Use the web browser version instead. And for the love of dog, use a adblocker you fucking maniacs.
Having to deal with the shitty web version makes you want to use it less, plus you save your face from being blasted by ads. Wanting to use apps less, makes you want to use your phone less. And that’s good for everyone, except the bastards who are completely fine with destroying your mental health just so they can be 0,78€ richer.
Personally I would like if everyone threw their phones towards a water bird, but not only is that unfriendly to the ducks, its also not very good for the environment or the local fish. And I guess its a waste of money as well. Also, I have been told that some of you use their phones to communicate with other people. I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that, but I find human behaviour rather strange, so lets not dwell on that.
Anyway, since you want to keep in touch with the other weirdos and since some of the services are kind of worth using and since it its actually pretty stupid to go to extremes, ditching the apps is a great compromise. Just open the services you want to use in a browser.
You can still watch DankPods shout at mp3 players on the Youtubes and if you use Firefox with uBlock Origin add-on, you don’t have to see the ads, you can even add a filter that removes the shorts! You can still go hit like? Thumbs up? Heart? Something? On the Instagram. You can even do… whatever you do on Tiktok. But making it just a tiiiiny bit inconvenient will slowly start to wean you off the addiction to the toxic swamp these awful apps have pulled you into.
When Reddit decided to start charging stupid money for their API access, it killed all the third party apps. Because the official Reddit app is trash, I never bothered to install it. I decided I’ll just use the web browser version and specifically the old.reddit.com version, because the new Reddit is basically the shitty mobile app. The old.reddit is not very nice to browse on a phone screen, but its heaps better than the new version. As a result, my Reddit use went down like 80%. Before that happened I would be doom scrolling for hours. Not 2 or 3 hours, but 5-6 hours. Looking back now, it was pretty horrible.
Reddit is… Reddit can be a great source of information, so I knew I didn’t want to ditch it completely. So the compromise was to use the inconvenient web browser version. I was still getting the information I wanted or needed but after getting the information, I didn’t stay on the website to doom scroll or otherwise waste my time. That’s how I use it on the phone these days, search for a thing, find the thing, get off.
I don’t even comment all that much anymore, not even when I’m browsing it on the laptop, because everyone over there seems to only want to have an argument, regardless of what you say. Even if you try to be helpful, some arsehole will come out of the woods and try to argue about it. So I’ve been thinking, having a reddit account is pretty pointless, other than having a subscription list. But even that is solved with the ancient technology of browser bookmarks. Hmm, I think I have just convinced myself to delete the account, brb.
When Discord started to make noises about the age verification thing, I wasn’t interested in any of that. I promptly deleted my account, removed the apps from my phone and laptop. Discord was the last app that I checked on my phone regularly. After it was gone, I haven’t really done much with it. I used to have to charge the damned thing 1-2 times per day, now it usually has 60-70% battery left when I go to bed.
A couple of years ago I bought a some of notebooks for unrelated reasons, but I ended up using them as notebooks. I don’t know what it is, but I find stuff faster and easier when its on paper. In a notes app everything looks the same, so it blurs into one big mess. When I write things down on a actual notebook, I can circle stuff, I can underline things, I can draw arrows pointing at things. All those catch the attention better, on a notes app I just end up scrolling up and down and get frustrated. And sure, the app has a search function, but 90% of the time my half melted brain forgets what words I used to write the note in the first place. And of course you can find a notes app that has a draw option, but those are awful. My fingers are just a collection of sausages, I can barely draw a straight line with these things. If I try to circle a note, I just end up messing it up and covering the text. With a pen and paper, I move like a samurai (that’s a lie). Also, when I use a notebook, my brain somehow remembers where in the notebook the thing was, for example, one page after the page that has “meet Peter at 13:00” circled a hundred times. On a note app that just doesn’t happen.
The same sort of mental map building happens with… well, maps. If you go everywhere with your map app guiding you, you’ll never train your brain to actually figure out where the hell you are at any given moment. If you start going to places without the navigator navigating you, your brain will start to make mental maps. Like when you were a kid and was running around the neighbourhood, you didn’t have google maps showing you where the playground was, you just figured it out.
I grew up before there was maps apps, or even that thing where you went to a website, typed in the setting off point and destination and printed 700 pages of directions. I also grew up liking maps. By very young age I had a pretty good idea of the main highways and the local roads. When me and my friends got our drivers licences and started to drive around the region, I surprised them with my knowledge of where we were and how to get to places. So much so that they started to call me TomTom. And conversely my friends surprised me with how badly they knew where they were or where they were going. There was many times where I was sure they would have starved to death because they would have gotten lost in the wilderness. But I didn’t study cartography, I wasn’t a taxi driver, I liked maps but I wasn’t a nerd about that. All I did was pay attention whenever we were travelling with family or whatever. And most importantly, I did it by not looking at a screen.
But again, don’t go to extremes. I’m not saying drive in circles until you find something that looks familiar. If I go somewhere I haven’t been to before, I do put the navigation on, I check the route before I set off. The road network is numbered in a logical way, where I live, the smaller the number, the bigger the road. So before I set off, I check the map and make mental notes, go north on the E12, take the east bound ramp on to the E63, then turn north to the 338, etc. If its a unfamiliar road, I check the app every now and then to make sure I haven’t taken a wrong turn or missed a turn. When I feel like I’m getting close to the destination, I turn on the app to guide me to the exact coordinates.
The same thing applies to your local public transportation system. You can use the app to figure out which stop to use, when the bus is there, where do you need to walk and whatnot. But you can also just learn a couple of routes and keep the phone in your pocket. I would hazard a guess that most people don’t use all the lines all the time, but rather use a couple lines daily. Even if you have 10 friends and they all live in different parts of the city, your brain will learn the routes and schedules surprisingly quickly. Don’t believe me? Ask a London Black Cab driver if they use a GPS to drive around London. They don’t. And they are doing a better job than the Über driver who relies on the navigation app.
But like I keep saying, no need to go to extremes about it. The public transportation app is nice, the audiobook and podcast players are nice, the music player is nice, the banking app is nice, the Signal app is nice. I’m also not saying you should never, in any circumstance use the toxic apps either. If you really need to add 17 385 pictures to your Instagram and the app is the fastest way to do that, just download the app, do the thing, then uninstall it. It takes a few moments to install them. And it usually remembers your login credentials, because of course they do. Nosy fucks.
I’m also not saying everyone should be a Luddite. I still chat to people, but I use IRC and only on my laptop. I still go to Mastodon, Lemmy etc, but only on my laptop. Doing these things on the computer makes it a thing to do “over there.” “There” being not on the toilet seat, not in bed, not hunched over at the kitchen table, not at the bus stop while the bus flies past you…
Some people do shock therapy and put their phone into a safe for a month, like that depressed looking moustache man and a few other youtubers. But those guys do it for views, its their job. I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone else. If you want to try it, sure go ahead. But you can also do just bits of it. And instead of a safe, you can just leave your phone on the table while you go do your grocery shopping.
I have cured myself of the phone addiction. And I did it out of spite and mostly accidentally. Spite, because I refused to use what the tech overlords wanted me to use. Accidentally because I wasn’t really doing all these things as a way to stop using the phone.
click here to see if you can find something else that is equally unhelpful