My life after quitting social media

I quit Facebook and Twitter around 2008, and the biggest downside in all that time was finding out about my niece&#x27;s birth days later than everyone else in the family, because it was only announced on Facebook. Not a huge issue in the scheme of things.<p>The biggest upside is that I&#x27;m completely disengaged with a lot of things people are angry about, because they aren&#x27;t on my radar at all. In practice, I don&#x27;t find that closely following breaking news is all that useful to me, since I&#x27;m not in a position to do anything about it, and it just makes me anxious to worry about things which are out of my control.<p>Instead, I read longform articles about major events when they get written a few weeks later, and supplement that reading with Wikipedia. This alternative seems to work well enough. If someone wants to talk to me about current events, I just ask them what their opinion is, which is usually what they want to happen anyway.

I love Twitter but recently removed Instagram from my phone and as a result, my usage dropped to near zero. I found I was watching the same updates (here&#x27;s my baby doing this fun thing!), which was nice, but I wasn&#x27;t really connected to this individual, and for most of my Instagram it was old friends and colleagues who no longer live near me or share much similarities.<p>Twitter, Instagram, Hacker News, etc. are all attention sinks but I realized I wasn&#x27;t getting much value from Instagram beyond a minor wholesome feeling to see (old) friends living their life. Reels were kind of fun sometimes but mostly a waste of time, though.<p>The joy I get from Twitter is being able to consume topics highly relevant to me, and I aggressively curate through blocking&#x2F;muting, grooming followers, and interacting with very smart people in their respective fields.<p>The pain I get from Twitter is a feeling I&#x27;m never good enough. I make a good salary which pays for my entire family of four&#x27;s well-being, but ... there&#x27;s always someone on there making more, or creating something cooler. During parental leave I spent more of my time with neighbours, volunteering at the community garden, and it felt more whole, but I still had a part of my brain thinking about the missed opportunities in building value &#x2F; wealth. Hm.

I quit social media for a year and nothing magical happened to me. I think it&#x27;s because I never really had a problem with it, since all my feeds were heavily curated and I didn&#x27;t scroll through mountains of noise. The content I consume is <i>always</i> high quality, because I made social media work for me. I avoid Instagram since it&#x27;s too visual and full of posers. Twitter is more real and authentic. Facebook is mostly for the family group chat which I enjoy more than the timeline. You have to make it work for you.

I recommended it in a similar discussion before, but Cal Newport&#x27;s &quot;Digital Minimalism&quot; offers reasonable ways to introduce intermittent fasting patterns into your social media consumption vs quitting cold turkey.<p>Some sample strategies to adopt:<p>1) Mobile sites only, never apps. Always log out when done to increase the friction of subsequent logins. The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you&#x27;re bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet.<p>2) Even better: computer access only, never mobile. Your phone is always around, unlike your PC. Set a time slot (20 min or so) when you know you&#x27;re around your computer. Social networks <i>really</i> excel at this pattern of usage. You&#x27;ll get the most important stuff, fluff relegated to the bottom of the feed, which solves the FOMO and shield you from the rest. This can be daily first and then cut down to whatever pattern you feel like (Newport himself claims he catches up on social media once a week).<p>I am sure I am butchering some of his advice, so worth reading the book.

Sometimes I feel HN also is a similar attention sink, even Wikipedia as well. They also can draw you in for information snacking, and before you know hours have gone. Commenting and reading responses in HN is also another attention consuming loop.

Or if I can put it in one sentence: I don&#x27;t want to consume the life of others. I want to create a life worth consuming.

I don&#x27;t use Facebook or Instagram. But I use Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and Hacker News.<p>I used to think that this is not that bad, after all, I&#x27;m consuming actually good content, not silly stuff like in those other networks. But then I was shocked to see how much time I&#x27;m actually spending on these networks. This is easy to see in the &quot;Digital Wellbeing&quot; section of modern phones. It was hours, several each day.<p>I was having trouble keeping up with my chores or exercising. I blamed work. I work the whole week and then in the weekend I want to rest, not to do chores. So I was falling behind. It took me a while to realize that the actual problem is that I&#x27;m spending so much time on social media. It&#x27;s consuming all my free time. I don&#x27;t watch TV anymore, I rarely watch movies or read books. Most of my free time is being devoured by social media.<p>The key word here is &quot;addiction&quot;. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you think that the content you consume is actually valuable. These are short doses of dopamine that make you feel good for a very short time and leave you wanting more. You start with a nice video of a guy building an 8 bit computer from scratch and you end up watching a girl watching dogs. And you keep scrolling because you want more dopamine. And if there is nothing more, you switch to Twitter or Reddit. And all these sites are being constantly optimized to keep you on the dopamine rush for as long as possible.<p>I used to think that the content I was consuming was actually good and valuable. And some of it is, but it was much less that I thought. One day I realized that I can barely remember anything that I have consumed on social media a week ago. Forget about a month ago or a year ago. It&#x27;s because most of this content is so unimportant that it doesn&#x27;t stick in my brain. Other slower sources of dopamine aren&#x27;t like this. A good movie or book leave you with something to remember. Social media rarely does.<p>I now understood that I have an addiction to social media. I have yet to overcome it though (after all, I&#x27;m here on HN). But at least I know that I have a problem.

Maybe I&#x27;m the outlier - but everybody I am &quot;friends&quot; with on social media I&#x27;m friends with IRL (save for Twitter, but that&#x27;s more blogging than social media). We just post what we did this weekend and stuff like that. Post stuff that the kids are doing (and for some of my friends what the grandkids are doing). No one is trying to impress anyone else. People just staying in touch. Maybe we older folks have a better feel for how to integrate technology into our everyday lives than we&#x27;re given credit for.

I quit sometime last Spring. I don&#x27;t know what happened but I finally was able to.<p>I think I feel happier because I have lower expectations and my small successes feel big in my mind because I am not comparing to others.<p>For example, a few minor home repairs over the weekend feels huge to me. I really feel great about them. One of my best friends is a carpenter and I know shouldn&#x27;t compare.. but I think I do it unconsciously.<p>I still have social media accounts. I posted a last message once I knew I wasn&#x27;t going back to social media.

I always find these &quot;quitting social media&quot; blog posts a bit ironic... &quot;social media is addictive and encourages doing and posting things just for the attention and to make other people think I am interesting... so I wrote this blog post about quitting social media, and am posting it to hacker news and other sites... I hope lots of people read it and think I am insightful&quot;

I quit Facebook (2019) and Twitter (2021). My general mood has improved, those platforms really are a cesspool that promotes and rewards the most hateful people and you can&#x27;t help but get dirty from them and their attacks on anything and anyone they don&#x27;t like. But I am quite a bit more isolated as an individual. And I noticed that HN serves me as kind of a surrogate.<p>We are slowly forgetting how to interact in the real world.

&gt; You are no longer used by social media, you start to use the tool.<p>This is the key. Either you use technology intentionally or it uses you. You don&#x27;t have to quit altogether, but it&#x27;s important that you use it as a tool.<p>I wrote about this from a different angle - in my view, the problem can be isolated to feeds[0]. They encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;suketk.com&#x2F;feeds-considered-harmful" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;suketk.com&#x2F;feeds-considered-harmful</a>

Interesting and insightful read. But the Facebook and Twitter share buttons at the bottom were....ironic.

I stopped using FB and IG a long time ago. The &quot;likes and followers&quot; appeal didn&#x27;t apply for me, as I rarely posted.<p>But I did feel the FOMO and when I closed the app, I would get this feeling that my life is boring, like a web page with the default Wordpress theme. Feeling as if nobody would be interested in clicking around and getting to know anything about me.<p>Yet, despite abandoning these apps, I am somehow still constantly on my phone (not during work), trying to find something new to distract me from the boredom I feel in the evenings after work. Reddit or Youtube are my biggest addictions.

I feel like these types of posts are only made by the socially inept, who&#x27;ve never managed to make a friend over the internet.

It&#x27;s almost impossible to promote art and music organically these days without being involved in social media. It&#x27;s different than traditional sinful addictions in that way...<p>Product designers don&#x27;t realize that each user has a different purpose for using social media, and totally different goals, while the basic narrative is that all of social media is dedicated towards selling products and building online celebrity status.<p>The real problem is that social media sites try to dominate the world without creating sub-communities for specialization, and they have also devalued and underestimated the value of being able to build followers in hopes of a focus on engagement and paid ad revenue. Social sites usually focus on one front page, and one script&#x2F;method for success on them, and that&#x27;s a massive failure to the different reasons users use them.<p>Social sites start out fair, with orderly time lines and visibility of individual accounts, but as year over year profit and user base increases becomes their focus, they grow corrupt and too big to change. They stop developing useful features and turn towards profit.<p>It&#x27;s a cycle they repeat until their user base wakes up to the reality of it all and realizes all of their content will be deleted if they quit. It is a cycle of abuse and loss compounded by lost time... More like the year I spent wound up in GTA4 than like drinking Tequila and smoking Newports.

&gt; Important things – news, events, etc. – that we think we’ll miss will come to you either way. Either a friend will tell you about an upcoming concert or you’ll read it somewhere else.<p>This is what bugs me about out current state. Sure, I ended my addiction to social media but I often still rely on my friends telling me about events that THEY saw in their feed. I wish business and artists would stop using social media as their primary platform for engagement. Use a website instead, an RSS feed or email.

Maybe this is type of interaction involved.<p>Formally, I was bit more active on Facebook. I still have an account (for Oculus, mostly) but I&#x27;ve scaled down my presence on Facebook a lot. I found signal to noise ratio not great on Facebook. There&#x27;s maybe one in fifty or so post that worthwhile to look at.<p>I&#x27;m still fairly active on Twitter and Discord -- mainly because I&#x27;m so involved in VR stuff, and that&#x27;s where a lot of people socialize and coordinate projects. (at least for Japanese people that I deal with a lot.)<p>Personally, I think this is more of the shift from contextual (WHO I am interacting with) to content based (WHAT I am interacting about), and I find latter more meaningful and productive. Last couple of years on Facebook really didn&#x27;t provide much of value to my life. There are also bit of junks on Twitter, too, but they are generally short and I can skim things on Twitter and generally it&#x27;s easy to pick out things that matter the most for me.<p>This also could be coming from that I&#x27;m following a lot more strangers (that share interesting things) on Twitter -- as opposed to subset of people I know on Facebook, too. Facebook I guess allows this to certain degrees (&quot;following&quot; someone without friending) but I don&#x27;t think this is primary use case on Facebook, making it fairly useless.

There was a time I used to have fun just building things for myself (rc planes) then it transitioned to this thing where I had to share it (forums). Eventually I would share just concepts&#x2F;drawings&#x2F;ideas and not the real thing. I now try to finish something before I even mention it.<p>There&#x27;s also a flood of people&#x27;s ideas&#x2F;works&#x2F;projects (Hackaday). I guess having personal goals is nice to pursue&#x2F;not compare against.<p>As they say talk is easy<p>I used to be active on FB and unfortunately I started to post like crazy&#x2F;cringe things on there, thankfully I became self aware&#x2F;cleaned up my public trail. Now I avoid it. One main reason is I have over a hundred friend requests of random people (indirect family&#x2F;acquaintances from 20 yrs ago) trying to get to know me&#x2F;ask me for money (people from a third world country).<p>I&#x27;m not completely against social media, I use Reddit to look at certain subreddits related to technology, check the news sometimes, and then for brain-dead time, look at meme sites. I have had to stop myself a few times just due to how much time... that&#x27;s the thing it&#x27;s captivating&#x2F;paralyzing the few seconds of media constantly changing (scrolling memes). But on the days when my brain doesn&#x27;t function anymore, this low effort content is nice to pass the time till I fall asleep&#x2F;ready to function again.<p>I want to get back into the groove again, isolate myself, pursue something with time. There&#x27;s also that sense of being a producer vs. being an audience like the person making the videos on YT vs. the people commenting.

This post is suspiciously long for someone who seems to charge money to summarise books (reading books being another unworthy use of one’s time on this planet, presumably).

I&#x27;ve never understood this. I think if you have a relationship with social media that elicits a desire to &quot;quit&quot;, it&#x27;s not because social media is terrible, it&#x27;s because the relationship is bad.<p>I wonder as well if there&#x27;s a difference between people who use it to catch up with their real-life friends vs. people who use it to communicate with online friends. I deleted my Facebook account last year simply because I had never used it; most of my friends on there were people I was acquainted with in real life at some point but I have no desire to talk to them. I never used it so I just deleted my account. However, I use Twitter, and I&#x27;d never dream of deleting it; most of my interactions on there are between me and friends I initially met online, and social media is one of the main ways we communicate. These are real friends - I&#x27;ve met several of them in person now - but I&#x27;d be losing a huge channel of communication with them if I went dark on social media.<p>Which, when worded like that, almost sounds like they&#x27;re trapping me on there, but I also have no desire to quit. I&#x27;ve never felt Twitter negatively impacting my life. I go on it daily, I usually have it open in a tab while doing other things on my computer, but I don&#x27;t spend hours just scrolling, and I don&#x27;t follow people who say things that will only make my day worse. I don&#x27;t see it as wasting my time any more than watching TV or doing crossword puzzles, which are also things I spend a reasonable amount of time doing.<p>The comparison to cigarettes and alcohol is ridiculous in my opinion. I don&#x27;t buy the premise that social media, by default and for most people, makes your life worse. Maybe I&#x27;m just the exception? I have no idea.

The thing that drives me crazy is how hard it is to avoid it. I have plenty of real life friends, a busy career, a family. Still an old friend said &quot;reach out to me on whatsapp&quot;. I can&#x27;t even use the thing without agreeing to import my contacts. Or my Oculus headset-- which I really enjoy-- demands I have an account. Bummer.

If you&#x27;re not going to go cold-turkey, the best thing you can do is turn off <i>all</i> notifications from apps like facebook and twitter on your phone. Android 9 and 10 provide very good features to block all notifications from any specific app.<p>You should only see messages and notifications when you specifically choose to open the app.

I think there are only three types of modern social media: Facebook, Pinterest, and then virtually everything else. (I don&#x27;t consider Reddit to be in this conversation because it&#x27;s a glorified forum, and those have been around since BBSes).<p>Facebook was conceived and still largely operates as a social network in the community aspect: you are in touch with your friends and family members for the most part. Facebook has of course tried to deviate from this path in the last decade, but that&#x27;s still strongly what the site is.<p>Pinterest is probably the least interactive social media platform in terms of communication between people, but it&#x27;s probably the most useful, even if it&#x27;s nothing but a collection of bookmarks.<p>All the other social media platforms are basically centered around groups of people yelling at influencers in a desperate attempt to be noticed. They are giant dopamine sinks.

I find myself replacing it with other garbage, sadly. Bad brain...

On a similar note, I quit watching the news and reading the newspaper. It doesn&#x27;t make me happy. It really doesn&#x27;t make me &quot;informed&quot;, it only makes me capable of parroting some soundbites my favorite pundit said. Lastly the news is terribly politicised nowadays and tends to focus only on the bad.<p>Plenty of research proving the link between anxiety&#x2F;depression and news consumption. What is there to gain by watching the news anyways...<p>If I want to find out more about something, i&#x27;d rather listen to a long form podcast by a professor, than read something a journalist copypasted. Or maybe read an article here and find comments by so many people from so many different viewpoints and cultural backgrounds.

Just taking all social media apps off your phone and having a complex password that makes it difficult to sign into their webapps are a huge step. Not having your social media of choice a finger press away helps a lot. It&#x27;s easier to get off them if you start with that. I did that years ago and replaced my favorite app with the kindle app. I read a lot more (books) now and I don&#x27;t get the addicted feeling.

&quot;My life after quitting social media - I post to my private blog and share it to HN. Totally not social nor media&quot; - durmonski

I was able to dodge it. Recently, I was thinking of joining Facebook because of Groups. I don’t have friends and I’m missing to have conversations with similar minded people but I just can’t make myself doing it. The sad things is that probably there are no alternatives. All platforms are almost equally bad.

The closest I came to &quot;social media&quot; was Reddit - I quit it and have never looked back nor missed it.

&gt; instead of refreshing like a lunatic for new information all the time during your day. You simply search for a solution only when you are experiencing a problem.<p>&gt; You treat social media like any other website online. You visit it only when you need something. You don’t visit it to find something to need.

I did quit Facebook for about 6 months. What made me login after that period of inactivity was to find information on a local forest fire that was threatening my house. It was and is the best source of up to date information for that.

I quit FB and Instagram by making it very difficult to login by changing my password and not saving it. However I still use Twitter with one useful trick: I make lists of Subjects I care about: COVID research, Real Estate, etc.

I quit all social media outside of forums about 5 years ago. I would say my life is better. I cannot think of one thing I miss from it or one benefit it provided that I would go back for.

Ive quit FB and Twitter, never had IG.<p>Hacker News and soemtimes Reddit is all I visit.<p>I did feel better after quitting Twitter, seeing as what an rage fest it was

I tried to quit clubhouse but couldn’t. We are suffering from loneliness in this world.

What exactly is this Social Media the author is referring to? Does HN fit the definition? Is he only talking about Facebook and Twitter? Is there even an agreed upon definition of Social Media?

&gt; Social media is like cigarettes and alcohol. Toxic. Addictive. Yet widely accessible.<p>I never thought I would say this...but I have to wonder if cigarettes and alcohol may be healthier options than social media, simply because they usually accompany real social lives?<p>EDIT: To be clear, any addictive substance is a bad choice. Please entirely disregard this analogy in that sense.

I quit <i>most</i> social media (I&#x27;m still here, aren&#x27;t I?) and I found a lot more peace. I ended up working a lot more, which stressed me out, but I finally identified my lack of work-life balance, and now I&#x27;m back to a healthy state. No outrage at irrelevant trivia, no other people&#x27;s lives being a distraction in mine. If anything I just have too much personal stuff to do now. Life feels a bit more meaningful, healthy. I recommend it.

&quot;Perished on commenting under posts about social change or doing something meaningful instead of actually doing something meaningful. &quot;<p>You know, I think we&#x27;d all be better off if everyone took a break from that one for a year or two.

&gt; I still haven’t deleted my social media accounts. I still have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I don’t need to delete them. I don’t feel that I need to delete them. I simply don’t open them because I simply unfollowed everyone there.<p>You&#x27;re not really quitting if you still keep all your accounts. It&#x27;s like stopping drinking but leaving a bottle of whiskey in the cupboard just in case.