u/Human-Investment9177

I think I was the problem this whole time. (re my 15yos phone, long, kind of a vent)

Ok. Im writing this at like 11pm because I just had a weirdly emotional moment with my kid and I need to put it somewhere that isnt my husbands face for once.

My daughter is 15, almost 16. Shes a good kid. Anxious in the way teenage girls are anxious right now, like a coiled wire. Around January I started noticing she was on Instagram 2-3 hours every night after dinner. Reels mostly. The dead-eye scroll, you know the look. I know the look because I catch myself doing it in the bathroom at 11pm and then hate myself for an hour.

So we tried everything. We had Family Link for years and she was past that by 13. I did Screen Time with a pin she somehow already knew (I still dont know how, I think she watched me type it once in like 2022 and just remembered, which honestly. impressive). We did phone-in-the-kitchen-at-9. She agreed every time and it just. didnt happen. Every night turned into me standing in her doorway like a hostage negotiator and her crying and me crying and my husband somewhere downstairs being very quiet on purpose.

And like. can I just say. I am so tired of the advice on this. So tired of my mother in law saying "just take the phone away" like its 1994 and the phone isnt where her entire friend group lives and her homework lives and the bus app lives. So tired of the school sending home pamphlets about screen time while ALSO making her do half her schoolwork on a school-issued iPad. So tired of every Atlantic article telling me my daughter is going to die if she sees one more Reel and ALSO every wellness mom on instagram (the irony) telling me I should "meditate WITH her." When. When am I meditating with my 15 year old. She does not want to meditate with me. She wants me to leave her room.

Anyway. The thing I actually wanted to write about.

There was a Tuesday in February where she was being short with me about something tiny, I genuinely cannot remember what, and I said "well maybe if you werent on your phone constantly you'd be a nicer person to live with." And she just. looked at me. And went upstairs. And didnt come down for dinner. I sat at the table and my husband didnt say anything and I pretended to eat and I realized I had basically just called my own daughter a bad person because I couldnt manage my own anxiety about her.

The next morning I told her I was done. I told her I wasnt going to police it anymore. I said I trusted her to figure it out, and if she couldnt, that was information about her and not about me, and we'd deal with it then. I 100% meant it. I also 100% expected nothing to change.

For about a month nothing did. Got slightly worse actually. I bit my tongue so hard I thought I was going to bleed out internally.

Then in March, on a Saturday, she came down to the kitchen and held her phone out and was like "look." Shed installed this thing called Dull. Its like a browser I guess? You go on instagram through it and theres just no reels. No shorts on youtube either. She told me shed had it for like two weeks already and hadnt said anything because she wasnt sure it would stick. She said for the first few days she kept opening the regular instagram by accident and feeling kind of gross about it. She said the no-reels version felt like actually checking on her friends and the other one had stopped feeling like that a while ago.I asked her why she did it. She shrugged. She said "I just got tired of feeling like that." This seems like a reasonable compromise.

That was the whole answer.

Its been about 10 weeks. She is not a different child. Shes still on her phone a lot. But the glassy thing is gone, shes reading again (shes on her second Sally Rooney lol), and last week she asked if I wanted to go on a walk after dinner. Which has not happened since she was eleven years old.

Im not posting this to brag because the actual takeaway here is I was making it worse for two solid years. The thing that worked was me getting out of the way long enough for her to feel embarrassed in front of herself. She couldnt notice how the phone made her feel because she was too busy being mad at me about it. I was the friction. I thought I was the solution and I was the friction.

And I think ( and Im gonna get downvoted for this maybe ) a lot of us are. A lot of us cant see that our kids are mirroring our own panic back at us. She didnt really have a phone problem. She had a phone-and-mom problem. And one of those I could actually do something about, by doing nothing.

Anyway. If anyone else is in the middle of the screaming match every night thing, I dont know. Maybe your kid is different. Mine is a particular kid. But I wish someone had told me earlier that the harder I pushed the more stuck she got.

ok bed. sorry for the novel.

reddit.com

u/Human-Investment9177 — 2 days ago

▲ 9 r/digitalminimalism

My problem with Instagram was never Instagram, and figuring that out took two years.

First attempt, June 2024: deleted the app cold. Lasted nine days. Came back because my mom was in a family wedding album group chat and I'd missed three weeks of it

Second attempt, January 2025: switched to a Light Phone II. Lasted six weeks. Came back because I'm freelance and half my clients reach me through DMs.

Third attempt, last summer: deleted just the app, kept the account, told myself I'd only use it from the mobile browser. Lasted four days. Tapped the Instagram bookmark, the site opens directly to Reels, I lost an hour, closed the tab, opened it again, lost another hour.

I've done versions of this for two years.

What I finally figured out: I didn't actually want to quit Instagram. I wanted to see what my college roommate's dog looks like and not get served a Reel about a guy who lives in a van and explains stoicism over a cold plunge soundtrack. I wanted my mom's wedding photo. The chronological version that used to exist in 2014, before they sold the room. The "Instagram" I was trying to quit was a different Instagram than the one I needed to stay in touch.

Here's the part this sub gets slightly wrong, in my opinion. The problem has three layers, and most of what we talk about here only attacks one of them.

Layer 1 is the device. The phone is in your pocket, charging next to your bed, with you at the dinner table. The dumb-phone people are attacking this layer, and good for them. It works if you can do it. I couldn't, because of work and parents and Ubers.

Layer 2 is the social layer. Your sister posts on Instagram. Your group chat is on Snapchat now. Your clients DM you on Twitter. Your mom only sends photos through Facebook because she doesn't text. "Just leave" is the advice this sub mostly gives, and it presumes you have nothing to lose by leaving. For a lot of us the cost of leaving is real and quiet. You miss the baby photo. You find out about the death three days late. You become the friend who isn't there. FOMO is the wrong word because it isn't fear. It's just absence.

Layer 3 is the algorithm. Inside every app there's a chronological layer where the humans live, and an algorithmic layer where the platform lives. Reels, the explore tab, suggested for you, the search page that's also a feed. These were grafted onto the human surfaces on purpose, so you couldn't have one without the other. Instagram is something like fifteen different surfaces stacked into one icon. The chronological feed, Reels, Stories, explore, suggested accounts, Shopping, Notes, DMs, Live, the search page that's also a feed, the search page that pretends it isn't, the part where they show you what your friend liked, the map. They fused all of it into one app on purpose. If you want the part that's basically photo-email from your friends, you have to swallow the rest.

Most digital minimalism content stops at layer 1. The whole frame is "use less," which is a willpower argument about a willpower-resistant device. Layer 2 mostly gets dismissed as weakness. Layer 3 barely gets named, even though it's the one that's actually engineered against you. The reason the dumb-phone evangelists sound a little culty, I think, is that they're attacking the wrong layer. If your house has a mold problem, you don't move into a tent. Sure, no mold. Also no kitchen.

What's worked for me, mapped to the layers, in case it's useful:

For the device (layer 1):

Phone charges in the kitchen overnight. Bought a $14 alarm clock. Took a week to stop reaching toward the spot the phone used to be.

Social apps in a folder on the last page. The friction of two extra taps cut my opens by something like half.

Enable grayscale & reduced motion in settings on iOS, it makes the phone much more boring and feel kinda laggy.

I also made text really large so it looks ridiculous in public. You could also get an embarassing phone case.

For the social / FOMO part (layer 2):

Notifications off for everything except DMs from a named list of about twelve people. The "X liked your photo" and "someone you know just posted" notifs are all silent.

One daily catch-up window. Twenty minutes after dinner. I check the human parts of the apps then, and I told the four people who'd be most affected that if they need me sooner they have to call. Two of them have called. Both were fine.

For the algorithm (layer 3):

The native apps are uninstalled. On iOS I use a browser called Dull that hides Reels, Shorts and the explore feed but keeps the friend timeline and DMs. There are other ways to attack this layer (network-level blocks, browser extensions on desktop) but I couldn't make them work on mobile without breaking the phone for everything else, which is the layer 1 mistake again.

On other platforms that aren't on there (like pinterest for me) I just sign out after every session. Re-entry costs a password, which is just enough friction that I don't open it accidentally while waiting for the kettle.

Also tell as many friends of you as you can to text u in messenger or iMessage instead of social apps, that reduces the need to open also.

None of these is a cure. Together they got me to something like a 70% reduction in algorithmic time without quitting the human parts, which is the thing I actually couldn't afford to lose (and I have to respond to some DMs for business purposes).

The cold-turkey people are going to tell me this is harm reduction and the only honest answer is to walk away. They might be right. I've watched a lot of friends walk away and walk back, and I've done it myself three times, so I'm going to bet on the version that lets me see my goddaughter's birthday photos until I see something better.

What I keep telling myself: the goal isn't less screen time. The goal is less algorithm. Screen time is a side effect.

Curious if anyone else has landed on a layered version of this.

reddit.com

u/Human-Investment9177 — 5 days ago

▲ 26 r/Mindfulness

I thought I needed more meditation. I needed less of one specific thing.

For most of last year I had this whole routine. Ten minutes in the morning, breath, the usual. Some weeks longer. Did a 10-day silent retreat in 2024 and came out of it convinced this was the answer to whatever was wrong with my head.

It wasn't. Or it was, but only on the cushion.

The second I picked up my phone the focus from the morning was just gone. I'd open Instagram for one specific reason, reply to someone, check a story, and lose 40 minutes to Reels watching strangers make coffee on a Tuesday. I'd open YT for one tutorial and end up watching pressure-washing videos. Sit down to read and my hand would reach for the phone before I'd finished the sentence.

Embarrassing, because I knew better. I'd sat through ten days of silence. I could watch the impulse arise. I just couldn't not act on it.

I tried more meditation. Longer sessions. The noting thing where you label every thought. Reaching-for-phone as a meditation in itself, which is what they tell you to do at retreats. None of it touched what happened the moment Reels started playing.

What finally moved it wasn't a technique. My brother was visiting and I was doing my usual complaining-about-phone routine, and he said something like "isn't it kind of just the swipey thing though, like specifically." Then he kept eating cereal. He doesn't meditate. He reads books. He doesn't have this problem.

That sat with me for a few days. And eventually I noticed every time I lost a session, it wasn't to the app. It was to one part inside the app. Instagram opened for a real reason every time. The thing that ate the next 40 minutes was Reels. On YT it was Shorts. Then Explore, then the recommended row on the homepage. Whatever started the moment I was actually inside, that was the part doing the damage. Not the app.

Meditation was teaching me to watch the impulse. It wasn't teaching me to stop putting my hand on a slot machine eight times a day.

There's a few filtered browser apps now that strip that stuff out. You use Instagram, YT, Facebook, Reddit through them, but Reels, Shorts, Explore, recommended, the algorithmic home, none of it loads. DMs work, stories work, search works. I tried three, don't remember the names of two, ended up on one called Dull. Roughly the same, pick whichever UI you like.

The first weird thing is that Instagram without Reels is genuinely boring. Two stories, three posts and you're done. You put the phone down because there's nothing else there. The meditation got easier almost immediately, which surprised me, because the meditation hadn't changed. There was just now space between sessions where my attention wasn't getting shredded every ninety minutes. The cushion work was always fine. It had nowhere to land before.

Reading came back slower. Week four I got through 30 pages of something without itching, and I only noticed because I'd stopped noticing. Sounds dumb but it's true.

I'm not anti-meditation. I still sit every morning. But honestly, looking back, I think I spent a year trying to breathe my way out of something the breathing was never going to fix on its own. The room was on fire the whole time and I was working on my posture.

Still sit. The morning thing still does what it does. The only difference now is that some of it's still there at 11pm. That was the whole thing.

reddit.com

u/Human-Investment9177 — 9 days ago

▲ 5 r/Instagram

I owe my Instagram friends an apology

I've spent the last two years telling people my friends got boring on Instagram.

Nobody posts anymore. Same five aesthetic accounts. Same recycled videos. Same random Reels I never asked for. You've probably said the same thing.

Turns out I was wrong. Like, embarrassingly wrong.

Last month I posted here about using Instagram through a filtered browser app instead of the normal app. It hides Reels and Explore, so the feed is mostly people I actually follow. A few people DMed me asking if I kept using it.

I did.

And about three weeks in, I noticed something I really was not expecting.

My friends never stopped posting.

I opened it last Thursday morning and there were nine stories from people I know. Nine. Two were from a friend I had not messaged since March. There was a post from my cousin, who I would have bet money had deactivated. I also found out I had missed a baby announcement by four days.

That one made me feel genuinely bad.

For months I had been telling everyone nobody uses Instagram anymore. But they do. The normal stuff was just buried under Reels. I thought I was checking my feed, but I was basically scrolling a Reels feed with a friend post dropped in every now and then, just enough to trick me into feeling like I was still keeping up.

Sounds stupid when I write it out, but I had fully convinced myself my generation had moved on from Instagram.

We did not move on from Instagram. We moved on from whatever Meta keeps pushing into the middle of it.

Once Reels and Explore are gone, the app feels weirdly normal again. Stories. DMs. Posts from people you know. The stuff I wanted from Instagram in the first place.

I've been messaging people again. I sent "you good?" to a friend because her story felt a bit off, and we ended up talking on the phone for an hour. I reconnected with someone I had basically lost touch with last summer. None of this was some big intentional digital wellness thing. It just happened once there were actual people on the home screen again.

The app I'm using is called Dull (I tried a few other similar apps too too. They are fine, but felt a bit clunky for me). It puts Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X inside one app (like opening the web versions of them), but removes Reels, Shorts, Explore, and the algorithmic homepages. The useful stuff still works: stories, DMs, subscriptions, posts from people you follow. It also has grayscale mode, which I thought I would hate, but I left it on because my phone feels less aggressive with it.

Anyway... They were posting. I was watching Reels.

reddit.com

u/Human-Investment9177 — 11 days ago

▲ 19 r/ProductivityHQ+1 crossposts

I'm starting to think my focus problem isn't discipline. It's withdrawal.

Spent the last year trying to fix my attention span. Did the cold showers. Deleted Instagram twice. Read at least four books that all said the same thing in different fonts. Bought a paper planner I used for nine days.

Nothing stuck. I'd sit down to read something and within about a minute I'd need to check my phone. Even with nothing on it. The phone was just there, and not having it in my hand was unbearable in a way I couldn't really explain.

For a long time I assumed this was a discipline thing. That's what the internet tells you. You're soft, you need a system, get up earlier. The advice is everywhere because the cure is content someone can sell you.

But discipline is the word for doing something unpleasant. Cold showers, the gym at six AM. You grit your teeth and get on with it.

Sitting down to read a textbook isn't unpleasant in that way. For me it was actively painful. Like my body wanted to be somewhere else and I was holding it in a chair. That's a different problem.

I think the right word for it is withdrawal.

My brain spent six years getting a small reward every twelve seconds from short-form video. When I sit down to focus now, it isn't bored. It's detoxing. The fidgeting, the irrational urge to check anything, even the wallpaper. Same shape as nicotine withdrawal. Nobody calls it that because everyone has it and nobody dies of it.

What actually helped wasn't a system. I tried the systems. Pomodoro. The thirty-day no-phone challenge. Lasted three weeks on that one, then reinstalled Instagram, spent an hour and a half in Reels, and felt physically gross about it.

What worked was switching to a version of social media without the short-form parts. Feed, DMs, that's it. No Reels, no Shorts, no Explore. Same apps in the sense that I still text my friends. Different in the sense that the slot machine is gone.

First week was strange. I'd open Instagram, scroll for ten seconds, realize there was nothing to scroll into, and put it down. Like trying to vape with a dead battery.

By month two, reading didn't hurt anymore.

That's the part I didn't expect. Not that I'd get more disciplined. That the thing I was trying to discipline myself into doing would just stop hurting on its own.

I'm the founder of an app called Dull that does the feed-and-DMs-only thing. getdull.app. Posting it here because the withdrawal framing is what I actually think matters, and I haven't seen anyone talk about focus this way.

u/Human-Investment9177 — 5 days ago

▲ 68 r/studytips

I think the physical pain of trying to read a textbook is dopamine withdrawal, not a discipline problem

Going to start with something that sounds wrong: deleting Instagram made me a worse student.

Not better. Worse. My screen time went down, sure. But my ability to read a textbook for more than two minutes kept getting worse the entire eight months I was doing what r/studytips would tell me to do.

I'm 20, in college. Around last summer I noticed I couldn't read two pages of anything without grabbing my phone. So I did the playbook. Screen Time limits. Forest. Phone in another room during study blocks. Deleted Instagram four times. Gave my friend the password to a blocker, then extorted him for it three days later saying it was urgent. I was the urgency.

The screen time number went down. The studying didn't get any easier. If anything I was studying less, because every time I sat down with a textbook I'd start negotiating with myself within four minutes. Read one paragraph, check phone. The advice promised the focus would come back. It didn't.

What actually fixed it was a comment from my brother. He was visiting and I was doing my usual screen-time complaining. He shrugged and said "isn't it kind of just the swipey thing though, like specifically." Then he kept eating cereal.

I sat with that for a few days. Because once I actually thought about what I do on my phone, the answer was the same every time. I'd open Instagram for a real reason. A DM. A story. Checking if my friend had posted from the trip. Took 30 seconds. The 39 minutes after the reason was Reels. Same with YouTube. Open it for one specific video, end up watching some guy pressure-wash a driveway for forty minutes.

Here's the part that finally connected to studying. That swipey conveyor belt had trained my brain to expect a dopamine hit every eight seconds. When I sat down with a textbook my brain was waiting for the next hit and getting nothing. That physical pain I felt trying to read wasn't lack of discipline. It was withdrawal. I was getting symptoms of coming off a drug and treating them like a character flaw.

Once I saw it that way the standard advice started looking off. Screen Time limits how long you spend in the app. Deleting removes the app. Phone in another room moves the phone. None of those touch the actual thing. The reasons I opened Instagram were still real reasons. And the second one of them pulled me back, the conveyor belt was sitting right there waiting.

What I actually wanted didn't exist. I wanted to use Instagram for the DM without Reels being there. Watch one YouTube video without Shorts. Use Reddit without the recommendations. I ended up building it.

I'm the founder. App is called Dull, link at the bottom. Posting it in this sub specifically because the withdrawal angle is what I think actually matters for studying, and I haven't seen anyone frame it this way.

Dull is basically a filtered browser. You open it, tap Instagram or YouTube or Reddit or X, and use the real mobile sites with Reels, Shorts, the Explore tab, suggested posts and the algorithmic home feeds gone. And I've optimized them to work better than just using through Safari (i.e u don't get the annoying download the app badges) DMs work. Stories work. Subscriptions load. The reason you opened the app still works. The conveyor belt just isn't there.

What I didn't expect was how boring Instagram is without Reels. There's almost nothing there. My friends post less often than I thought. You scroll past a few posts and put the phone down because there's nothing else.

Two features in it ended up mattering most for studying:

Time limits with quiet hours. You can lock yourself out of social during a study block. Mine is 7 to 10. One 15-minute extension a day, then it's actually locked.

Grayscale, per social media app. Sounds dumb but color is doing more work to keep you on the phone than you'd think. With it off, scrolling just feels boring. I leave it on now. Before that I had my whole phone on grayscale for some time, but it's hard to use Google Maps without color.

(There's also a PIN on settings with a 24-hour cooldown to remove it, and a 24-hour delay on any change that weakens filters. So the tired version of you at night can't undo what the version of you that morning set up.)

Week three I had a bad night and reinstalled regular Instagram to see what I was missing. Spent an hour and a half in Reels, felt physically gross afterwards. Went back the next morning. Only real relapse.

Screen time went from four hours a day to about 90 minutes. Some days closer to one, some closer to two. The studying took longer to come back than I expected. About a month before I could read for thirty minutes without itching. Two months before I could do a real two-hour block without negotiating with myself.

The withdrawal frame helped a lot actually. Once I stopped treating reading-pain like a sign I was failing and started treating it like a sign my brain was off the drug, I stopped getting frustrated when it hurt. It just became a thing I had to wait out.

Link if you want to try it: https://getdull.app iOS only right now, Android is on a waitlist at the same page.

Happy to answer questions, especially from anyone who's been doing the standard advice and watching it not work.

u/Human-Investment9177 — 14 days ago

▲ 420 r/selfimprovement

I tried fixing my attention span for 8 months and only one thing actually worked

I'm 20, in college, and around last summer I noticed I couldn't read two pages of a textbook without grabbing my phone. The second something stopped being entertaining my hand would just go for it on its own. Studying hurt in this stupid physical way. So did sitting through a movie without pausing.

I tried to fix it for like eight months. Going to lay it out because most of what I tried didn't work and I think I figured out why.

First thing I tried was one of those app blockers, the kind that makes you do a breathing exercise before Instagram opens. Worked for four days. Then I started doing the breathing exercise faster, which is funny in retrospect. Then I just turned it off.

Then Screen Time. Set limits on everything. The "ignore for today" button is a joke, your thumb hits it before your brain has even read the popup. I don't think I respected a single limit. Then I let my friend put the password, after which I extorted him for the password saying it was urgent.

Then I deleted the apps. That lasted the longest, sometimes two weeks at a stretch. But I'd reinstall because I needed to message someone, or look up where my friend was that night, and once the app was back I was right where I started. Did that probably six times. Felt worse about myself every time.

What actually fixed it was a half-formed comment from my brother. He was visiting and I was doing my usual thing where I complain about screen time and ask if he has the same problem. He doesn't really, he mostly reads on his phone. He shrugged and said something like "isn't it kind of just the swipey thing though, like specifically." Then he kept eating cereal.

I didn't really do anything with that for a few days. But it kept rattling around in my head, and by the end of the week I'd actually worked out what he meant, which I'm not sure he could've articulated himself if I'd pushed him on it.

When I sat down and tried to actually break out what I do on my phone, the answer was the same every time. I'd open Instagram for one specific reason, look at two stories, get bored, end up in Reels for half an hour. Open YouTube for one particular video, end up watching strangers pressure-wash driveways for forty minutes. The thing I was addicted to wasn't Instagram or YouTube. It was the short video format that lives inside them. Which had also rewired my brain to find anything slower than eight seconds boring. Which is why studying hurt. Which is why everything off the phone felt flat.

Once I figured that out the fix was kind of obvious. There's these filtered browser apps that strip the Reels and Shorts stuff out and let you keep the rest. I went through three different ones (don't remember the names rn), but landed on one called Dull, which I liked a bit more. They basically do the same thing, you use Instagram and YouTube through the browser app and the short-form stuff just isn't there. Differences are mostly cosmetic, pick whichever UI you like more.

What I didn't expect: Instagram is so boring without Reels. There's almost nothing there. You look at stories, scroll past a few posts, and then you put the phone down because there's nothing else to look at. Like my friends post less often than I imagined (you can force yourself into only the following tab of Instagram on most of these apps)

Week three I had a bad night where I reinstalled regular Instagram just to see what I was missing. Spent like an hour and a half in Reels and felt physically gross afterwards. Reinstalled the filtered version the next morning. That was the only real relapse.

Screen time dropped from around four hours a day to somewhere around 90 minutes. Varies. Some days it's an hour, some days it's closer to two.

The studying took longer to come back. Maybe a month before I could read for thirty minutes without itching. But it came back. I'm not a different person, I'm just not constantly losing fights with my own thumb.

Wasted most of last year deleting and reinstalling because I was aiming at the wrong target. The apps weren't really the problem, the short-form features inside them were, and you can keep the parts you actually use without the addictive bit dragging you under. Wish I'd figured that out in June. And I truly just wish that EU finally regulates these big tech companies to care for our phone addictions a bit. It's truly gross what they are doing.

reddit.com

u/Human-Investment9177 — 15 days ago

▲ 36 r/ProductivityApps

I deleted Instagram four times before I figured out it was one feature I actually wanted gone.

I tried everything before this.

Screen Time limits, dismissed the second they popped up. Deleted Instagram completely, reinstalled within a week. Put my phone in a different room, walked to the other room. Did the dumb-phone thing for two months, still ended up on my laptop. The pattern was always the same. Open the app for a real reason, like replying to someone or checking a story, and end up 40 minutes deep watching strangers make coffee on a Tuesday morning. The reply took 30 seconds. The other 39 minutes was the algorithm doing what it was designed to do.

The thing that finally clicked: it wasn't Instagram I couldn't put down. It was Reels. I opened the app for a real reason every single time. The thing that kept me there wasn't the reason. It was the conveyor belt that started the second I was inside.

Once I saw it that way, the other things I'd tried started making sense as the wrong tool. Screen Time tries to limit how long you can access the whole app. Deleting removes the whole app entirely. Both miss the actual problem. The reasons you opened the app are still real reasons. So within a week one of them pulls you back in, and the conveyor belt is right there waiting.

So I built an iPhone app called Dull. It's a filtered browser. You open it, tap Instagram or YouTube or X or Facebook or Reddit, and use the actual sites, except Reels, Shorts, the Explore tab, suggested posts, recommended videos, and the algorithmic home feeds aren't there anymore. DMs work. Stories work. Subscriptions load. You can post, reply, check notifications. Just no infinite scroll waiting for you.

It works because it doesn't ask for willpower at the moment you don't have any. The conveyor belt is just gone. There's nothing to resist.

Three months in I'd stopped feeling the background urge to "get off my phone" because nothing was pulling me sideways anymore. Sessions are five to ten minutes now instead of forty-five.

A month after launch I figured out that removing Reels wasn't the full answer. Take away the worst surface, the urge starts looking for the next one. So Dull has more in it now:

- Grayscale, app-wide. The thing other people try first and don't expect to work. Color is doing more of the work in scrolling than you'd think. With it gone, scrolling just feels boring.

- Per-platform time limits with quiet hours. "No Instagram after 11pm" actually means it. One 15-minute extension a day, then locked.

- A 4-digit PIN on Settings, with a 24-hour cooldown to remove it. The version of you holding the phone at midnight isn't the version that should be deciding whether to weaken filters.

- A 24-hour delay on any change that loosens filters. Decide at 9pm you really need Reels back, you wait til tomorrow to find out if you still mean it.

I'll add this because people sometimes ask: the platforms are not going to fix this on their own. 41 state AGs sued Meta in 2023 and 14 sued TikTok last year for designing these features to be addictive. The internal Meta docs Frances Haugen leaked in 2021 already showed Meta knew Instagram made body image worse for 1 in 3 teen girls and kept the features anyway. They're not going to remove the conveyor belt for us unless proper regulation comes.

Here is link to iOS app and also the Android waitlist: getdull.app .

I'm building Android next based on how many people are on the list, so it isn't decorative.

I'm the founder. Ask me anything.

u/Human-Investment9177 — 16 days ago

▲ 18 r/apps

Last fall my screen time said 5h 12m and I genuinely could not tell you one thing I had seen that day. Not one video. Not one post. Just a vague feeling that my thumb was sore.

The thing that bugged me wasn't Instagram or YouTube. It was specifically the parts that loop forever. The Reels tab. Shorts. The Explore page that turns into a reel after one scroll. I liked the DMs. I liked watching long videos from people I subscribed to. I liked seeing what my friends posted. I wanted the rest of it gone.

I tried the usual things. Deleted Instagram, came back in three days. Set a Screen Time limit, learned the four-digit code by heart. Did the grayscale shortcut, missed color, switched it off.

So I built the version of these apps I actually wanted to use.

It's called Dull. You open it, tap Instagram, and you're in Instagram on a stripped-down mobile browser. Logged in, your feed, your DMs, your stories. No Reels tab. No Reels mixed into the feed. No Explore-into-reels pipeline.

Then I did YouTube. No Shorts anywhere. Subscriptions tab loads first. Watch later still works. Then Facebook. Then X. Then Reddit (yes I see it).

A few other things in there because once I started I couldn't stop:

- per-platform time limits and quiet hours

- a 10-second delay screen before any platform opens (sounds dumb, kills about 40% of my own opens)

- optional grayscale per platform

- a usage view that shows you where the time actually went

It's iOS only (Android waitlist). I built it solo over the last few months. No ads, no tracking of what you browse, nothing leaves your phone.

Link: https://getdull.app

Roasts welcome. If you try it and something breaks on your end, message me, I'll fix it that day.

u/Human-Investment9177 — 18 days ago

▲ 44 r/micro_saas

The app is Dull. You open it, tap Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or X, and you get the real platform with the addictive parts cut out. Reels gone. Shorts gone. For You feed gone. Algorithmic homepages gone. You can still post, message, search, watch your subscriptions, see what your friends did this weekend. The infinite-scroll machine inside each app isn't there anymore.

There's also grayscale mode, a friction gate that makes you sit through a few seconds before each platform opens, daily time limits per app, quiet hours, and a counter that tracks how long you've gone without breaking your own rules.

First month: $1,100 gross. Solo build. Six months from first commit to live in the App Store. iOS only. WKWebView under the hood with my own CSS and JS injected on top of every platform. I want to write down what actually worked while it's close enough to the surface that I can be honest about it.

The real pivot was the audience

I started thinking I'd sell this to parents. Filter your kid's feeds, monitor their TikTok, etc. I burned weeks on it. The market is a bloodbath, parents who care already pay the big incumbents, and the user I was actually building for didn't want me in the loop. The parent did.

So I went and read where the problem was actually being talked about. Productivity subreddits, comment threads under articles about teen mental health, replies under Reels about deleting Instagram. The voice in those places sounds nothing like the voice in parental-control marketing. It's first person. "I" wasted my morning. "I" can't stop. "I" deleted Instagram three times and reinstalled it because my friends are on it.

That was the customer. Self-aware teens and young adults who already lost the argument with themselves and want a way to set the thing down without throwing it away. Anyone who still needs convincing that screens are a problem is not the audience and never will be.

I rebuilt the positioning around that user. The voice on the site went dry and direct. No "reclaim your time." No "screen time epidemic" stats. The tagline is basically "Instagram without Reels. YouTube without Shorts. And that's just the start." It treats the reader like the smartest person in the room about their own problem, because they are.

The product is a kit, not a feature

Most things that try to fix your phone fix one thing. Block one app. Add one timer. Switch on one setting. A month later the setting is off, the timer is ignored, and the user is right back where they started.

Dull is built as one tool that does the whole job. Install it once and Instagram is stripped down, YouTube is stripped down, Facebook and X are stripped down, the screen goes grayscale when you want it to, a friction delay sits in front of every platform, daily time limits enforce themselves, quiet hours come on at night, and a counter tracks how long you've held your own line. It works because it's all in one place, talking to itself.

Nobody pays for any single piece. They pay because installing Dull changes how the phone behaves the moment they open it, every day, with zero ongoing maintenance. That's the product. The bundle is the moat.

If you're building in a category where every other app ships one feature at a time, ship the whole system. People will pay for the thing that actually finishes the job.

Naming did real work

The app was called Porch for the first build. People thought it was a smart-home product or a real-estate listing app. I renamed it Dull soon after.

The name pre-qualifies the customer. If "Dull" turns you off, you were never going to pay for an app that makes your phone less interesting. If it makes you smile, you already understood the pitch before reading a word of copy. The rename moved more numbers for me than any onboarding tweak I shipped that quarter.

If your product is built on a contrarian truth, the name should embarrass the wrong customer a little.

The Reddit thread I actually learned from

One post in r/digitalminimalism. $29 in attributed sales, which sounds modest, and the cash was the smallest part of the return. The comment thread under that post was the most valuable hour of marketing research I have ever done. I got five months of content angles out of it. I learned the actual language the audience uses to describe the problem, which is a different language from the one founders use. I got testimonials I still quote. I figured out which features mattered and which were vanity.

The lesson: find the place your customer is already complaining about the thing you fixed, post once, then shut up and read the comments. Posting is bait. The catch is in the replies.

Shape and numbers, since you asked

- 7-day free trial, hard paywall, no free tier

- Monthly and annual subscriptions

- iOS only, solo dev, six months from kickoff to live

- ~$1,100 gross in the first month, with the subscription base still building underneath that

- RevenueCat for subscriptions, Fastlane plus App Store Connect API key for releases

- Approved by App Review on the first try, which I'm told is rare for anything touching WebView

Hard paywall, no free tier, no compromise version of the app. In a category that's full of free settings and free utilities, this should have killed conversion. It didn't, because the bundle is the product. Free tiers in this category teach the user that you're a feature, not something they paid for, and that framing is hard to climb back out of.

What I'd tell someone building in this space

If your category is full of single-feature tools, the integration is the moat. Sell the system, not the part.

Pick the contrarian truth you actually believe and let the name embarrass the wrong customer.

Aim at the audience that already agreed with you before they tapped install. The audience that wants to argue with your premise will eat your runway.

Hard paywalls work when your product is a tool. People pay for tools.

The post is the trigger. The comment section is the marketing. Most founders post and leave. Stay. Read. Reply for a week. The gold is downstream of the upvotes.

Happy to get into the iOS build, the App Review process, the pivot, the copy rewrites, the marketing, anything. App is at getdull.app if you want to see it. Not here to plug, figured someone would ask.

u/Human-Investment9177 — 18 days ago

▲ 12 r/buildinpublic

I built the same mobile app foundation four times before I built it once properly. That's the embarrassing fact at the heart of this post.

Quick context: I write React Native, the framework that ships one codebase to iPhone, Android, and the web. Discord, Shopify, Threads, a big chunk of what's on your phone. If you've been vibe coding web stuff and you're about to take your first swing at a mobile app, this is the world you're walking into.

Every project, six weeks of plumbing before I could even start on the actual product. Login. Stripe for the web. RevenueCat for in-app purchases (you can't use Stripe there, Apple and Google force you through their stores). Push notifications that fail in weird ways on whichever Android manufacturer is having a bad month. Analytics. A web build pretending to be a real website. Tests. CI. By the time I got to the actual product, I was already sick of my own idea.

The fourth time, I caught myself copy-pasting magic link code from the third project at 1am. The small, dumb embarrassment of that moment is what finally made me stop building apps and build the thing underneath them instead.

I called it Shipnative. Put it up. Figured maybe twenty people would buy it.

Then vibe coding happened, and a year of agent tooling I'd been doing quietly turned out to be the most relevant thing I'd worked on. Once Claude Code landed I rearchitected the whole boilerplate around how an agent reads a codebase. AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files at every folder boundary, basically little README files written for the AI, telling it what's in this folder and what the patterns are. Predictable file structures over clever ones. Comments that explain why, since the what is already in the code. Skill files for the workflows people repeat.

Funny side effect: the boilerplate became more useful for human developers in the process. Whatever makes a project legible to an agent (clear boundaries, named patterns, no clever indirection) is the same stuff that makes it legible to a person on day one. Turns out we'd been dressing up sloppy architecture with tribal knowledge for years and calling that "elegant."

40+ paying customers later, and a chunk of them showed up saying "a friend told me to buy this." That's the only social proof I actually trust. Nobody refers a tool that wasted their weekend.

Three things worth passing on, regardless of whether you ever look at my thing.

>1. Installing the libraries is an afternoon. The decisions around them eat the next six weeks.

Once RevenueCat is wired up, the real time-sink starts. What does the app show when entitlements haven't synced yet and the user is staring at a paywall they already paid for? How do you handle a webhook that lands while the device is offline for nine days? How do you restore purchases on a new device without confusing someone who genuinely doesn't have a subscription? A boilerplate that just dumps libraries on you doesn't help with any of that. The opinions are the value.

>2. Use Paddle if you're selling to humans across borders.

I started on Stripe because every founder thread told me to. Then customers showed up from Brazil, India, Singapore, Estonia, Germany, and I realised I was about to become an unpaid VAT clerk for a dozen countries that can't agree on what software is. Paddle is what's called a Merchant of Record, which means they're legally the ones selling your product, so they handle the sales tax, VAT, GST, and receipts in jurisdictions you didn't know charged tax on digital goods. They take a slightly bigger cut. Cheapest insurance I have ever bought.

>3. Agent-readiness is the new "good docs."

A new customer's first interaction with your codebase is their agent's interaction with your codebase. If Claude or Cursor gets confused on day one, your customer concludes your codebase is bad, even if it would have looked clean by 2022 standards. So I write AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files everywhere now. That shift is real and barely anyone is designing for it yet.

The boilerplate today is unrecognizable from v1. Tighter, more opinionated, fewer files, sharper defaults, architected so an agent can navigate it without three rounds of "let me read these files first." People clone the repo Monday, point Claude or Cursor at it, and start working on their actual product Tuesday. That's the bar I hold it to.

The build-in-public lesson buried under all this: customers will teach you the product if you ship something rough enough that they can react to it. The hard part is listening when they tell you the thing you spent two weeks on is the wrong shape.

If you wanna check out the boilerplate it's at shipnative.app. Otherwise happy to just talk shop in the comments.

u/Human-Investment9177 — 19 days ago