I have a love/hate relationship with reddit (in fact, I've probably "quit" reddit 3 or 4 times by now). To save myself from petty disputes and compulsively refreshing the "new" page while on holiday, I found an uncheatable way to lock myself out of reddit.
The method:
To begin with, the only reddit-accessible device I took with me was my android smartphone. On my phone, I installed blocksite, which very easily allows you to block any websites you choose on any browser on your android phone. (And yes, it works on chrome's incognito mode, too). If you have relatively good self control, that may be sufficient to keep you away.
Blocksite is very easy to disable however, so to prevent myself from simply opening the app and knocking it off, I also installed stayfocused. Stayfocused lets you restrict access to any apps on your phone for as long as you choose - so I used it to block blocksite, so I couldn't open blocksite and allow myself back onto reddit. Upgrading to the Pro version of stayfocused (for £4.99) gives you access to strict mode. For a set period of time this prevents you from changing which apps are blocked, and prevents you from circumventing the block by making itself impossible to install.
How did it work:
It worked excellenty, well worth a fiver to unlock the pro version of stayfocused. I did test it - mostly out of curiosity - and I couldn't get on reddit, although I didn't find myself going to extreme lengths to try and gain access to reddit. There was a couple occasions when I picked up my phone and without even thinking had typed in reddit.com, so I was grateful to have been prevented from ending up in an inevitable time-sink.
Interestingly, once I'd got everything set up and had tested how watertight the blocks were, I felt mostly relief - nothing like the anxiety I was expecting. However, to avoid the potential risk of going stir crazy, I only blocked reddit one day at a time - setting everything up so that each morning after waking I had a choice of whether to continue the break for another day, or whether to allow myself back on if I really wanted it.
My intention was never to stop myself using my phone at all, but I did find the usage stats on stayfocused useful, for details of how long I was spending in my phone, and what apps I was spending the most time on. To that end, space deserves an honourable mention. It works by allowing you to set a target number of unlocks, minutes of phone usage, or consecutive minutes of phone usage, and gives you a pop-up encouraging you to get off your phone when you are failing to meet those targets. You can easily ignore them and carry on regardless, but they provide a nice little reality check.
On the occasions I though of something, or read something, that I'd ordinarily post to reddit, I just made a note of instead, and can evaluate later whether they're really worth posting. I will probably continue to use these apps day to day, when I notice my reddit usage becoming excessive. Now I'm back at home, I have also installed cold turkey on my PC, which promises to block websites in a lockable way. (fwiw, I'm a longtime user of the timewarp chrome extension, which can be set to block websites after a set number of minutes, but can be disabled with just one click)
Security:
Initially, I did have concerns about security - to work properly these apps need more permissions than most apps. However, both have a large number of downloads, a good rating, and no worrying reviews (that I could see), so as far as I can tell everything is above board.
Submitted September 02, 2018 at 12:14PM by ckeeks https://ift.tt/2Pv4CfB
