Getting un-Hooked from technology

Using tech to fight tech.

In the fall of 2016, I went on a four-month Buddhist retreat, which helped me learn many things about my mind. When I graduated from the retreat back into the real world, I was happy to re-discover some of my favorite activities, like dancing, playing improv games, and connecting with friends.

But there was one thing I avoided: tech. My laptop sat there for months, waiting for me to re-discover it.

I was torn.

On the one hand, tech is great. Humans love creating things, and coding is a cheap way to create things that can be shared with the whole world.

On the other hand, tech can be harmful. It’s too easy to create things that aren’t actually good for our minds, and once the laptop is open, it’s that much harder to resist those things.

Both these things are true. Tech is merely a tool, a means to an end. It’s up to us how we use it.

I briefly fantasized that everyone could simply abandon their phones and live happily in the woods, free from the harms of tech, but of course, that is just a fantasy: tech is here to stay, along with its good and bad bits.

I decided that as long as people are going to use technology, I’d like to help figure out how we can use technology better and then share what I learn.

So I re-opened my laptop and dived back into tech, coding from 9–5. Most of the time, coding is super fun, interesting, and engaging.

Sometimes coding is hard, really hard. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never figure it out, that I’m just not good enough. And AGGHH WHY WONT IT WORK??

Ideally, when I feel these feelings of frustration, I would sit, acknowledge them, and let them pass. But… I don’t always have the willpower for that, especially when a distraction is Just A Tab Away.

There are so many websites that will happily distract me from my feelings of frustration!

There’s a reason those websites are so appealing, a reason why I type their URLs in the browser bar reflexively.

Websites are designed to hook you, to get you coming book for more.

There’s even an entire book about how to do it, called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Reading it will give insight into why the tactics of websites are so effective, but it won’t necessarily free you from them. I know that personally as I was reading it right after signing up for OkCupid, and I still could not resist swiping for hours.

Websites optimize for key metrics, and for many websites, their top metric is the amount of time users spend on their site. So they will hook you, even if it’s at the expense of your happiness. The App Ratings Chart illustrates that well.

So the bad news is that the web is full of websites that can bring out the worst in you. The good news about the web is that it’s relatively easy to modify your experience, if you know how. I’ll show you the tools I used to create a web that works better for me.

Using Tech to Fight Tech

I started off by deciding that there are many websites that I never need to consume —basically, news and gossip sites. There are lots of good reasons to read news, but when I read news, none of my reasons are good reasons.

I opened up my /etc/hosts file, a system file that can redirect domains to other addresses, and added a long list of news sites. There are likely thousands of other news sites, but that list helps me avoid the ones I kept running into.

For you, it might be a different set of sites you want to block entirely. Perhaps you’re addicted to clothes shopping sites and want to block those, or perhaps you can’t resist an internet game and want to block those.

Once you block a site, you’ll encounter a nice blank tab, and that serves as a lovely reminder that your past self thought it was a bad idea to visit that site. That pause gives me the time I need to reflect on why I feel the need for a distraction, and to deal with it a better way.

Then I decided that I never need to read comments. They tend to be filled with hostility and ad hominem attacks. My mind already has a tendency towards judgment and paranoia — I don’t want to feed it more fodder.

I installed the Hide Comments Everywhere extension, which nicely removes anything that looks comment-like on every website. If you’re (rightly) nervous about giving a Chrome extension access to every website you visit, you can also block many comments by putting “disqus.com” in your /etc/hosts file.

Now the hard part: the websites that have both beneficial features and potentially harmful and addictive features. Curiously, the beneficial features tend not to be the addictive ones. :)

I’ll start with the classic example of Facebook: I use their groups and events features to connect with my local friends each week. I do not want the news feed, as it’s unnecessary information that feeds my gossip-craving.

I installed the Kill News Feed extension, which replaces the news feed with blank space. There’s a similar News Feed Eradicator extension, which replaces the news feed with inspirational quotes instead.

Next up: YouTube. I enjoy watching a few videos each day, like Muppets’ Ode to Joy or Why Tunnels Don’t Collapse. What I don’t enjoy is getting sucked into watching video-after-video, with no end in sight.

That happens because of those darn recommended videos everywhere. I visit the YouTube front page, and I see dozens of videos picked out algorithmically to entice you. I watch a video, and the whole time, in the corner of my eye, I see a list of other videos just begging me to watch them.

The recommended videos had to go. I couldn’t find a Chrome extension that did that, so I made one myself! It’s called Youtube UnHooked and it’s open source. The code is relatively simple: it’s just a CSS file with six rules that find and hide the recommended video elements on the page, plus a manifest file that instructs Chrome to inject that CSS whenever it loads youtube.com.

I do truly enjoy all the whitespace in my new YouTube browsing experience. Refreshing!

Next on my list: Medium. Yes, the website you’re probably reading this on. Awkward!

Here’s the thing: I like using Medium to write posts, and I like how Medium makes it easy for people to find my posts.

But I don’t like the Medium front page, for the same reason I don’t like the Youtube front page. It serves up dozens of articles picked just for me, and those articles are often titled to appeal to the gossip-seeking part of my mind. I am happy to read articles on Medium that are recommended from my favorite bloggers and friends, I don’t want the algorithm to feed me them.

When I visit Medium of my own volition, it’s because I want to write a post that’s in my head. I don’t want to be distracted by the posts in others’ heads.

So once again, I wrote a Chrome extension: Medium UnHooked. The code is a little longer for this one, because it both hides the feed and provides quick links to the actions that I want to encourage for myself. Plus it says hello! :)

The last site on my list: Twitter. Oh, Twitter. I may very well be better off in life if I removed Twitter entirely, but I’m fortunate to have a sizable number of followers and I like having the option to share useful information widely.

I want to use Twitter, but I don’t want to be addicted to it — both because I don’t like when my mind starts trying to word every observation as a tweet, and because I don’t like scrolling tweets endlessly.

So I took an extreme measure: I unfollowed everyone. If I really want to read someone’s tweets, I can open their profile up individually or follow them in a feedreader like Feedly. Most of the time, I don’t.

Even when following 0 people, twitter.com has addictive elements: the trending hash tags (news? in tweet form? the worst!), the who-to-follow sidebar (noone!), and that bright neon notification icon.

As usual, I made a Chrome extension: Twitter Unhooked. The code is just CSS again, including a rule for making the notification icon as subtle as possible.

This is just a sampling of the tools that are out there to help us improve our digital experience for the better. Another great tool is HabitLab, a Chrome extension by a Stanford HCI research group. The extension will serve up different “interventions” on the sites that you want to spend less time on, both generic ones like “GateKeeper” that pauses the site loading for a few seconds and reminds you to breathe, and site-specific ones like “Stop Autoplay” for Netflix. HabitLab is open-source and you you can submit new interventions, so I’ve started turning my extensions into HabitLab interventions.

There’s also an entire organization dedicated to this cause: Center for Humane Technology. Their goal is to encourage the next generation of products to embrace humane design, and to spread awareness to consumers about how to use technology to make your life better, not worse.

That’s also my goal in this post. I want to show you how you can take control of your digital experience, to make it work for you. But I also want to remind all of us that create products (including myself!) to think carefully when we’re adding new features into our products.

We want our users to be happy, not hooked.

Appendix: But… what about your phone?

None of these Chrome extensions work on my phone, as far as I know.

Typically, I try to keep my phone far away from me when I don’t need it. At night, my phone is always in another room. During the day, it’s usually a dozen feet away. Of course, it’s still tempting.

I turned my phone black and white about a month ago, and I find I’m less tempted by the more colorfully addictive parts of the web, like fashion blogs and videos. Generally everything feels less grippy when it’s black and white.

If you know of ways to modify your phone experience, please share below.