Turning my ESP32 into a DNS sinkhole to fight doomscrolling

I was never addicted to social media, but I used to be terribly addicted to YouTube. I tried various blockers, and none of that worked. In the end I told myself I'm going to quit for 1 month and see. It's a long enough period, where you can't just distract yourself with other things, but it's not long enough to feel like you're losing something. Not to preach, but it worked for me, and I've applied it successfuly in other places like eating habits. You commit to 1 thing at a time, and see if it makes your life better.

> and I've applied it successfully in other places

There is a positive effect to quitting without too many crutches or aids. Not so much that you learn how to do it, but that you realise that it can be done, it's not that bad and it will make your life better.

I agree. If you need to set something up (like a DNS sinkhole) to trick yourself (and you know how to disable it to get back to scrolling), it'll take actual willpower to truly stop.

And what happened after? Did you stop using YouTube altogether or you can now moderate your usage?

I did a similar experiment quitting YouTube and reddit for a month last year. By the end of the month I didn't feel like I missed it much and thought that it wasn't a problem for me anymore. Unfortunately, with time my usage started to ramp up again.

YouTube is still useful, so I didn't cut it out completely. I have an RSS feed for channels I'm interested in, and sometimes the only good search result is a video. The feed is for noise control only. I find that I now negatively associate impulsive YouTube consumption, and I'm conscious of when it happens, so I catch myself almost immediately.

If your usage ramps up, and you catch yourself scrolling for the sake of distraction, then don't beat yourself up, just repeat the process. I'm sure I'll need a reminder too.

I’m in the process of loading up my instance of FreshRSS with my MVP YouTube subscriptions, with plugins to allow videos to be viewed inline, sans anything relevant to politics or news. It will be the final algorithmically determined feed that I am routinely exposed to. I left most social media for good over 12-years ago (I am an early adopter, even in cynicism about the societally damaging potential of social networks).

The benefit of having a chronological feed that consists entirely of plain text headlines cannot be overstated. I can feel a tangible difference in how I engage with news and information that’s presented without the usual “tricks of the trade”. I am going to setup accounts on my system for friends and family, but I wish there were a more straightforward mechanism for doing this, and I fear that Cloudflare, Discord, and actions from the big players in this game will take actions to prevent this kind of separation of content from its platform, but for now this is working well.