June 1, 2026
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I made my phone slow on purpose
He bought a fancy new phone just to make it annoying—and the internet is split
TLDR: A developer bought a new iPhone and intentionally slowed social apps to make doomscrolling less tempting. Commenters are fiercely split: some think it’s a brilliant middle ground between willpower and app bans, while others say it just turns scrolling into a miserable slow-motion mess.
A man bought a shiny new iPhone, then immediately did the most chaotic thing possible: he made it worse on purpose. His idea was simple. If social media apps feel less smooth, less pretty, and more annoying, maybe your brain stops treating them like an endless cookie jar. So he built an app called VineWall to slow down certain apps, making videos blurry, pictures slow to appear, and feeds fill up with loading circles instead of instant gratification.
And oh, the community had thoughts. One camp called it flat-out genius, with one commenter joking that Apple should ask users on day one, "How addictive would you like your phone to be, sir?" Another said this “slow instead of block” approach sounds way smarter than harsh lockouts, because total bans just make people rage-quit and turn the blocker off. Basically: don’t take away the cookie, just make it stale.
But the backlash was immediate too. The loudest skeptics warned this won’t cure doomscrolling at all—it’ll just create a new flavor of suffering. Their verdict? You’ll still keep scrolling, only now you’ll be mad while doing it. Others chimed in with their own accidental anti-phone hacks, like disabling word suggestions just to make messaging so irritating that real life wins by default. The mood is half self-help breakthrough, half digital prank, and fully internet-brained: is this behavioral genius, or just artisanal frustration as a service?
Key Points
- •The author bought a new iPhone 17 and intentionally set out to make parts of the phone experience slower.
- •Previous attempts to reduce doomscrolling, including quitting apps and using app blockers, did not work for the author.
- •The article argues that increasing friction and reducing content quality can make compulsive scrolling less appealing.
- •The author built VineWall, an iOS app that throttles internet speed for selected apps.
- •Under VineWall's throttling, videos become lower quality, image-heavy feeds degrade, and prolonged scrolling leads to frequent loading delays.