The hottest Digital Wellbeing Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top Health & Wellness Topics

How Tech Metrics Change Your Values and Behaviour

SatPost by Trung Phan • 223 implied HN points • 24 Jan 26
🕹 Technology Digital Wellbeing
  1. External metrics like scores, ratings, and likes can come to define your values and make you chase numbers instead of what truly matters to you.
  2. Metrics are not neutral: they embed the priorities of their designers and tend to flatten rich, qualitative experiences into simple numbers that reward shallow, attention-grabbing behaviour.
  3. You can resist value capture by being intentional—pair or balance indicators, trust anecdotes when metrics feel wrong, limit exposure to harmful scores, and treat platform scoring systems like optional games you can enter or leave.

Maybe we should make ChatGPT less “WEIRD”

Sex and the State • 23 implied HN points • 19 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Digital Wellbeing
  1. Large language models learn mainly from online content produced by Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic (WEIRD) populations, so their outputs reflect those perspectives more than the global population.
  2. WEIRD modes of thinking — more individualistic, analytical, and universalist — differ from many non-WEIRD, more holistic and group-focused cultures, which makes models less accurate or relevant for those other groups.
  3. That WEIRD bias can shape real-world effects: by reinforcing individualistic and commercial norms, LLMs may worsen loneliness and reduce real-world socializing with heavy use and advertising, so we should consider making models less WEIRD and study these downstream impacts.

A review of Brick, a little box that shuts down your phone

Startup Strategies • 71 implied HN points • 02 Feb 25
🕹 Technology Digital Wellbeing
  1. The Brick is a device that helps you stop using apps on your phone by locking them down until you tap it again. This makes it harder to scroll through social media mindlessly.
  2. Although it works well to keep you off distracting apps, it's not the cheapest option available. There are free apps like Screen Time that can do something similar.
  3. Some people might prefer making their own version of the Brick with cheap parts instead of buying one. It’s a fun project, but the Brick does its job of reducing screen time effectively.
Get a weekly roundup of the best Substack posts, by hacker news affinity: