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.)
The friction makes me want to disable the measure before it makes me want to stop the activity. And unlike paging in forums, I can disable it. That’s why these measures never work for me.
If you don't actually want to stop, then these opportunities for pause do nothing, because in that pause you reaffirm that you do want to continue the behaviour.
This ties into why addiction is so powerful, while many people know their addictions are bad, they enjoy them and don't actually want to stop. I.E. They don't value the results of cessation versus keeping the addiction.
It's entirely possible to reach for your phone, then tap an app or load a website on your computer while being semi-aware of your actions, and this is typical for people with ingrained behaviours. These people can start scrolling instagram or twitter without really thinking about it. Having a forced circuit breaker gives these people an opportunity to stop and reconsider their actions.
At the end of the day only you have full agency over yourself.
Let me try to illustrate: I might want to stop after the "circuit breaker" comes up for the tenth time. But the nine times before are annoying enough that I'll disable it before I reach the tenth time. Maybe not initially, but after a few days. In other words, the friction vs. frequency they exhibit, in conjunction with how easy or difficult they can be turned off, makes them not work for me. And I haven't found anything of that kind that works well. Either the friction is high enough that I'll rather disable it, or it's too low to actually serve as an effective deterrence. What would be needed is something that "ramps up" in just the right way.
I do understand your position and reasoning, but I'm hoping to explain that you're asking too much of the system. Nothing is going to overcome your personal willpower, if you want to see that site or load that app, there isn't any local technical solution that is going to stop you.
These systems are trivial to defeat, after all you turned them on, you can just as easily turn them off, but that's not the point at all. It's not meant to be an unsurmountable technical wall. The point is to provide you with a moment to actively think about your actions instead of an autopiloting behaviour that lands you on a website or app that you are trying to avoid using. People who use employ these types of "circuit breakers" do so because they find that they frequently find themselves autopiloting to these services. For these people the circuit breaker is their moment to realise "oh hang on I said I don't want to be doing this while I'm working on my project", rather than "oh this is inconvenient, I'll just disable it for the time being".
The stopping power comes from you, not from the crutch.
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.
People exist on a wide continuum of impulsivity. I have ADHD and nothing short of truly unbypassable restrictions on all my devices are enough. Mail me if interested.
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
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.
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.)