Day 36: Carrot vs. Stick

I’m kind of having a hard time adjusting to my new life in NYC. My mood is significantly affected by the weather and the gloomy sky + rain here saps my energy; I’ve gotten used to having a proper working space where I can sit comfortably and work for hours, and the only space I have here is being crouched over on my bed because all nearby cafes are packed and the working space in the hacker house is unfinished; I’d grown fond of my housemates and my friends in Austin, and I miss them. I’m guessing that a lot of the difficulty might just be the natural result of big life changes, so I’m hoping this smooths over in the coming days.

One telltale sign that my mental well-being needs attention is if I find myself mindlessly binging content. On most days, I look at Hacker News and my Twitter feed for several minutes and don’t really spend time on YouTube, Facebook, or Reddit. The more I’m engaged with the things I’m doing and the people around me, the less interested I become in spending time just consuming random content. But yesterday, I fell into the dark pit of endlessly cycling between all the different feed sites, devouring everything in sight, leaving for another site, and then returning within a few minutes despite the lack of new content. I ended up spending hours being a zombie, scrolling through videos on subreddits like /r/whatcouldgowrong, watching compilations of people making shots from half court during NBA games for cash prizes, and watching Tony Hawk explain the difficulty level of various skateboarding tricks. Time incredibly well spent, am I right?

But falling into that pit helped me realize something about Hide Feed: Knowing how much time I’ve spent on a site doesn’t really help me break the cycle I’m stuck in. The desirable thought pattern is “Dang, I’ve spent over an hour watching garbage on YouTube. It’s time to stop.” The thought pattern that actually happened was “I’ve spent over an hour watching garbage on YouTube. Ugh.” and then I’d go right back to binging.

Right now, the usage stats of Hide Feed act as a stick: It tells you how much time you’ve spent viewing the feed, so the more you view the feed, the worse you feel. The idea is that being able to see that should help you check yourself. But the reality (at least in my experience) is that you just feel bad and it doesn’t really help you break the cycle.

That raised the following question: Can I change the stick into a carrot? Can I reward people for choosing to hide the feed instead of making them feel bad for showing it? Currently, if you go to Facebook 10 times without viewing the feed, the usage stats message shows “You haven’t viewed the feed today” every single time. But visiting a site without viewing the feed should be an accomplishment to be celebrated. Some friends had previously mentioned that they’d like to see the time they saved by not viewing the feed, but I didn’t really pursue that because it’s difficult to determine that number (who knows how much time you would’ve spent viewing the feed? 30 seconds? 2 hours?) vs. the ease of precisely showing you how much time you spent. But I think that they were onto something (thanks Jonah and David). If you open Facebook and Hide Feed shows “You’ve saved 30 minutes today by hiding the feed”, that could provide motivation to continue your healthy behavior.

So the main takeaway from yesterday’s binge bonanza was to change the usage stats from a stick (time spent) to a carrot (time saved) and see how that feels.

The other takeaway I had was that I think I might have been too quick in deciding to let go of Intention, the Chrome extension I worked on before Hide Feed. I think there might be a place for a much heavier solution that enforces time limits on your browsing and kicks you off. I still don’t know whether that’d make more sense to integrate into Hide Feed or have a separate extension entirely, but it would be quite helpful for helping stop the downward spiral of mindless binging.