I like scrolling. It's great. You open up your advertising platform^[1] of choice, start the scrolly scrolly, turn your brain off, and before you know it an hour has passed and whatever was on your mind before you picked up your phone is lost to the sands of time!

Ok, so maybe it's not so great.

My advertising platforms of choice for many years were Reddit and YouTube, and I'd developed a genuine addiction to them in my decade-plus of use. I knew they were bad for me, I wanted to quit them, but I couldn't. I'd either find ways of justifying my continued use — "I'll only check these specific subreddits" — or I'd find myself scrolling again without consciously choosing to.

I ditched Reddit as a result of their API change rug pull and the poor way in which it was handled. The perfect storm of losing faith in the platform at the same time as my Reddit client — Apollo — was shut down made it surprisingly easy to quit the platform cold turkey without requiring too much willpower.

Then there was YouTube Shorts. YouTube fucking Shorts.

I can't tell you the amount of hours I've sunk into YouTube Shorts. Screen Time would likely have revealed around 90mins per day for at least a year, and that's probably conservative. 10% of my waking time — 10% of my life — dumped unceremoniously into Google's slop factory. What's even more galling is that I don't think I could tell you a single thing I watched in that time. Seriously. Not a single thing. That's appalling. That's embarrassing. That's engagement.

YouTube, of course, doesn't provide any obvious way to disable Shorts, and why would they? Think of all the data they gathered about me over those hundreds of hours, or the money they made serving me ads^[2].

Fortunately, a friend pointed out that you can disable shorts by turning off and deleting your watch history. A drastic step after using the platform for approaching 20 years, but one I took regardless and — unsurprisingly — I've never looked back.

I do still subscribe to some channels via RSS — shout out to Unwatched — but the lack of an attention-craving algorithm means I'm averaging about 12 minutes per day according to Screen Time.

No more scrolly scrolly?

I still scrolly scrolly. According to my Screen Time I now spend 15 minutes per day on Hacker News^[3], and 7 minutes per day reading my RSS feeds. The key difference, though, is that Hacker News and my RSS feeds are fundamentally finite in size. I only subscribe to a handful of personal blogs^[4], so there's rarely more than a few new posts per day. On Hacker News I tend to skim the top posts and might read a couple which interest me. The content on the front-page doesn't change all that often, so I find I exhaust the amount of available content pretty quickly which naturally encourages me to close my client.

As a result of these shifting behaviours I've noticed something novel; my phone isn't that interesting any more. Quite often I find myself bored by my phone. Once you take the predatory, infinitely scrollable, algorithmically optimised, feeds out of the equation, it turns out that phones are fundamentally quite boring devices. My phone has been downgraded from a boredom-killing, attention-devouring machine to a little rectangle I carry around with me to pay for stuff, take photos, and help me navigate.

Using the time that I've gained back from my phone I've found myself rediscovering old hobbies, rebuilding this website, and going out for more walks. Nothing revolutionary, but all things which make me happier than advertising platforms ever could.

Next steps

Reclaiming my attention from YouTube has felt like a substantial positive change. Time and attention are finite resources and I've spent far too long giving them away to advertising platforms who, in return, did everything they could to wring more of it out of me. They delivered immediate gratification while making everything else feel duller by comparison, creating a perfect dependency loop.

My phone usage habits now are significantly more positive than they were a few months ago, but this new perspective has made me reconsider some of the other ways I interact with my phone. Abandoning these predatory platforms was straightforward enough, but are there ways I interact with my phone that feel "good" but perhaps mask less obvious negative effects? I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks; does that warrant deeper reflection as I consider how and where I spend my attention? Is seizing every free moment when cooking, cleaning, or walking to listen to a few minutes of an audiobook truly a net gain, or is it further disconnecting me from the world and claiming my attention in the same way as YouTube?

Perhaps I've not yet won the war for my attention, merely the battle.