Curbing Compulsive Visiting/Scrolling with Scheduling?

[hikatamika]

My time back in the SmallWeb after choosing to social-web detox has been nice… but…
I find instead of scrolling/refreshing social media sites, I look out for Alerts here on MelonLand, or scroll the Most Recent Posts page as if it were a feed or a timeline… lol. 

Sometimes I even spend more time pressing Random on WebRings as if they were For You Pages or Algorithms or something. My dopaminergic scroll brainrot just found newer outlets  .

I'm feeling partially inspired by how the MelonLand forums, for a few reasons, close on Mondays. I'd already decided to only schedule art to share with the Social/Platform-Web once a month,
but I'm interested in limiting how frequently, and for how long I visit/scroll sites, SmallWeb or BigWeb, using some sort of schedule/rhythm/routine as well.

I don't know if I wanna have one day where I use a large, set, time limit to check up on every site I want, or if I should have a smaller time block every day, but switch which place I check, like "Wednesday is MelonForums day, Thursday is Bluesky day…" etc.

What patterns, rhythms, or schedules do you use to balance the frequency at which you check sites and interact with web apps? And have you experienced people who follow the common cultural practice of checking sites/apps frequently and as much as they want, finding you strange for doing things like taking a few days or even a week to reply to, or interact with, something?

[Dan Q]

I've come to timebox a moderate amount of my consumption. I do all of my news/blogs reading via my RSS reader (no distractions, all in one place!), and I hit it at the start and end of each day, and optionally at lunchtime. Where sites don't support RSS, I use XPath Scraping to achieve the same thing. I keep interruptions/notifications to a minimum.

I avoid media with "endless scroll"/"look at this next..." features, or - where that's not feasible - use JS-blocking or userscripts to remove that functionality (e.g. on the rare occasions I use YouTube, it never suggests a "next" video when I'm on a video page - when I'm done watching a video, I'm done unless I take the proactive step of navigating e.g. to the creator's channel to see what else they have).

I've only been on Melonland for a month and haven't yet adopted "good" habits here, but eventually I'll probably end up using my RSS reader for this, too: telling me about new threads in boards I'm interested in, and replies to threads I've engaged with, I'm thinking. But for now, I'll admit I'm like you @hikatamika - "popping in" to refresh a couple of times a day. Still much better than being interrupted with a buzz in my pocket, but not as disciplined as I'd like.

Making the Internet slow and deliberate takes effort and self-discipline.
It's worth it, but - like any good habit - it takes time to acquire, and you'll fail as often as you succeed in the early days.

Find what works for you, and it'll pay off. For me, as described above, the strategies are:

• Centralising - having one place to consume most of the things I access reduces the risk of distraction
• Scheduling - I primarily hit my feed reader only as specific times
• Blocking - if it interrupts me, it has to be for a good reason, e.g. because something's on fire, or because a real life human wants my attention; everything else should be on silent or removed entirely
• Sabotaging - where sites I use exploit the attention economy, I stop them doing so by nerfing their dark patterns (e.g. with plugins like DeArrow and userscripts) and by blocking the cookies that feed algorithmic "recommendation" algorithms
• Self-compassion - I accept that I'm not perfect, and respect that some "digital sins" are worse than others: losing an hour while I get lost on Wikipedia's a lot less-harmful than any 5 minute period spent on Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts, I'm sure!