use tubearchivist with the Jellyfin plug-in.

TIL tubearchivist has a Jellyfin plug-in. Cheers.

https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist-jf-plugin

"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here

Writing with a pen has a lot of unseen benefits.

Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.

Doesn't take much to find the science.

Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.

If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.

It's your "choice" (tm)

Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)

Peace to you all.

I tried something like that with Chrome Extensions but it doesn't age well. WHen it worked, it surely saved me some time to do more productive things: https://github.com/oldeucryptoboi/Homer

I'm also such an old PC (Linux) person. However, I'm using the phone more these days, either to read books while I'm out and waiting and have nothing else to do, or to listen to audiobooks while I'm walking or working on menial tasks.

If you press t key you will get a full width video player.

Screenshot not found.

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