Today I learned that people pay money for an app that stops them from using a (probably expensive) phone. And not just a few people, but enough for the Freedom app to have 2 investment rounds and 11-50 employees[0]. Is it just me, or does that sound like something has gone horribly wrong somewhere? Why not just mute all notifications, or put the phone on silent or airplane mode, or switch it off, or even just replace it with a dumb phone?

And as an aside, I have a theory that the attention/distraction economy is not exclusively the fault of Big Tech spending billions working out how to "steal" people's attention, but also has an element of people being much more easily distracted nowadays thanks to rise of pointless jobs, unfulfilling personal lives, etc.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/freedom-2

In his Chaos Manor column, in Byte Magazine, in the late 90's, author Jerry Pournelle used to mention the “monk cell” where he went to write, upstairs his house - on a PC with no Internet access and just enough software for writing.

Calling it that feels wrong to me. They're putting a label on people who ignore their manipulative trash. Plenty of people don't use social media, or watch news and movies, they're not in "monk mode"

How many of us are currently distracted checking HN rather than concentrating on our work?

This smells like a thinly veiled attempt at marketing for Freedom, rather than solving the problem. Sort of like "it's ok to binge drink all weekend because of this app, but not on a work day!" sort of mentality.

I think you need an absurdist lens to not get lost here. Camus had a point.

Think about it, I could say I'm going to adopt a modal diet, which is really what monk mode is, a modal diet of information attention.

How would my modal diet work? One day, fasting, the next day, a steady stream of alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, and processed food.

Consistency is key.

As technical people, we know this from reading the history from Pirsig (ZMM) to Nielsen-Norman:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modal-nonmodal-dialog/

Asceticism has never scaled, much like the hacker news post today about intimacy not scaling, or the fact that modality in design was more about making it easy for implementors than making it easy for consumers.

Monks have been and will always be ascetic. There's nothing ascetic about taking a time-honored tradition and using it to mis-label the behavior of people who are overwhelmed by water they cannot breathe but cannot ignore.

Wish there was a better way to do this that didn’t just let you delete the app.

Apple’s screentime UI is really limited and poorly designed IMO.

I just uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter apps. I can still log into the website if someone sends me a link, but there's more friction and there are no notifications pulling me in. Highly recommend.

I've succesfully rolled out a (IMHO) better version of the "Freedom" app, that comes with a load of other benefits like being cheaper and even more effective. My phone can only make calls and texts because it's a dumb phone, and I have to go to my computer if I want to waste time on the internet.

The Apple watch with cellular has been awesome for limiting social media use.

I frequently leave my phone at home and while I don't use Social Media that much, it's great to never be tempted but still be contactable, have all the useful info I like (stocks, weather etc) while not having anything from Meta anywhere near me. Not having browser is wonderful.

Apps shouldn't be able to "notify" you (by default), in the same way your home appliance are not interrupting you.

What works best for me. Leaving phone at home when I meet people. It's not always possible, obviously, but if I know the address, I might take a db phone for emergencies. Or even, just a paper with the phone number.

I uninstalled social media from my phone (I still have them on my desktop PC). I still have wahtsapp, but I turned off the notifications.

Yet another newspaper talking about a new trend (that they possibly made up by cherry picking).