Smartphones and Being Present
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The article discusses the challenges of being present in a world dominated by smartphones, and the discussion revolves around various strategies for mitigating smartphone addiction and finding a healthier balance between technology use and being present.
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- 01Story posted
Oct 13, 2025 at 10:20 AM EDT
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Maybe something like that could work. If you find there are notifications that are disturbing you, but they really could have waited until the evening, toss 'em in the batch bucket. Eventually you'll tune out all the low-importance stuff and get your life back. Or find some other cadence that works for you. It takes some effort to tune these systems, but I think it's worth it.
Now the browser doesn't work and I can't install new apps. I also turn on "Do Not Disturb" almost all the time, which allows through notifications from exactly 3 people.
I stood up and heckled my clown state representatives, for almost an hour, providing audience-appreciated commentary to what I perceive as our failed political system (US bipartisan).
To their toothless grocery sales tax reduction legislation (which'll never pass), I suggested my fellow constituents just shop across the state line, in one of the many nearby grocery stores — just STOP giving our state this money, then maybe they'll consider legislative changes.
Perhaps this fell upon deaf ears, but I wasn't the only audience member frustrated with our legislators' back-patting/inaction. I will vote/shop with my money, elsewhere. I wrote my state officials a letter afterwards, offering common-sense suggestions — hoping this geriatric remembers my participation (he turns 80 soon... just retire already, Congressman!).
And don't get me started on all the custom apps cluttering my phone that these schools and sports leagues get sold on for sharing flyers and other info (Parent Square, Peach Jar, Playmetrics, Mojo, etc.) I guess it's a feature that most of those apps are not well designed and they don't suck you into addictive engagement loops like the big social media platforms.
Come on, raise your kids right.
https://cabletvinfo.com/internet-services/cricket-wireless-p...
or 20GB for $35, with no talk or text.
https://www.usmobile.com/blog/explore-cricket-wireless-simpl...
edit: linking weird sites because I don't know how accessible US telecom site pricing is in Europe, but they are correct.
I've tested the unlimited claim, and they really do let you download terabytes. All my local LLMs are downloaded over mobile data.
So yes, in my experience it's inverted over here. Mobile bandwidth is the cheapest if you can get a good deal and you're in an uncongested area with a good signal. Unfortunately that's not a combination I've found to be reliable anywhere I go, especially over the last 6 months. But the price is good!
Tiktok having a borderline unusable web app has done wonders for me. I'll end up on it because someone sent me a link, I can watch that ONE video, a single time, before normally I get a spot-the-boat style captcha or an "install the app" modal. Even trying to get past that point, it feels like the site is somehow falling apart at the seams as you navigate around. I know the concept is "well people will install the app then" but that's also annoyingly frictionful.
They unintentionally made the most literal social media experience: some one sends me media, I watch it once, I leave before the site crumbles to pieces like an ancient tomb that was only held together by a load-bearing dog video.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
old.reddit.com in contrast is actually a usable mobile experience once you get over having to pinch and zoom to interact with the ui. Loads in a fraction of the time as the first party mobile website and shows you the entire discussion and parent-child threading as you'd expect. No nondeterministic behavior.
I miss i.reddit so bad. Blazing fast, no new tech, exactly what I needed.
Notifications has been broken off and on for months now. Before you would see there were message on your post. Click on post? Nothing. First it would load the image and show zero comments. Then it wouldn't load the image and just a blank screen. Now its the same problem in the notifications menu. Can't click on the comment, won't bring up the notice, nothing happens.
Its 2025 and its the worst UI experience I've had on any social media app and its not even close. I just keep wondering how this can be this bad for this long without anything changing.
That can't be true anymore, Instagram is a black hole for artists
Glad I'm not the only one.
At least the same(?) update finally fixed the browser back button and you don't have to scroll all the way down again after hitting it.
It's not perfect, as I still spend a lot of time on Reddit and HN on the tiny screen while commuting, but it's moved the needle for me.
1. it's gotta be bad for the eyes on a screen that small 2. the Pixel camera!
I guess these phones are rebadged?
I apologize for what is doubtless egregious projection on my part.
I am like you in the sense that I seem "immune" to TikTok/Reels, especially relative to my wife, who can definitely get sucked into it for 30-60 minutes. However, I'm easily-snared by things like "the last year of drama in the NixOS community". I can easily spend an hour I don't have reading forum threads in which people are accusing moderators of abusing their position in a forum about a piece of technology I don't use.
So in some sense the tech industry didn't need to "innovate" in order to suck me in. I was getting sucked into reading about web forum drama 20 years ago.
I often spend way more time on those.
Each one 3-5 lines. Hundreds of comments in a near endless list.
I don’t think HN is that different compared to other social media
It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.
Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.
Of course, long term I know time spent this way is mostly wasted for the value I get out of it.
This forum is addicting to a lot of people. There are also clickbait titles (though less than elsewhere), heated debates, even flamewars in the comments.
People do project their general behaviour patterns on social media regardless of the form, though some forms are more malleable to that than others.
Well, in that case, I need some sources. For example, I'm not convinced that people project on social media to the extent that you're implying they do. It's a statement that needs support (which you didn't provided).
I am confident that you are able to find those sources, then we'll be able to talk about it on a common ground!
As for evidence for people actually miss old Twitter, sorry I can't prove to you I have friends who mention that multiple times a month. You can take it for what it is (someone sharing their experience) or you can assume that I'm making this up for the sake of a throwaway internet conversation. Your choice.
Most of the YouTube and short-form content doesn't inspire anything like that. The "job" is to sit and watch the content for 30 seconds and repeat. Almost every form of "engagement" is to manipulate the audience into "doing the algorithm".
I think they have differences that are significant.
I've been trying to correct the algo but giving a down thumb to videos I don't want to watch but its not learning.
I highly recommend the book Hooked by Nir Eyal[0]. It is the book that effortlessly detailed how to build short form video networks (as well as other addicting software over the last 10+ years). The people who built this stuff read it and the people who want to stop the addictions should read it.
[0] https://search.worldcat.org/title/881418283
Edit: mute button is essential and don't allow any notifications outside important messages/apps
The human race has survived for about 2 million years without a 24/7 tether. Our environment is the safest and most human-shaped it's ever been, you don't need to have constant anxiety about true emergency situations resolved by cell phone connections, those are unimaginably rare.
It's totally feasible to go without a cell phone once in a while, just try it! Check your emails once a day, 5 days a week. Set up an auto-responder saying you're unavailable and can check messages at [time]. Navigate with your memory and the many signs that are posted, or with a paper map for aid. Write down things you need to remember with a pen and a piece of paper. Leave the phone behind and just go for a walk in a park with nothing but your surroundings and your thoughts. The world will keep turning for 30 minutes regardless of whether you're keeping tabs on it through the phone.
- Completely hide the recommended tab
- Make every thumbnail grayscale (to mitigate eye-catching thumbnails)
- Make every video title lowercase (to mitigate eye-catching titles)
Here's my code, although I have to update it every once and a while when YouTube changes:
It's amazing how much a couple small changes can make on your browsing experience. The companies that own these products have a huge incentive to make every element purposefully addictive. I've also patched the iOS Instagram app to remove all Reels (using FLEXtool & Sideloadly), so I can keep up with my friends without falling into the traps. As developers, we have the ability to target these manipulative tactics and remove them, and I encourage you to do this as much as possible.I find YouTube recommendations very useful. I only get what I'm interested in or adjacent topics, no junk, no ragebait.
https://unhook.app/
I just wish I had an addon like this for, well, everything. The browser is such a great platform because you can have this much control over your experience--no such luck with mobile apps.
When smartphones came out, I made a decision early on that I'm just not going to use them in a way that makes my internet footprint follow me everywhere I go. I set them up using a throwaway email account, turned off almost all notifications, and added just family and real-world friends. I think this served me well for nearly two decades. I really only use my phone for maps, photos, and maybe 2-5 messages a day. I honestly never found myself in a situation where I thought to myself, "gosh, I wish I could read my e-mail right now".
But in the past five years, there's been this mounting pressure from app vendors to make sure I can no longer enjoy that. Every other time a friend sends me a web link, I get a popup that detects I'm on mobile and demands I install an app. And they increasingly can't be dismissed, so if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
If you work for a place that does that, I just hope you stub your toe every morning.
Also Wikipedia. I don't remember if I particularly disliked the first-party app, but I vastly prefer Wikipedia in a web browser.
It's 13:41 on Tuesday, October 14 - Don't forget to give us money!
Surely you don't mean to block our popups, right?
Surely you didn't mean to block our auto-playing video, right?
Surely you would rather use our lousy app rather than the desktop web site you explicitly requested, right?
etc.
The browser vendors already do. What do you want to change?
Firefox on Android seems pretty good on desktop-mode, though: its resolution seems desktop-like, and sites rarely give me the mobile treatment.
For example I use Opera to browse `facebook.com/messages`. It's a bad UX for writing (somehow it "swallows" some of the written text when you type too fast, or select text and try to overwrite it), but this makes me use it less. Won't ever install FB app on my phone.
I was literally using it fine one day, then the next they started saying I need to use the desktop website for menu editing as it's "more optimized."
Dinguses, if I'm manually turning on Desktop Mode I know it's not gonna be "optimized." Just let me get my menu edits pushed goddamnit!
Especially if viewport scaling is disabled.
People with vision impairments need to be able to zoom.
Apple has started down this road. All iPads now use desktop user agents.
If you want full fooling, install a UA changer on your Firefox mobile, and you're laughing.
Usually I can work around this by toggling "desktop mode" in firefox on android...
I have one of those parental limit things set for it from 5 years ago. I used to run into the 15 minute limit every day but now I rarely see it pop up.
From my social circle, the only such annoying links I get are from Instagram.
I have a deep, almost visceral hatred for the current incarnation of social media, so I go out of my way to not create accounts on those things.
For Instagram and similar shit, I could find some nice downloader bots on Telegram. They typically require you to join some spam channels, but you can join and archive those so you never see that they exist.
Why is this better than just joining Instagram with a 'ghost' account only used to view things you've been sent. No following or viewing otherwise. Is it just self-control (which I fully understand if it is)?
It does help with self control - I intentionally hamstring my ability to see Instagram (and other social media) content by following a slightly cumbersome procedure on Telegram that also makes it impossible for me to search or view any related content. But that is a second-order benefit.
Yeah, we can waste a lot of time in front of the PC, but it at least can be used for creativity and productivity.
[Smart]phones are almost pure consumption.
This might depend on one's age/generation. There are tons of internet-connected people today growing up without ever owning (or knowing how to use) a PC at all. They do everything on their phone, including the creative stuff. I didn't believe it either until I saw my friend's high-school age kid writing an entire 15 page writing assignment on her phone. Us PC people are kind of dinosaurs.
I agree with the parent comment. Smartphones (and tablets) are useless for anything productive. They are entirely consumption machines. If somebody is able to do their job or studies entirely on a smartphone and tablet, it says more about their job and studies than anything.
What vexes me to this day is that you still can't really use something like VS Code on an iPad (you can do it in a browser in a limited way). A tablet, with a wireless Bluetooth keyboard would be a perfect hybrid for creative and productive work. I haven't really found a 2-in-1 that provides the same standard.
Hard to imagine, as for me any text longer that 1-2 sentences is a pain on mobile, but maybe indeed it is a matter of conditioning.
And many of them face issues when joining the workforce.
I mean, it's covered in cameras and microphones and shit. I can measure things with it. In a pinch, it's a level. Photos for reference at the hardware store. Filming content for most any purpose short of outright pro-level work, great on a phone. Tuner for my instruments, metronome if I want that, good for sheet music (iPad's best, but a phone will do in a pinch, and I'm not gonna carry a laptop around and unfold it and stuff). It fits in my pocket and I always have it, which means it's the only "notebook" I've been able to stick with for writing down ideas. Working with MIDI? Phone or tablet. In the workshop? Phone or tablet. Cooking? Phone or tablet. Working on my car? Phone. Working on the garden or any handyman-stuff around the house? Phone. A laptop would be a downgrade in every case, I don't really have any use for one aside from writing code.
I messed around with stuff like MSPaint as a kid, like everyone else, but these days I'd do that in Procreate on the iPad (and that is in fact what I use for drawing). Even the Pocket version on a phone would be better.
Unless I'm making things for computers an I-device is at least as good, and usually better, for creation-related stuff. Phones are worse for long-form writing, mostly due to the tiny screen, but a tablet's better for that than a laptop, given an external keyboard, because you can place the screen somewhere other than right on top of the keyboard, for better ergonomics.
A lot of the things you listed are utilities, which I'd agree the phone is great for. If any of the things you've listed are a key feature of your job, for you it works. For the endless office hordes who write emails, code, documents etc. for a living, their only using a smartphone would suggest their job is largely superfluous to me.
A tablet is a happy medium, and a tablet with connectable keyboard is perfect. I wish VS Code (the full version) worked on an iPad. It's that extra bit of real estate.
For instance some people making music like to have a dedicated, offline computer to do so in lrder to not be tempted to open the web browser for 2 minutes that transformz itself into hours. Same for some writers who try to seek dedicated environments focused on writing and limiting their exposure to the internet.
Are there alternatives that are as friendly? Or being friendly is the danger here?
I don't think there are alternatives to what modern phones can do, unless you want to carry multiple dumb devices around (ebook + GPS + mp3 player for example)
The first is an app called Bloom (theres another called Brick thats similar) that allows you to lock app access behind a physical NFC card. You lock the app and to unlock you must scan the card.
The second is an app called "freedom" that blocks access to specific websites or apps on a schedule.
I setup Freedom to block the distracting apps and websites during specific hours, then used Bloom to block Freedom, this prevents me from just disabling Freedom when I'm bored. I keep the NFC tag in my car.
Now I use a full featured smartphone that does what I want, and if I actually need access to social media or blocked sites I go to the car to unlock Bloom. I still have all the options, they're just a little more inconvenient.
The added friction of having to physically get up means I usually just don't bother, and Freedoms scheduling and category based blocks mean I can be pretty flexible about what I block and when.
Eventually they realize that's the better way to share it, ask me how I did that, and start doing it themselves.
I get pretty upset at this. I have a 1 strike policy for most apps. Now even Uber just doesn't get any notifications at all on my phone.
Same for email spam. If I didn’t opt in or if I unsubscribed and still get emails, or if unsubscribing requires more than 2 clicks, every single one gets reporter to Google as spam. If there’s no unsubscribe link I report it to the FTC.
I do it out of principle. If everyone took an absolutist hard line on these things, the world would be a tiny bit better.
But like I said, just my perspective, I don't have any hard data points.
At the cost of making an actually useful website for those of us not on mobile. My bank insists on making their website/online banking platform work as if it was their mobile app. The flow of bank transfers, paying bills, writing to your banking adviser is now entirely confusing and feels unsafe. Even a 14" laptop has plenty of space to show you detailed overviews, but no, assume that the user is on a tiny ass screen and show them mostly white-space.
But it's really a pick-your-poison situation. All of it sucks on some level haha.
> if I want to view that URL, I need to mail it to myself and open it on a desktop.
I'm signed in to both my Firefox on Android and on desktop, and I can hit the share button while viewing a website and then tap my desktop Firefox under "Send to device". Saves a bunch of steps there.
I'm assuming other browsers can do the same.
The only other response is to fill your phone with 128 GB of every different social media app that exists.
Extra toe-stubbing wishes for those that are pushing this paradigm into desktop - it's bewildering to me when I hear non-technical folks tell me that an app on desktop needs to come from an app store. Or when web design is being "simplified" and dumbed down really on desktop to facilitate surveillance.
Toe-stubbing-every-morning wishes to a lot of people for contributing to this reality.
You're too kind. These kinds of nagging parasites should be force fed excrement until they choke on it.
So I'm back, but limit what I have on my phone now and its like you said, a constant struggle NOT to download and install something.
- having a "phone box", the small uncomfortable shoe bench now has a shelf above it for phones, phones shall only be used on that bench
- only my partner knows the "screen time" password on iOS
- putting away my laptop and using a desktop computer instead
My current problem is listening to podcasts, I don't have a convenient way to listen to them without my phone.
The big issue is that I'm not very good at moderating my intake. I'm a crack addict for information and one small dose will turn into a bender.
I've got a somewhat weekly 6 hour round-trip commute where it get a lot of use.
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