The reason why social media and similar websites now have infinite scroll is because the next page button provided you with a circuit breaker to stop and reconsider if you actually wanted to continue or if you were just mindlessly scrolling.

So if you have a genuine intention not to use certain websites at particular times (e.g. work time), then having any kind of forced interruption can be useful for changing that behaviour.

If you're looking to create genuine change, then making those websites load slowly is even more effective than going cold turkey (because it minimises the dopamingeric effects.)

For some "a little friction" is enough. For others, not. I keep less-healthy food treats in a cupboard in my garage, because the friction of walking out to get them is enough to reduce my usage to an acceptable level. Even less healthy treats I don't buy, because the friction of going to the grocery store to get them when I'm craving them is enough.

It's an interesting exercise to think about how this could be engineered to increase the friction.

If you're getting to the point where you have to open a terminal, elevate to root and edit your hosts file, that's beyond a bored impulse. You know exactly what you're doing and you can stop yourself. That tiny bit of friction is enough to defeat the ingrained impulses and make you think.

For a lot of behavioral things, tiny nudges are just enough friction. At one point, I wrote a bit of CSS in stylus to hide the downvote button on HN to see how often I thought a downvote was really earned (not that often). It was trivial to undo [or use another browser], but gave just that small amount of friction to drive my own awareness.

Trivial to some. I think the point is that the person a) dislikes getting up to click a switch, b) finds making such changes prohibitively difficult, at least enough to prove a dissuasion