Show HN: I built a smart blocker after destroying my dopamine baseline

16 pointsposted 16 hours ago
by Rahul07oii
(chromewebstore.google.com)

6 Comments

recursivegirth

12 hours ago

I’ve thought about this too. As an unmedicated ADHDer, context switching is a big struggle. I often check Reddit while researching or coding, but end up doomscrolling.

I use LeechBlock with limited overrides (15 minutes max) for when I actually need access, and add a 15-second delay for certain domains. That combo keeps me from disabling it while still annoying enough to curb mindless browsing.

Do you have any data on how many credits someone typically uses per day, week, or month? I’m wondering if it’s worth installing on my work profile, or if it’d be more useful for personal use.

georgefrowny

11 hours ago

uBlock rules for recommendation elements is a good adjunct for things like YouTube where the URL doesn't allow address-based blocks.

AI seems like an appropriate tool (but not the only one) for this as it's fuzzy, stochastic, low-stakes processing of unstructured data. As usual my first impression is it seems like overkill but it probably genuinely is easier on the user than careful manual curation of blocklists.

netsharc

14 hours ago

Geez, the (LLM-generated) description, and this whole thing reads like "frequency alignment device for living water" (1)

Dare I ask for scientific studies (and not just pseudo-ones) about why "dopamine bad"...

(1) https://soundhealingcenter.com/store/frequency-infused-water...

georgefrowny

11 hours ago

> Hard problems that used to be interesting just felt like grinding.

AI-flavoured emoji-heavy copy notwithstanding, this really does resonate as someone who recently has allowed YouTube to get in behind my braincells.

anon7000

11 hours ago

I mean this is pretty well understood at this point. I linked some further reading below. Addiction happens because doing X activity produces a lot of dopamine in your brain, enough that you can’t replicate that dopamine surge by doing healthy things.

For things like hard drugs, your dopamine receptors are stimulated to a huge degree more than “normal life.” Since dopamine is essentially a physical “reward” mechanism for your body, and you can’t get that level of reward through normal life, you end up chasing the high through whatever it is you’re addicted to.

Lots of things trigger dopamine, including scrolling social media. You train your brain to physically desire high levels of dopamine from short-term sources. Since the dopamine given by completing a long, complicated task is a lot harder to get, you have a physical tendency to just get the easy source of dopamine, social media, instead.

Dopamine isn’t bad. The problem is addiction. When you’re addicted to something, any task that takes a lot of effort and doesn’t have much payoff will be very difficult to accomplish when you can simply turn to a quick dopamine source.

People experience this differently — for example, dopamine is a big part of why ADHD is hard to deal with on a physical level.

- https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-an-addicted-brain-work...

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31905114/

ccallanan

14 hours ago

From the site guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.