Solution: No internet at home^[1].

Gave me back ~3hr per day when nothing else worked^[2].

Wikipedia can be downloaded via kiwix (~90GB for English WP with images), programming documentation with zeal & devdocs.io. Logseq as a replacement for obsidian/roam, yt-dlp for downloading YouTube videos (and video/audio from many many other sources) to watch/listen to later. wget for downloading whole websites+assets to read at some later point.

No great solution for LLMs (yet…), all the ones I can run on my laptop are not good enough—maybe I should bite the bullet and get a GPU/digits that can run of the big LLaMas/DeepSeek V3 locally. I have internet at my workplace, and a local library with internet 10 minutes away by walk that closes at 7PM.

(No mobile internet either, that'd defeat the purpose. Haven't yet quite figured out to get people to call me when they want stuff…)

Similar stuff that's worked for me includes:

• lock the notifications down completely. Every notification on your phone should be something your ideal self cares about -- usually direct human contact. Might help to differentiate between "public" vs "private" apps -- "public" apps aren't allowed notifications because it's the algo pushing stuff on you, whereas "private" apps are allowed notifications because they consistently represent an actual human who you've invited to contact you.
• Model your engagement with content as training your algorithm. Just as you probably wouldn't cuss in front of a toddler that's absorbing everything you say, be careful of watching garbage because everything you watch is training it that that's what you like.
• Block all ads and the too-aggressive engagement feeds. Unhook is one extension that does this for YouTube; I keep the home feed but hide everything else (recommended vids, shorts, etc)
• Move your app icons on your phone whenever you catch yourself reflexively opening an app. Put something else in the location where you've formed the habit of tapping when bored.
• replace "don't wanna x" with "do wanna y". Same principle as teaching a dog to pick up a pillow instead of "don't bark" when it hears someone at the door -- the easiest "don't x" goals are shaped like "do y" ones. Maybe that's "use my flashcards", maybe that's "read a book", maybe that's "be still and quiet"... the trick is to start your "do y" as easy as possible. If it's "read a book", start yourself on the trashiest easiest most clickbaity-engaging book you can find, or even a magazine or comic.

Selling my TV [LW · GW] was one of the best decisions I ever made. In that same post I wrote about the underlying scientific principles behind Supernormal Stimuli. 

If you're interested in the topic, I'd recommend author Deirdre Barrett’s book Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose, and also Eliezer's post Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization [LW · GW].

My solution:

1. Make starting inconvenient. I have no FB app/tiktok/YT on my phone. I can log to FB in a browser, but I intentionally set some random password I don't remember so each time I need to go through password recovery process.
2. What to do when you started. Whenever I find a moment when I am strong enough to stop watching, I also log out/uninstall app, i.e. revert to the state when starting was inconvenient.
3. When starting is inconvenient, I have these 30 second or so to reflect on "where will that lead?" and this is usually enough to not start.

This works well for me. I watch short videos on days when I'm too tired to do anything productive - this is quite pleasant and relaxing then - but I learned to force myself to logout later, and this is enough.

There have been a lot of tricks I've used over the years, some of which I'm still using now, but many of which require some level of discipline. One requires basically none, has a huge upside (to me), and has been trivial for me to maintain for years: a "newsfeed eradicator" extension. I've never had the temptation to turn it off unless it really messes with the functionality of a website. 

It basically turns off the "front page" of whatever website you apply it to (e.g. reddit/twitter/youtube/facebook) so that you don't see anything when you enter the site and have to actually search for whatever you're interested in. And for youtube, you never see suggestions to the right of or at the end of a video.

My solution: don’t have a smartphone and don’t use social media at all (don’t even have any social media accounts). Seems to work well.

I use Freedom and Limit on my computer and Stay Focused on my Android phone. The former two allow for a combination of complete blocking during certain time windows and time limits (for any website, even across browsers and even if you open an incognito window). The latter does both for my phone.

I block all social media and content during prime working hours and implement a 30-minute limit outside of that. It works pretty well. I may make it more strict because I sometimes find myself looking at Twitter, etc. occasionally when watching a TV show in the evenings.

I also use BlockTube to get rid of YouTube Shorts entirely from my web browser. They no longer show up in search results or in the menu.

Finally, I recommend the tools here, though I haven't tried all of them: https://liamrosen.com/2023/04/18/modding-social-media-to-win-the-attention-war/

I installed Mindfulness Bell on my phone, and every time it chimes, I ask myself, "Should I be doing something else right now?" Sometimes I'm being productive and don't need to stop. When I notice I've started ignoring it, I change the chime sound so I notice it again. The interval is adjustable. If I'm stuck scrolling social media, this often gives me the opportunity to stop. Doesn't always work though. I also have it turned off at night so I can sleep. This is a problem if I get stuck on social media at night when I should be sleeping. Instead, after bed time, I progressively dim the lights and screen to the point where I can barely read it. That's usually enough to let me fall asleep.

This might not work well for others, but a thing that's worked well for me has been to (basically) block cheap access to it with anticharities. Introducing friction in general is good

I don't want to pretend that I'm someone who is immune to Youtube binges or similar behaviors. However I am not sure why this is a problem and what meaningful work that this behavior was getting in the way of? Speaking for myself, 9/10 if I have a commitment the next morning, I won't stay up late on my computer because... I know I have a commitment at a set time. (If you forced me to hypothesize why that 1/10 times I don't, I'd guess that it is stress related anticipation means I can't sleep even if I did lay down - but that is just a wild guess).

I'm also surprised to see how most of the solutions in the comments involve removing access to anything... doing something more productive. I think there is a difference between the nebulous guilt we feel about Opportunity Cost - "oh geez I could have used that time more effectively" and specific, tangible, realistic things we could have done but didn't. I often find that Youtube Binges are caused by/as-a-result-of not being able to find those activities, they do not frustrate them.

I have perennially found that whatever vice (or as you call it 'hyperstimuli') that I remove, I just replace it with another but it's never a beneficial activity. (The one exception I can think of was when I stopped listening to music when I had a bout of insomnia and instead replaced it with lectures on Wittgenstein or Quantum Physics, because I figured "I might as well learn SOMETHING').

This has caused me an incredible amount of frustration. For all the talk of "social media detox" and even the farcically named "dopamine detox" none seem to actually result in net increases in my well being.

Going back to what I said about specific, tangible, realistic alternatives: I have found that the only way to stop mid-way through a Youtube binge or a Instagram scroll is to be excited about a project that I have a lot of faith in my ability to complete, and a viable first-step which I can do now. 

This isn't fail-safe, if I'm writing a journal entry or an essay, and I have to leave in 30 minutes, you bet your bottom dollar I'll be late because I'll be so engrossed in that writing process. But that doesn't sound like a 'hyperstimuli'


 

For those who live alone, one option for the phone password is to make it an Antimeme.

1. Randomly generate a long random string
2. Mix in some novel Unicode characters that you’ll have to remember the names of so that you can google

Write it down somewhere inconvenient

To avoid shorts/reels etc I use ScreenZen. I'm allowed to use all of YouTube and Instagram with no issues except for the short videos where I receive a special message that I can bypass but then my 100 days streak would be broken so... Yes I used my achievements addiction to force myself out of Reels/shorts.

Depending on how far gone you are it may not be enough but I found that this was great because it gave more control, for instance you can simply delete all shorts from the youtube interface iirc.