Making technology less irritating and harmful

I will continuously add to this

Turn off Snapchat "person is typing..." notifications

It's a pain in the ass to do but worth it. This is a really horrible dark pattern Snapchat pioneered.

Use NoScroll (free and amazing!!!)

The NoScroll app blocks YouTube Shorts on Youtube. Needless to say these are not a good use of time. They are designed to hijack your attention and they do a pretty good job at it.

Lower phone screen saturation

I like the idea of this. Setting your phones display to be greyscale supposedly makes your device massively less addictive but it also feels really limiting especially if you want to watch media of any description. Lowering your display's saturation is a nice middle ground (0% saturation = greyscale).

On Samsung's you can do this in settings > display > screen mode > change from "vivid" (default) to "natural". Massive difference without the sacrifice of greyscale.

I find this makes using my phone feel slightly more relaxing (in a nice way, not in an addictive way).

Try using a smaller phone

I've heard smaller phones are less addictive, and I've also heard that it makes no difference. I will experiment with this when I need to replace my very large S21 Ultra. I suspect it won't make a massive difference.