Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media? I'm curious, have you ever wanted to quit social media? |
Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media? I'm curious, have you ever wanted to quit social media? |
You don’t need social media, and I think less of people who need the acceptance of others.
I quit all social media about 10 years ago, when I wasn’t yet 20. I don’t watch or read the news either.
People are sheep though, so they thought that odd. But I’m not a sheep. You soon learn the important relationships, and the pointless ones.
I have nothing but HN. I don’t even have a LinkedIn, I still have a good software job.
You don’t need any of it, it’s all just noise and self-felating, distractions.
I have a great quality of life, very close friends and proper relationships with people, and I spend my time outside or furthering my studies.
I don’t care what Stacy ate for breakfast yesterday, and I don’t care about John’s new car. I don’t care about Bobs new position, I don’t care about Jacks political prowess. I don’t care about the “edgy” meme that Kate posts.
You are what you consume. So if you consume banal, shitty content, non-genuine surface level relationships, and manipulative advertising, and put up a false digital grandiose mask of who you are- what does that make you?
Like you I find a lot of what people share boring, but I have had a few nice friendships made possible by social media. Without it we would have lost touch a decade ago. And there are many others who are only a click away because of it. Maybe some of these relationships aren't that important, but so what? Why not maintain ties?
To me the real enlightened view is to use social media as a tool while not letting it consume your life. Take advantage of the ways it adds, while avoiding the negatives. But to each their own, if people prefer to get off of it completely that's ok too.
That's where the trouble starts. You don't have control when you use social media. By its very nature, it draws you in like a vortex. You can't get out.
And this amount of information on a singular person was only available if it was a roommate, coworker or a close friend. Which amounts to a small number of people. I don't think we were meant to deal with this.
While we also have a lot of information, interactions are starved. No real conversation is taking place. And it tends towards selfishness.
I could agree with everything you said except this. I believe it is important to have some source of news. Even if it is just reuters news or some conscious choice, one needs to be informed of certain events in daily life.
My Facebook account is only for the messenger and some local buy-and-sell groups.
My (private) Instagram account is for my friends.
My LinkedIn is for recruiters reaching out to me and contact my former managers for references. Former manager could've changed jobs so the old work email isn't any good anymore. A side effect is to research the companies and teams for my job interviews: Some recruiters did send me the LinkedIn profile of the interview panels.
Long lost friends and colleagues still have some way to contact me without knowing my phone and email. I don't have to proof myself through posting what I eat today and how excited about my work.
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; then
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; next
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been years since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)
You would be amazed how much taking colour out of the equation lowers the addictiveness of the content. I guess the people that make poker/slot machines knew about this decades ago, but I think this one step helped me more than anything else.
I quit Instagram in 2019.
I quit Twitter in 2022.
I quit Reddit in 2023.
I'm primarily on Mastodon and Threads at this point, but I soft-quit Threads recently because it was bad for my mental health.
I just don't think commercial social media is compatible with my brain at this point. The algorithms pull you in at first, but then they go sideways and you're addicted to garbage. It's like tabloid culture took over blogging. I hate it.
Reddit felt like an echo chamber. My biggest learning from combining social media and professional programmers is that in general most developers (90% or more) cannot measure things at all. Its the same in the real world too, but its just so much more noticeable online.
Sometimes (rarely) I think what it would be like to be able to make posts to bigger audience. But then I remember the algorithm and the reason it's there, to make you and Facebook closer, not me and my friends.
Thinking of my relationship for social media is like thinking those big decisions in life, out of curiosity, "What if I would've chosen stonemasonry?", as a fun exercise. But I'm never going back. Not as long as the rules and values are what they are now. Since they have not changed, I feel no reason to have it back.
Do I feel like I'm missing something? Yes, I'm certainly missing something, here and there. But in return I have free space in my system for something else.
Try for it, like for a month at first, see what you like in it and what not.
Wherever possible, I do things so that I see what everyone wrote, in order, instead of letting an algorithm choose. However, this isn't enough, because the algorithm causes changes in what everyone else reads, and says.
I'm thinking that some sort of RSS ecosystem, with an RSS ONLY search engine, that you have to submit a feed to (instead of just crawling everything) is the way to go.
RSS is fine for holding on to existing sources, but you do need some form of discovery mechanism.
It would also be useful to add a mechanism for rating items in a feed, in arbitrary dimensions (spam, phishing,funny, false, political,adult et cetera). Everyone could collaborate on curation, and meta-curate as well .
I am down to two subreddits that I visit by typing the URL in the address bar, and the orange site we all love. The other websites are write-only dumps where I interact with my website’s (very kind) followers. I don’t follow anyone and my feeds are literally empty. I use a Firefox extension to redirect from the feed to my notifications. I never tried TikTok or Instagram, and quitting the other hellsites was very easy post-covid; I just went outside.
Above all I just stopped engaging with bad faith comments. I just don’t get riled up by any of it anymore. I focus on positive interactions and lost interest in having the last word.
My business profile has an audience that I interact with. However I only go there if I have something to post, or to reply to interactions. Hence “write-only”.
I am not an influencer. My face is not on the internet. I am just a guy running a locally popular website, and I use social media to talk about the stuff I am working on for this website.
There's far too much advertising, of course, but I've developed some tricks to deal with that, too.
I was on Twitter very briefly. I'm experimenting intermittently with BlueSky and Mastodon. I'm mostly here, on Reddit, and at AskAManager.
I also use LinkedIn for much the same reason. It is the main way some businesses in my local industry (including the one I work for) communicate.
My wife quit LinkedIn about 5 years ago when somebody used it to mine information to try to steal her paycheck... and it almost worked.
Instagram is for staying in touch with fringe friends, it's mostly awful now but stories are still genuinely pleasant.
But I mostly spend my time on forums, RSS feeds, Mastodon, Reddit, and e-mail newsletters. That's where smart people can be found.
Just pull the Facebook plug. Don't keep Messenger either. It's great.
I all but stopped using Facebook years ago and deleted it recently. I'm off all of the other platforms.
I joined Instagram because that was the only way to contact some friends. And progressively I get more and more into Instagram reels, which is tenacious, and bleeds into YouTube shorts, which is just the same thing but revenue for Google.
I'm annoyed that sharing memes is so fun to do with long-term, now distant (far away) friends.. we kick memes back and forth for a few months before one of us posts a larger life update: birth of a kid, marriage, job promotion, etc.
Reels are the only way I get a good chuckle with my mates now. And I don't like it.
No FaceBook, no LinkedIn, nothing; I have found my peace from narcissists and "successful" people that live in their fantasy world!
Personally, I live in a city with no natural community. I'm married but have no family here and only a couple acquaintances. I tried to quit Instagram a couple years ago but just ended up more isolated than I already am.
I think this type of situation is common for a lot of people. Social media is the glue that ties us to friends in distant places, which is why it's successful.
If you have actual community available to you quitting is much more doable.
You may be ok, but I know a few people who have been possessed by the algorithms and influencers. They have one thing in common, they live in isolation with no community.