With all the recent developments in the US, I started doomscrolling reddit about a month ago. It’s clearly affected me emotionally.
Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.
It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.
1. Planned obsolescence at the firmware/app level. Eventually, manufacturers and app maintainers stop supporting your TV. When that happens, you need to change the whole smart TV. Dumb TV + smart box means you can upgrade separately and at your leisure.
2. Privacy concerns. Smart TVs openly monitor your usage, which includes not only how you use the TV but also what you watch on it, and sell that data for marketing purposes. Often you need to agree to the tracking to get many of the connected features - for example, my TV demands that I accept data collection to use AirPlay. Locking features behind an EULA and tracking is crappy, IMO. TBH I don't know if Apple TVs are better, but I Pihole my whole home network anyway.
3. Bad UI and UX. Many smart TVs are a PAIN to navigate. Convoluted, inconsistent menus, menus hidden inside menus hidden inside menus, slow start-up speeds or even straight up slow UI. The added complexity doesn't really justify the extra features, IMO. Purpose-built smart boxes normally do a better job. And if you don't like the current UI, selling it and buying a new one is much more convenient that selling your TV and buying a new one.
No mention of smart TV's embedded planned obsolescence? If they stop updating the firmware, eventually the smart features and apps stop working as well.
You know what worked for me to get rid of Facebook? I turned it into a chore and eventually broke it.
When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth.
I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages.
Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry.
I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.
Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.
It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.