The Slot Machine: How I Got Out

In my last blog post I explained why it can be so hard to stop scrolling on YouTube or Reddit. Think of it like a slot machine in your pocket. Instead of pulling a lever and hoping to win, you scroll and hope for something interesting. The mechanism behind this is called intermittent reinforcement. When a behavior is only sometimes rewarded, it gets reinforced far more strongly than if it were rewarded every time. That’s exactly what’s happening when you scroll: you only sometimes find something genuinely interesting, and that unpredictability is what keeps you scrolling.

In this blog post I want to share what I did to overcome my own tendency towards doomscrolling on YouTube and Reddit.

The first step is understanding what the actual problem is. For me, the key realization was that the problem is not the content itself, but the algorithm serving it to me in an endless feed. Even if there are no bad intentions when creating an algorithm that tries to provide a user with interesting content, there is the danger of creating an intermittent reinforcement scheme that simply makes you learn a new behavior that you maybe didn’t want to learn. So I’m much more aware of the cost of interacting with these algorithms (i.e., learning a behavior you never intended to) and that makes it a lot easier for me to stop.

The good thing about a learned behavior is that you can unlearn it. In order to do so, you need to avoid the behavior. This seems easy at first but can be the most challenging part at the beginning. The reason is there are a lot of learned contexts that act as triggers for the behavior. For example, when you’re waiting at the bus stop what do you do? I bet you look at your smartphone and maybe you’re scrolling on social media. What if you now forbid yourself from using social media? You will stand at the bus stop and something in you, automatically, wants to reach for your smartphone and start scrolling. That’s what you have to avoid and what you have to expect when unlearning it.

For me the hardest trigger was time after work. I used to hang out on the couch to relax and think about the day. Before I knew it I was doomscrolling on YouTube for way longer than I’d like to admit. So that was the hardest trigger for me to break.

When you’re in that situation and the urge to scroll kicks in, it’s best to come prepared. And by prepared I mean having alternatives ready. For example, instead of sitting on the couch and scrolling I started calling friends or doing short meditation sessions to relax. But that was only partly a real alternative, because YouTube and Reddit were also platforms I used to inform myself. And through a good friend I learned about an absolutely groundbreaking alternative: RSS readers.

Depending on your age and background that might sound more or less cryptic to you, so let me explain. On social media platforms, creators make content and the algorithm selects it for you and puts it into your feed. The problem is that both the creators and you are fully dependent on the platform, and as a viewer you have little control over what gets recommended to you.

With RSS readers, you’re the one in control. People write their own blogs and are in full control of their content. An RSS reader lets you build your own feed by subscribing to the blogs you actually want to follow. Most blogs support RSS, and what makes it even better is that individual YouTube channels do too. That means you can still follow your favorite creators without ever opening YouTube’s homepage and getting pulled into the recommendation rabbit hole. You decide what you see. Not the algorithm.

If any of this resonates with you, I’d say don’t start with an app blocker or a strict schedule. This usually doesn’t work because you’re trying to unlearn a behavior, and you can only do that by not executing it. It’s like scratching open a healing wound again and again. Start with step one: understand the problem and become aware of it. Then pause for some time and find good alternatives. For me it was RSS, and I can’t recommend it enough.