Endless scrolling and reccomendations are basically internet cigarettes 

I use a Firefox extention called "Mind The Time" and while it could use some feature improvements I find it's good enough at it's one purpose: to track how much time I am wasting on various interent sites. Once I look at the data I will usually change stuff about my browsing habits to be a little bit healthier. This hasn't resulted in less time online but it has maybe resulted in better time online? or at least identifying why and how I am spending so much time online. Ugh.

I use this in conjuction with an extension called "Leechblock" which you can set a timer on to block a website after a certain period of time. In practice what happens is I hit the override over and over again after using my time limit. Usually it takes a pretty big thing to get me to stop looking at websites. I quit Twitter cold after like 12 or so years on the site, after the 2024 elections, and have not missed it at all. 

Recently Youtube's reccomendation's page, which is the default front page of Youtube, had been giving me a near constant stream of garbage I wasn't interested in. I would see videos but not want to click on them or even hover over them lest it go into my view history and I would get sent a torrent of garbage on my front page. I would regularly nuke my view history to get better results, but it would still annoy me after a while. 

Eventually I discovered that somehow, you can turn view history off completley. This makes youtube a totally blank page. The result is: I am spending much less time on there

By turning off the endless scrolling feed in one I spent a whole 24 hours less on youtube from one month to the next. That was kind of wild to think about. I didn't really seem to think I had been spending too much time on youtube, but removing the torrent of suggestions meant that I wasn't spending 20 or 10 minutes here or there watching random videos. I am now just using the search function to find stuff and also my old subscriptions are good enough. 

So with less time on youtube I've found that time has been displaced by Bluesky. Bluesky has an endless scrolling feed. I also have a time limiter on bluesky, one that I regularly override to look at it more. I am spending just as much time on Bluesky as I was on Youtube. I don't think that's because Bluesky has compelling content or whatever, I just think the endless scrolling takes all the friction out of viewing the web and means you can spend a lot of time on there and not know it.

Our dearly departed Cohost was built with this in mind. It had pagination on purpose. It didn't have a global feed of posts, and it didn't have reccomendations either. As a result I spent way less time on that website, didn't have to use a time limiter, and generally felt like I got a lot more out of it as a result. It didn't waste my time. 

All this is to say I will never install tiktok or go back to the old ways. I am spending most of my time on a videogame forum now.