Custom iPhone Widget to Encourage Less Wrong Use

post by Will Payne (will-payne) · 2022-06-27T16:14:50.141Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

This is a link post for https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T9YhNbKfibTtphH5m/custom-iphone-widget-to-encourage-ea-forum-use

Contents

  What is it?
  Why I think it's good
  How to set it up
None
2 comments

TLDR: I made a little custom iPhone widget for the EA Forum recently and have been getting a lot of value out of it. It takes an extra 10s to make this a LessWrong or Alignment forum widget. At the moment I don't feel bothered to make this into an app which is easy to install, but I think people could set it up themselves in ~5 mins or less, and if you don't use the forum much but want to use it more it might help.

What is it?

I set up a EA Forum^[1] widget using a little iPhone personalisation tool called Scriptable. It shows the details of a random front page forum post once per hour. And it looks like this...

At the time of writing I haven't read Ozymandias' post

Why I think it's good

I've noticed that when I interact with the forum I usually enjoy it. However, I usually don't reach for the forum over other easily available sources of entertainment like YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok (although don't worry, I deleted TikTok). I made this widget initially to try and make the Forum an easy reach alternative to these apps. I think it worked; my usage of the forum went from once per month (or less) to once or twice a day. At one point I removed the widget and didn't get around to re-adding it for a few months, and my forum usage dropped down again. Since reinstalling it a few days ago, it has jumped back up. I’d put this then at somewhere around a 10 - 100x increase in value out of the forum for me, but don’t know yet if it will work long term or just hold my attention for 1-2 week chunks.

How to set it up

This works for iPhone and presumably iPad (although I haven't been able to test it on iPad).

• Download the Scriptable app then open it
• Click the little plus icon in the top right corner

• Paste this code^[2] into the editor
• For LessWrong replace getForumPosts(EAForum) with getForumPosts(LessWrong) on line 10.
• Go to your home screen
• Long press on the home screen or any app to enter jiggle mode
• Click the plus in the top left to add a widget
• Find Scriptable (You can use the search bar)
• Pick the midsized view and click "Add widget" at the bottom
• Tap on the widget
• Click choose script
• Pick the script you just made (If you didn't actively change the name it should be the only option called "Untitled Script")
• Tap anywhere else on the screen to exit jiggle mode.

You're done! I just ran through this process and it took a little over 1 minute. Here's a video.

I hope this helps you as much as it's helped me.

1. ^{^}

   Since the EA Forum, LessWrong and the Alignment Forum all use the same code you can replace getForumPosts(EAForum) with getForumPosts(LessWrong) or getForumPosts(AlignmentForum).

2. ^{^}

   For what it's worth, I don't advocate copying random code you see on the Internet and running it, but we're all friends here. (Plus I trust the community to have someone who feels like reading through the above and checking it's not horrifically unsafe and confirming in the comments.)

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