Easy habits for a calmer experience when logging onto the Internet

Once you do these things, you will feel as crazy as I do whenever people use the word “enshittification” to describe Poob turning the My Poobs button from green to orange.

Let web apps be regular apps

And use a browser for browsing. Or, more specifically, no using all of your productivity software in a browser. If a web app you use frequently has a desktop version, even if it’s an Electron app, download it. If it doesn’t, try finding an alternative to it or, as a last resort, pin the website to your taskbar if you come up empty-handed.

The goal of this is to structure your software in the frankly superior way people thought about their computers in the 90s: the operating system was the operating system. It had single-purpose apps, including a web browser for consuming content. The web browser wasn’t the “real” operating system for everything like it is now.

This makes you more conscious of when you’re wasting your time mindlessly surfing the web. Every time you Alt-Tab from an important thing you were doing in a dedicated desktop app to this new consumption-focused environment you made yourself, you can question if you really need to be there.

I admit this one is probably much harder if you’re on Windows. Mac users get Pages as a free native word processor. Windows users get... LibreOffice? I guess? But on the flip side, Windows is a lot more friendly about turning websites into things that look like PWAs.

The point here isn’t to get the performance benefits of making as much of the software you use native apps (though that is a nice bonus) but instead to more clearly organize everything you do on the computer and separate them from the homogeneous blob the web has become for most people.

Find your own entertainment

You know that one quote that’s like "you can have as much junk food as you want as long as you make it from scratch?"

No algorithms that find funny short videos for you. No algorithms that find funny short texts for you. Run away from any tab called “Explore” or “For You”. Get the Unhook extension and hide your YouTube recommendations. Remove all of your Bluesky feeds besides chronological ones that only show what the friends you chose are doing.

If you want to find funny channels, funny accounts, you’re going to do it the old-fashioned way, baby. Ask your oomfs about the kinds of things they watch, because what are oomfs for if not that? Using that big, beautiful search bar to find content about the stuff you’re interested in. The stuff I’ve found from typing in random keywords has been so much more rewarding for me than the posts any algorithm has ever served me.

Once you do this for a few weeks, if you ever try to relapse, you will become too hyper-conscious of when a website is trying to get you addicted and simply waste your time and instinctively gag and hate it. Like eating a treat you loved as a kid and noticing it’s way too sweet as an adult. You may even do the thing a lot of zoomers try to do and quit short-form video entirely, because it’s way harder for you to take action and be the one finding the content yourself on those.

Consider an RSS reader

You may think this conflicts with my motivation for never using a web app (preferring single-purpose apps rather than a single browser where everything happens), but the idea there is to silo apps by their purpose, not by who publishes them.

In that regard, an RSS reader is actually extremely additive to that goal. It is, as much as I can make it, the sole app where I read stuff. When I am in it, I am aware I am consuming and not working or creating.

“As much as I can make it” is an important point here, though. It’s getting harder to find RSS feeds for the blogs that I like, either because this new crop of websites made by zoomers never lived through the RSS era or because of media executives wanting to guard access to their content. For big paywalled publications, you’ll at most get an RSS feed that only shows you headlines and then links you to the article to the full story, even if you pay for the publication.

These kinds of RSS feeds don’t tick me off as badly as they probably do for a lot of people, as I still value being able to get notified of new articles in a dedicated app, without needing to filter through posts my friends make or checking a website homepage designed to maximize engagement to do so. Still, I imagine that non-full-text RSS would defeat the point for a lot of people, which is why you might not want to do this if much of your reading is from high-brow journalism.

Pro-tip: If a publication you like doesn’t have an RSS feed but does have a Bluesky account where they post all their new stuff, you can convert their Bluesky feed to an RSS one . You can also do this with a Twitter account using a Nitter instance, but I haven’t tried this myself yet.

Turn phones from foes to friends

I mainly wrote this blog post with desktop computers in mind, but much of this advice can also be applied to phones. In fact, it’s probably even easier to do the “let web apps be regular apps” thing considering PWAs on phones still kind of suck and Apple hates those things, so every mobile web app pushes you to download a mobile regular app. Many a tech enthusiast says they find this trend annoying, but I am here to tell you that your phone actually offers unmatched built-in tools to flip the forcing apps against these companies.

Use app time limits, which can be way more fine-grained on a phone for this very reason. If you find yourself too hooked on Instagram but have more self-restraint on Pinterest, for example, you can set two different time limits for both of those apps in a way you can’t do on a desktop where you use both of those apps on a web browser.

Use focus modes liberally. Focus modes these days are way more powerful than the simple notification pause switch they used to be. Set them up in a way such that you still get texts and calls from important people in your life while filtering out all the other crap you don’t need to look at, effectively turning your phone into a dumb phone when you’re not using it. Again, this kind of app-by-app tweaking has not been replicated on any desktop OS that I’ve used. Both Windows and Mac suck at notifications.

If you want to learn more about being a focus mode power user, check out Snazzy’s video on the topic . His video is about iOS, but my Pixel also has a very similar suite of options.

Make unlocking your phone as annoying as possible, and give yourself a cooldown period between unlocks. Stop doing the thing where you lock your phone, put it down, and then immediately remember something else you wanted to look at and then unlock it again. Make yourself annoyed by seeing your phone’s unlock animation so much. This isn’t something you can enforce through your phone’s software yet. But it’s also something you can’t really keep track of to begin with on an always-unlocked desktop or a big laptop where if you’re pulling all that out it’s likely because you have actual work to do and will be using it for a long stretch of time.

This is why I hate the fake problem that AI gadget companies and also David Pierce from The Verge try to sell you on. That the apps on our phones are too siloed from one another, that we need some unifying layer between all of them. Yeah, sure, this hypothetical layer would make some automation between apps easier, but would also make everything I just said above impossible.

Phones are great at monotasking. The thing that makes them feel like this magical wonder gadget in a way a computer doesn’t is that they can transform from a calculator, to a map, to a notepad, to a pager, to anything else you can think of in a blink of an eye. Interacting with all these tools with a single interface would kill this magic and also obfuscate what you actually use your phone for. Maybe once I see a chatbot that implements MCP in a functional way, I’ll change my mind about this.

Conclusion

I feel like a lot of my zoomer brethren say “using the Internet as a kid used to be magical, it isn’t like how it used to be :(“ because they let themselves be distracted by the whims of a few tech executives when all the fun of the Internet hasn’t disappeared.

It feels self-inflicted. Yes, it’s true that more of the Internet has seemed less designed with UX as a top priority like it did in the past. Paywalled, ad-supported, full of AI slop, bots, what have you, they’re all over the place and only there to juice stats or make some other people money.

But the reason why all this stuff seems so prevalent is because the companies that have the money to put all of their apps or content in front of your face also tend to be the ones that monetize said offerings most aggressively. And there’s way more to the web, even today, beyond what they want you to see.

Teach yourself to make the time you spend consuming on the Internet more meaningful, like back when the Internet was a destination rather than something you get from thin air. Teach yourself how to find interesting websites. Learn to google for fun again. Doing this stuff is less obvious these days, but it isn’t impossible either.