Fa Fa

Old habits die hard, and the one that led to this post died a lot harder than some of the others.

Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely easy URL to type into a modern web browser’s omnibar. This sounds crazy, but the first two letters, f and a, are on the home row, and I don’t really rely on bookmarks, but my browser’s history function to type in URLs.

This creates a sort of recency bias. If I type in the same URL a lot, it’s the one that pops up the most. And so, if I’m at a browser with no clear idea of what my intent for the next page I load up, I inevitably type in “fa,” which would suck me in.

Over the years, Facebook’s bad content has gotten worse and worse, and despite my dislike of the company, I’ve kept it mostly out of desire to keep connected with a small number of people from real life. In the past I’ve used an extension designed to hide specific Facebook features on the desktop, most notably reels, and I have limited my Facebook access to my mobile app. But I still loaded the site, even though I hated the company and everything it represents.

To put it in terms of Guster’s 2000 single “Fa Fa,” I was always clicking somewhere I swear I’d never click again.

It’s an infuriating problem that really shows how far dark patterns go. If you type in a URL as a force of habit, inevitably you type it in even when it’s the last place you want to go.

Recently, I came up with a solution which appears to be deeply effective, and I’m hoping sticks long-term. Essentially, rather than fighting my tendency to type these two characters in my omnibar, I neutralized it. At first, this involved just blocking Facebook in the hosts file, which prevented the website from loading entirely. However, I found this too disruptive, as it gave me nowhere to click. Plus, immediately after I did that, I inevitably had a task that required me to use Facebook.

So, what I ended up doing was creating a URL that does nothing but forward to Google News. (You can supply any domain you’d like, as long as it starts with “fa.” Wanna go to fatberg.com every time you load your computer? Or maybe faxtoy.net? Up to you.) At the same time, I went through my entire history in Vivaldi and removed every reference to the Facebook website. The result is that whenever I type in my new Facebook URL, I go to a news aggregator, which is inevitably what I was using Facebook for anyway. A week later, and my Facebook usage has gone down considerably, and I’m now fully aware of how far downhill Google News has gone; open to suggestions there. Kind of shocked that’s all it took, actually. (I will admit that I did just start on a GLP-1, which is known to ease addictive behavior, but that’s a story for another time.)

I think addictive behaviors can be really difficult for anyone, no matter how well meaning, to get past. For whatever reason, this one was particularly hard to defeat. I’ve used similar strategies in the past. One of my go-tos: When I need to focus on something creative, I switch my YouTube account to a curated feed that leans on instrumental music. If I start looking up random junk, it ruins the feed. So I’m discouraged from looking up random junk if I’m listening to vintage jazz or higher consciousness music, as I am right now.

At this point in time, I think this is something that I’m really trying to get a grasp on. I think that so much of the work we do on computers requires a good sense of flow and rhythm, but if that flow leads to things that take us away from our work, does it really serve our needs?

In the case of a browser for example, wouldn’t it be great if the browser detected obsessive behavior like this and called it out for you, rather than you having to call it out for yourself and adapt accordingly?

We should be challenging our technology experiences and letting go of things that make our tech worse. And if it means I need to trick my brain to look at the news instead of my Facebook feed, I guess that’s where we’re at.

I guess what I’m saying is that I should switch to a Dvorak keyboard layout so I don’t mindlessly go to Facebook.