Riffing on Phone Addiction is a Technology Problem disguised as a willpower problem
See Brian’s article on phone addiction
Brian’s making too points in this article:
- Social media hijacks our attention
- The phone is the leverage point to stop them
I agree deeply with the article, adding some commentary to it:
I believe social media could be made significantly less addictive with some relatively small UI changes on the device level, which social media companies have relatively little leverage over
The blackpill is that social media being addictive is structural. Everyone stays on X, because everyone else is on X. A social media less addicting than X would lose to the more addicting version. So at a broad level, I think a less addictive social media just wouldn’t work. It has to be addictive, so everyone’s there, so it outcompetes the other medias.
And application models that rely on advertising (twitter), then require owning the UI, no third party UI’s = no customization, and we’re back locked in hungry ghosts world where they can make us want Just One More Tweet.
But you don’t need to solve this problem for the world. You can solve the problem for yourself. Everyone else is addicted to social media, you can just visit. One person not being addicted and just visiting doesn’t degrade the platform, obviously.
My gut intuitions on what might help: Find ways to help navigating the feelings they are avoiding (I don’t rly know how to do this)
This is the big one. 50-70% of my internet time is avoiding a certain feeling. Similarly no ideas how to solve it - if I knew how to solve it I wouldn’t be here.
When I’m feeling my worst I scroll twitter. When I’m feeling good, I scroll my RSS reader and have a much more calm and peaceful experience with my screens.
Experiment with most valuable/useful potential UI interactions, downselect to most promising for mockup > prototyping
This is the real question. I’m groggy and don’t want to get up but have been scrolling twitter for 30m. What can my phone do to get me out of bed?
I haven’t the faintest clue. But Apple is a dead player, and isn’t even trying to solve this - “screen time limits” are horribly ineffective bandaids.
There’s space here. It also helps to reframe what the goal is. In my mind - “how can I engage with the world through my phone, intentionally”