Recently it occurred to me that a large part of being addicted to Reddit isn’t actually the content but the fact that the links turn purple when you click on them. And my brain is slightly obsessed with turning all the blue purple, all the time.
This is amazing, yet seems so obvious in retrospect. So many of us have turned into blue-minimizing robots without realizing it. Hopefully breaking the reward feedback loop with your extension would force people to try to examine their true reasons for clicking.
I was pretty pleased with myself for discovering that. It—sorta works. I still find myself going to Reddit, but so far it’s still “feeling” less addictive (which is really hard to quantify or describe). Now I’m finding myself just clicking to websites more looking for something, rather than specifically clicking links. I’ve been sleeping badly lately, though, and I find that my brain is a lot more vulnerable to my Internet addiction when I haven’t slept well—so it’s not a good comparison to my norm.
Incidentally, if anyone wanted me to I could certainly make the extension work on other browsers. It’s the simplest thing ever, it just injects 7 clauses of CSS into Reddit pages.
I thought about making it mess with other websites I used (hackernews, mostly) but I decided they weren’t as much of a problem and it was better to keep it single-purpose for now.
From your blog:
This is amazing, yet seems so obvious in retrospect. So many of us have turned into blue-minimizing robots without realizing it. Hopefully breaking the reward feedback loop with your extension would force people to try to examine their true reasons for clicking.
I was pretty pleased with myself for discovering that. It—sorta works. I still find myself going to Reddit, but so far it’s still “feeling” less addictive (which is really hard to quantify or describe). Now I’m finding myself just clicking to websites more looking for something, rather than specifically clicking links. I’ve been sleeping badly lately, though, and I find that my brain is a lot more vulnerable to my Internet addiction when I haven’t slept well—so it’s not a good comparison to my norm.
Incidentally, if anyone wanted me to I could certainly make the extension work on other browsers. It’s the simplest thing ever, it just injects 7 clauses of CSS into Reddit pages. I thought about making it mess with other websites I used (hackernews, mostly) but I decided they weren’t as much of a problem and it was better to keep it single-purpose for now.