I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Page I Visit (2020)

This has reminded me how much my Reddit usage has dropped off a cliff after the third-party apps debacle.

At first, it was as a futile protest, but then the inevitable addiction hunger kicked in. But this time, I had no choice to use the offical Reddit app.

The sluggishness of that app added enough latency, that my Reddit consumption is now non-existent

I love the idea, and I love how it makes me feel revulsion. Would I do this to myself? No way - which makes it such a tempting idea to try, because I don't trust that gut reaction. That's the kind of gut reaction the brain will find any reason to justify because it is, as stated, an addiction.

> This just feels like a beneficial dilution of the Internet. It feels like wine to the ancient Greeks, who drank wine but attacked the practice of drinking undiluted wine as tantamount to barbarism.

As a classics major this was always one of my favorite tidbits about ancient Greek culture, so I love seeing it show up elsewhere. It speaks to why I like weak drinks as well... I enjoy drinking, and weak drinks let me drink more and have a higher degree of control.

> Other possible dilutions

Interestingly, I'm already about 60% of the way there without doing anything as intense as intentionally slowing down my web. Something I consistently find myself missing is old-style forums, which I believe are definitely what I want, but aren't easy to get to "stick", so I'm openly soliciting recommendations for any which care about and and enforce quality.

I added a grayscale filter to my phone which has cut down my phone usage from 8 hours to almost 4 hours per week. I’ve been doing it for 2 months now I think. I can’t even describe how boring it is to use my phone now, which is exactly how I want it.

If anyone is curious to trying this, I highly suggest combining this with one of those minimalistic launcher apps. There are multiple options, one is called Dumbify on iOS (not free), but I've stuck to "Blank Spaces App" (trial, not free).

It reminds me of when years ago I disabled watch history on YouTube and I realised that with that, recommendations became significantly worse, which in turn made me watch YouTube less, and have a tighter control, through subscriptions, on what YouTube recommends me. By making YouTube worse, I made my YouTube experience better.

Now I always pay attention to these kinds of things to see how can I get more control over personalised recommendations if I can't avoid them

Addiction is a disease, it should be treated as such. We shouldn't be relying on the afflicted to heal themselves. It's no different than asking someone depressed to just "think happy thoughts" and expect them to magically will their condition away.

that's wasteful.

disable all prefetch in the browser (which mostly server to tell google about links on the pages you visit).

use only quad9 dns.

enable all worldwide AdBlock filters (in uBlockOrigin obviously)

enable browser process sandbox (firejail if you're lazy) so it can only every access ~/Downloads and you have to artisanaly curate and move files beforehand.

disable JS globally on uBlockOrigin and see the site without it, and then think for a brief second before deciding if you will abandon or enable js on that domain.

there are so many GOOD ways to add that latency with a LOT of return.

Beer? My settings taste like rancid fish oil.

No JavaScript by default. Each JavaScript file or snippet MUST be whitelisted FOR THAT DOMAIN. My whitelist has about 50 permanent websites.

Cookies vanish when I close each tab. I can whitelist specific domains that won't do that. I never accept third party cookies. I have about 5 domains whitelisted for that.

No browser history. I have around 5 bookmarks. My bookmarks bar is on the same row as the address bar, if I put too much bookmarks I loose address bar space and get uncomfortable, forcing me to clean it up.

My phone only have about 20 apps (including default ones) on the home screen. Single page, only the bare essentials. Everything else is browser based. I don't even have GMail, for example (disabled it). The only things that can notify me are calls, sms and alarm clock. I have zero permanent contacts (memorized phones of closer people).

Result:

- I can't keep logged in on almost anything. Most my accounts require 2FA. Huge discouragement for all kinds of things.

- Most of the web feels completely broken and miserable (because it is, all things I turned off are supposed to be optionals).

- My phone feels sterile. Text, clock, occasional Maps navigation, bank, pagerduty, etc. I hardly look at it.

I am still fairly addicted to YouTube though. History off, comment box hidden and recommendations hidden helps, but I still spend too much time on it. I once did the thing of hiding thumbnails, votes, description and channel name (only title and duration visible). It was good, I need to try that again.

I wonder how social media would turn out if people combined this with AdNauseam.

Every time you visit a website, your PC will show you an empty page and in the background it'll click all ads for 8 seconds, then it'll switch to hiding all ads and showing you the content. Most likely, all ad networks will quickly block you for ghost clicks. But I wonder what they'll do next? Can the ad network report you to publishers' pages? Or will you still see the content but all ads will be missing because the ad network refuses to show you anything?

Planning to add this as an option into my extension SuperFocus https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/superfocus-ultimate...

It currently lets you hide all the distracting elements in YouTube - one of the methods the author references. YouTube is my #1 time suck. From personal experience, this alone makes a lot of difference.

Somewhat related:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/consuming-articles-off...

(HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739940)

And:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2024/Apr/reading-articles-via-p...

It's rare that I read anything other than very short articles via my screen. I haven't posted followups, but one thing you notice when reading offline is that the things that compete for your attention are quite different vs when reading via a screen.

When reading on a monitor/phone, you are (only) competing with other things on the PC/phone. Other apps, other tabs on your browser, etc.

After reading offline for a while, my brain realized that next to my pile of articles is a bookshelf with books I've accumulated for years, and not read. As a result, even though I continue to print articles to read offline, I read very little of those, and spend more time reading actual books. The quality is higher, as well.

Likewise, while I still listen to articles via the podcasting solution above, I spend more time listening to audiobooks instead.

I firmly believe that had I not gone the offline reading/listening route, I would never had read those books.

I have been intentionally spending Sundays at the command line only: Browsing using various TUI site-specific clients, and elinks with my own customizations for sites that I use a lot. I write code in a console editor, and I just don't use GUIs for anything. Having an arbitrary set of constraints has made me more mindful of my use of technology, and has given me reason to delve into lots of random projects to scratch an itch.

I absolutely want to do something like this to help me and my family spend less time watching our phones in the evening.

Does anybody know of a reasonably-simple way of either increasing the latency or throttling the bandwidth, per-device, with programmable hours? For example, is there any wifi router that lets you do this?

Back in 2020 this got a lot of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319383

Edit: And there are some really insightful comments there. No surprise, of course. But worth looking back at. I already got some good advice for my HN disease. Somehow I missed this discussion the first time around.

Does anyone know of a way to implement this at the network level? Maybe with a pihole or something?

You could do this, or you could use the distractions as a practice for ignoring the distractions. This is quite a powerful practice for improving your ability to focus on what matters, in and outside the web.

When I read TF I was hoping to hear that the latency injection impacted the authors ad tracking.

I wonder if signaling a low quality network or device would change the behavior of advertisement injection during browsing?

Oh, I thought he was going to talk about Bing. Bing outbound links redirect through Bing, and Bing's redirector is so slow that can add seconds of delay.

Tip: play some modem sounds while waiting.

I recently started using “one sec” on iOS to help control my habits. I highly recommend it after my first week of use. It has you take a breath and keeps track of how much time you saved (predicted) by declining to click through after the pause by integrating with Screen Time. You can customize your tags for overriding in case you need to “learn” or “troubleshoot” with a bounded app.

I need an extension that forbids responding to comments on reddit, like just hide it almost NEVER has responding to comments come out well and always devolves into an argument, but i like reading comments to see the funny things hell most of the best things on an article are the first or second comment, but dear god its so hard to refuse to click the reply to some annoying asshat.

What the author describes is basically the digital alternative to moving to a "higher rent area". You can choose to filter out the issues that the average person has, but that doesn't make them go away.

Searching for "XKCD 862"[0] finds implementations. I never found a good one for firefox.

[0] check the alt-text https://m.xkcd.com/862/ (2011)

interested in the old-style forums you pay money for

text rendering sucks on this particular website (chrome windows)

test rendering sucks on this website