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Addictive websites and apps have been poisoning society with incredibly alluring infinite feeds for years and, surprisingly, show no signs of stopping. In an attempt to partially un-poison myself, I have long uninstalled the offending apps on my phone, and recently even blocked the websites on my phone, which has worked very well.
On an iPhone, you can do this in the Settings app under Screen Time → Content &
Privacy Restrictions → App Store, Media, Web, & Games → Web Content. From there,
select “Limit Adult Websites” and add instagram.com, youtu.be, and
youtube.com under “Never Allow.”
Those websites are just way too addictive to be on a device that’s with me 24/7. I’d rather use YouTube on my laptop, which at least has some limitations on when I can use it.
On my laptop, I use this extension to block comments, related videos, and other distracting parts of YouTube.
This way, I can still see what people are posting, such as the content from people who look through the news, test out AI models, and then post their findings to YouTube. That is interesting and sometimes useful. But it's a slippery slope, and I don't want to get sucked in all the time.
A lot of these channels use tactics like clickbait to signal that there might be a secret in their video, even though there is not. I feel that this sometimes damages their credibility. However, they are earning a living, and I don’t expect every video to be high quality.
Recently, I've been stopping before watching videos and instead right-clicking them, copying their link addresses, and giving them to Codex.
I paste the link into Codex. I have one thread where I’ve told it to find the transcript for any video I paste, and then give me a no-bullshit summary of the conclusions of the video, so that I don’t have to watch it.
That has been a really nice workflow, and I recommend trying it out.
The results are that most videos do not really contain anything substantive beyond a few sentences.
It's also interesting to be able to go directly from reading the conclusions of the video to asking the same AI what it thinks about the contents of the video. For example, if it is a 40-minute video about the IPO of some company or the economics of a country, I can just paste the link, read the conclusions, and then ask the AI if the video is largely fearmongering or if it has some real claims. The AI can do some research and try to give me an unbiased response.
Overall, I like this workflow. I think it's a good bridge from the addictive side of YouTube to the real world. Try it out if you like.