GoKawiil
Tech News
A growing number of people are buying gadgets, including a $60 plastic cube, designed to lock down smartphone features and reduce compulsive scrolling. These tools intentionally strip phones of advanced functions, pushing them back toward the simplicity of older devices.
A new category of 'dopamine sites' lets users browse, checkout and 'track' orders for products and food they never actually buy. The trend began with Park Seohyun's South Korean site 'Food Never Arrives,' which estimated money and calories saved by skipping real orders, and has spawned imitators like 'FakeHaul' and 'Food Never Comes,' the latter drawing over 2.7 million views since June.
Minded is a new free app designed to interrupt habitual doomscrolling by prompting users to pause before opening time-wasting apps or sites. Rather than blocking access outright, it nudges users toward intentional decisions about how they spend their attention.
A designer has created the CinderClock, a 3D-printed alarm clock featuring a large arcade-style button for snoozing. The device is built to make hitting snooze once simple and satisfying, but deliberately harder to repeat, discouraging users from lingering in bed and reaching for their phones.
Times columnist James Marriott has expanded his viral essay on declining reading habits into a new book, 'The New Dark Ages,' published this week. The reviewer, a fellow journalist and friend of Marriott's, describes it as an entertaining but troubling 50,000-word argument about how digital media, especially YouTube, is reshaping childhood attention and literacy for the worse.
Roblox announced a crackdown on games within its platform that incentivize children to engage in prolonged, compulsive scrolling behavior. The move targets experiences designed to keep young users hooked through reward loops tied to endless content consumption rather than meaningful play.
Roblox has introduced a new policy blocking younger players from experiences that reward continuous media consumption through autoplay, infinite scrolling, or embedded video feeds. The rule appears aimed squarely at 'Steal an Egg,' a viral game that let players boost their characters by watching a treadmill-style video stream, which was pulled and later reinstated without that feature. Accounts under the Roblox Kids and Select tiers, covering ages 5 to 15, are now barred from such games.
A study led by Dr. Ian Hughes at Texas A&M University found that employees who compulsively browse distressing news during work hours tend to dwell on what they've read, and that lingering rumination reduces their engagement with work. The findings, drawn from two studies of workers in the US and UK, show the effect is strongest among people high in neuroticism, a trait tied to anxiety and worry.