This post has some pretty good suggestions. But I always get frustrated with this issue and honestly there will never be a great solution to it.
The underlying problem is that addicting people is core to the business model of facebook, twitter, and many other sites. With the web coupled to the profit motive there will always be infinitely more resources put towards making sites addictive than making them user-friendly, ie, encouraging healthy user habits. If the web was treated as a shared, public utility with no-strings-attached funding for developing shared tools like social media as well as supporting user-written clients for everything, effective tools for this that anyone can easily use would proliferate and web addictiveness and these clunky solutions would be nearly a non issue.
This is basically the dream of socialism. Utility set free from the malignant requirements of profit. I think it's much closer to people's original dreams for what the internet could be before venture capital crept in and came to rule everything.
The underlying problem is that addicting people is core to the business model of facebook, twitter, and many other sites. With the web coupled to the profit motive there will always be infinitely more resources put towards making sites addictive than making them user-friendly, ie, encouraging healthy user habits. If the web was treated as a shared, public utility with no-strings-attached funding for developing shared tools like social media as well as supporting user-written clients for everything, effective tools for this that anyone can easily use would proliferate and web addictiveness and these clunky solutions would be nearly a non issue.
This is basically the dream of socialism. Utility set free from the malignant requirements of profit. I think it's much closer to people's original dreams for what the internet could be before venture capital crept in and came to rule everything.