TL;DW The opposite of addiction is community, not sobriety. So you're already doing something right by being on Neocities

(and also "community" means just being in the presence of other people in any pleasant digital or in-person third space, NOT pressuring yourself to make friends. yes, just being around other strangers frequently is all you need. friendships eventually happen from repeated exposure to others. the full video does a better job arguing all of this lol)

Saving to watch! man i used to have a playlist of these sorts of videos and then my channel was deleted. rip. gotta start new.

Oh man, thank you for sharing this video! It's a really nice breath of fresh air from the usual detox slop that i've seen on youtube. Having a community and a presence with other people absolutely is a solution to this problem. I have an example: playing Space Station 14 (or, any roleplaying game in general) helped me feel happier. Scrolling youtube wasn't as enticing anymore! For a while, atleast.

But, hey, I feel like enjoying IRL time with friends is *the* way to go here

we in da neocities rat cube

I knew what video that was before i clicked on the link because i watch this womans channel for several years now. Glad shes finally getting recognition she deserves since she gives good advice on the topic! All her videos are worthy of your time not just this one!

I know you were referring to neocities peeps when talking about strangers, but its got me thinkin about how i need to be friendler to strangers irl. I truley lost any energy to do that and i need to figure it out

I joined almost 10 months ago, and I can assuredly say I'm never leaving the Neocities hood

Eh hot take but a lot of those kinda videos are just nostalgia blindness/revisionist history about the 2000's and early 2010's was perfect and how we should go back to "the good ol' days" which were just as bad if not worse in many aspects, also just designed to make you extremely stressed and pessimistic so you keep watching them to be "updated". Yes there are issues but it's really not that bad.

By "not that bad" I mean they make it seem like this is some life threatening emergency, where absolutely nobody of the 8 billion people on Earth has a personality anymore and everyone is possessed by a device and it's all hopeless and doomed and the only solution is to doomscroll and be elitist. Also they take a few short video clips and think it represents an entire country or the whole world

@cottonjewel I agree with the sentiment that the 2000s/2010s are not something to fawn over or reminisce, and that you actually need to start listening to the advice of these videos instead of watching 10 people give the same advice. But I do think the dark patterns embedded in modern mainstream social patterns have never been this bad in history, and people need to learn (or re-learn) how to be more discerning with

how you spend your time online and where you get your information from. Also this video addresses the usual empty points people parrot like "just put down your phone" and "find community" which leads to further inaction. I strongly think this is life-threatening

(I appreciate the alternative viewpoint btw)

"But I do think the dark patterns embedded in modern mainstream social patterns have never been this bad in history" well if you were Muslim, Arab, "looked Muslim" (Sikhs for example were mistaken as Muslim) or you were high needs autistic it was bad, REALLY bad. Worse than now. Like people threw the r word left and right, and regular Muslims were blamed for 9/11 even if you weren't Muslim but "looked Muslim" to them

Like the people saying how the 2000's weren't as bad were either kids, they weren't born and learned about it through TV and aesthetics, or they were sheltered or lucky to have a good life. Or they were Western/White/upper or middle class/thin/fit beauty standards/able bodied/neurotypical which of course they're gonna have a good time.

*social MEDIA apps. I typo'd real bad sorry. I'm only talking about the apps. I don't disagree how much worse people were back then, it's the questioning-what-you-read-online part that's super dire for everyone to learn. Especially as AI ramps up

Aaaaah. Well yes AI is getting so much more convincing. I think Gen Z is better at realizing something is fake. But I guess this was always a problem, cuz before the internet was accessible to everyone, there was only the news which is very biased and they just trusted the news (even now, for example they only show Israeli perspectives and not Palestinian perspectives) (also sorry if I sound mean accidentally)