Reasons to Quit Social Media

I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it&#x27;s not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.<p>Is it the like&#x2F;upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.<p>My vote for what&#x27;s more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven&#x27;t done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don&#x27;t want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.<p>I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I&#x27;d love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.

&gt; After the habit of scrolling and liking wears off, you suddenly find yourself in a joyful place. A quieter, calmer, less demanding place where you don’t want to know what others are doing. You focus on what you want to do.<p>But what if you <i>don&#x27;t</i> know what you want to do?<p>I feel like this post was written from the perspective of someone who already has their own life goals sorted out, and social media was clearly acting as an obstacle to accomplishing those well-defined goals, so they dropped social media.<p>But when you&#x27;re on your own, it is not a given that you have everything figured out and all you need to do is give yourself a lot of free time and just do what you want. The void that remains is exactly the kind that social media is designed to fill for many people.<p>That kind of feeling almost legitimizes the concept of FOMO, because at a certain point you cannot imagine how anything you&#x27;re doing could be more interesting than the things that other people are moving forward with in their lives. You want to aspire to be something, and looking for someone else to copy would mean you at least have <i>some</i> kind of aspiration to work towards, instead of nothing at all.<p>Social media is a net negative overall, but once it&#x27;s out of the picture you have to work on yourself, and in that domain there are no easy answers.

“ We persuade our minds that liking pictures and joining virtual groups gives us a sense of belonging. Connection with others”<p>Except in many cases its not persuasion. Joining groups actually does give us these things. My gf is part of “bay area moms” group and the amount of useful tips she gets out of participating in that is significant. Or “bay area hikers” for me. Also, if i want to sell something, I hire facebook to find a buyer for my old ipad or iphone.<p>Social media has caught on to the jobs framework. Jack Dorsey references it directly on Twitter earnings calls. He says we need to fill more jobs for more people. He constantly asks what can people hire twitter for?<p>I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.

I don&#x27;t want to quit social media<p>What I want is for interactions with other people in online social spaces to be less destructive.

I never had to quit social media. They quit me. I loved Facebook and Twitter when they were new, I connected to people that were way outside my normal group of friends and stayed in contact with people I knew who moved away, sometimes passively by reading their posts, sometimes actively.<p>But both platforms started actively working against that kind of usage. Eventually I just had to stop as they became unusable, not using Twitter at all anymore, and only using FB for messenger.

I have a question: before “social” “media” became a thing we* all had been using various irc chats, forums and theme websites of all kinds.<p>There has always been all kinds of drama, addiction, obsession, love and hatred.<p>But I can’t stop thinking that modern websites just monetize by growing the userbase. This model kills creativity and we are juste cattle for them to feed us with some bullshit.<p>And some random guy nowadays instead of registering a domain name and creating a bunch of html pages to share his thoughts and observations no matter how weird and awkward or enlightening they are, just a small comfort zone in the neverending blizzard of data traffic - this guy will go create a facebook&#x2F;instagram&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;etc. page, get all sorts of rage and ignorance, get kicked by violating some stupid ToC rule of the bespoke “social” “media”.<p>Long gone the times when internet was a place where you could stumble upon something really touching.<p>There are nice places to visit but google favors to show crap on its first couple of search results pages nowadays<p>* Well, by “we” I mean to say people born before 1990 probably

I&#x27;m sure there are reasons to quit social media but this essay seems hyperbolic. I use social media because I like to see photos and read updates about my friends and family. That strikes me as a pretty normal and healthy use for it. My wife&#x27;s Instagram account is a collection of all the cookies and cakes she&#x27;s baked. She follows other Instagramers who do they the same thing and they inspire each other to make different kinds of things or with different ingredients. Again, seems like a perfectly valid use of social media (though probably not healthy for me).<p>The author also seems to look down on people with &quot;average lives&quot; like that was a bad thing. Assuming life quality is a normal distribution, most people will lead average-ish lives. Many people will lead worse than average lives. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that.

I find that social media has went in a direction that makes it impossible to curate a &#x27;healthy&#x27; feed.<p>The thing that ruins it for me is the constant negativity. Everybody is upset about something. Often, rightly so, but everybody is also extreme in their views. There is never nuance or healthy discussion. Only anger. Even in innocuous things. For example, follow the official account for a sport on Instagram. If you ever wade into the comments it&#x27;s a cesspit of anger and negativity. Even if you never get involved (I don&#x27;t ever comment) it effects how you feel.<p>Twitter is the worst offender. I can curate a feed of people I enjoy seeing content from. This should be enough, but these people can retweet things I don&#x27;t want to see. Fortunately Twitter allows you to disable retweets for people. But...Twitter populates your feed with tweets people you follow have liked or tweets Twitter thinks you might like. The majority of the time these are things I don&#x27;t want to see that cause negative emotions. It makes Twitter unusable without customisation via Chrome extensions or third party apps.<p>When I look around at my friends, the people that have the least negative outlook on life and seem to be most outgoing and happy are the people that don&#x27;t actively use social media or who never even signed up. They&#x27;re the people who don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s happening in the news unless there is a major crisis that might actually effect them. It&#x27;s always hard to know from sure looking in but these people seem to have the right idea.<p>When I look at it objectively, I get absolutely nothing beneficial out of the most popular social media companies (or reading the news constantly). There is something about it all though that makes it really hard to step away. It&#x27;s FOMO more than addiction. I never last more than a few days, but they&#x27;re always better days.

I enjoy social media and use it to exchange information, observe trends in culture, and as a communication channel when convenient.

While in principle I agree with so much that the author has said,I think they miss a large advantage of social media,at least for my digital life: I am an author and I use social media to advertise my writing. I also run across cool tech, and I share that. I also use Twitter as a source of links to reading material and open source projects.<p>I use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freedom.to" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freedom.to</a> to only allow access to social media during a few short pre-specified times during the day.

I’ve limited my social media to a group chat with friends, an entertainment website with discussion, and an informative website with discussion (HN)<p>I’m no longer absorbed in sensationalist media and I’m no longer angry about some flavor of the week topic. I don’t see ads anymore and I’ve been a lot happier since. Now I can work towards minimizing other unproductive and unfulfilling screen time.

Firmly believe what’s ruined social media is special interest groups and the rest parading as people like you and me. My evidence for this is the overnight take-over of r&#x2F;politics in 2016 and the subsequent introduction of extremely divisive talking points which eventually transformed it into the glorified hate-site it is today. YES I’m bitter, Reddit before then got me through some tough times.

Here&#x27;s another reason to quit social media: the lords of the engagement economy make money off &quot;mimetic desire&quot; -- off your envy of me and my envy of you. The more anxious they can make me and you about measuring up to each other, the more money they make.<p>That&#x27;s evil. Some might say it&#x27;s demonic.<p>Here&#x27;s a writeup. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lrb.co.uk&#x2F;the-paper&#x2F;v39&#x2F;n16&#x2F;john-lanchester&#x2F;you-are-the-product" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lrb.co.uk&#x2F;the-paper&#x2F;v39&#x2F;n16&#x2F;john-lanchester&#x2F;you-...</a><p>(Said he, writing on the Hacker News social media network :-)

I have not used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc etc for the last 10+ years. There wasn’t really an event or a moment where I said “I’m quitting social media”, rather I just sort of faded out of it.<p>I do browse Reddit and occasionally comment on something, or here on HN, so I still see things like Twitter posts frequently and keep up with things through some of those channels.<p>When I say I don’t use social media, I mean it directed more towards the kind of posting what I made for dinner so my friends can comment on it use case. I think our society is heavily focused on social media and it’s become an integral part of staying informed and up to date.<p>For that reason, I do check on certain people’s Twitter from time to time, or look at some replies to a tweet that was linked to from an article or something, what’s troublesome to me is that I can’t do almost any of this without signing up. I have more of a problem with it in regards to Twitter, as that has seemingly become the nearly exclusive place for a lot of prominent figures(including elected officials, high profile CEOs, etc) to give updates. Creating this walled garden feels like an attempt to limit access to information that is intended to be publicly available, and at this point my unwillingness to create an account is stemming more from my disdain for this practice than my desire to “quit social media”.

One of the arguments for social media is that it keeps you in touch with friends you&#x27;ve lost touch with.<p>Except, that there&#x27;s probably a good reason you&#x27;ve lost touch with a lot of those people. What Facebook showed me was how racist and vulgar most of the people I went to school with are. Better to just see them once every ten years at a reunion event where people are on their best behavior than to have to face it every day.

I checked out after the first few paragraphs because his viewpoint is so b&amp;w. I&#x27;m either using social media for validation or as an observer, because apparently I&#x27;m shallow and needy. This is such a broad generalization that I don&#x27;t feel the need to read further, even though I generally agree that social media is a problem. Cynicism isn&#x27;t how to start that conversation.

I think the eternal september has become so deep that social media lose its value. Pure mobs don&#x27;t work, and regulated mobs don&#x27;t scale. People can get addicted to counting their &#x27;likes&#x27; for so long, after that they realize it&#x27;s a rigged, impossible game. Upvotes are not the way forward, and that puts an end to social media based on pure popularity.

&gt; We hire social media to create a virtual representation of the life we want to live, but never actually live it.<p>HN being the exception to my 2+ years hiatus from Twitter, Facebook, etc, I am careful to represent myself sincerely, in part because I’m assuming my little stories might help someone practice better mental and physical health (I have found some of your collective comments to be helpful—-thank you!).<p>&gt; We hire social media to observe the life we want, but never actually experience it.<p>Today I read this post instead of reading further into a book. If I practice reaching for the book instead of HN I may thank myself later, as this forum post is satisfying to complete but otherwise has a low ROI (I tend not to check back soon enough to be part of any discussion). I generally enjoy the life I have, and one action that will make it more enjoyable is to be reading more often, as I find engaging with longer stories over days and weeks to be gratifying.

I don&#x27;t much like sharing personal fun life events with pictures and a lot of detail on social media. As an example, my family just went on a cruise to celebrate my Dad&#x27;s 100th birthday (yay Dad!). I posted a very short text message on Facebook and Twitter after the fact. What I did do was create a private photo and video slideshow that I shared with about 15 family members and about 25 friends. In comparison my Brother was frequently posting pictures and text to Facebook during the trip. To be honest, a few friends in real life mentioned that they liked seeing pictures of my wife and I that my brother posted. Anyway, to me, sharing means more when done directly, and instead of getting Facebook likes and a few comments, I had about 15 people respond with more meaningful emails, with a few private conversations starting.

Isn’t HN social media?

Man, the time before social media must have been glorious indeed.<p>It seems that before social media people were engaged and productive and attentive and whatever.<p>Wait. MySpace was founded in 2003, twitter in 2006, Facebook in 2004, etc. I was an adult by then. I grew up before social media.<p>And yeah, people are more or less still people. Those 20 reasons are a wishlist. They&#x27;re the same 20 things we always promise ourselves every single day after we spent the previous day failing to achieve those 20 things.<p>I&#x27;m not saying there aren&#x27;t problems with social media, but let&#x27;s not pretend we&#x27;ll all become ubermensch if we all log off of twitter.

Good points and personally relate to some of these benefits.<p>I try to keep my social media minimal. No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, etc...<p>At times has been difficult to use social media in moderation. Feels like I am competing with an Olympic champion in their own sport.<p>With that said, here some things that I found helpful:<p>- Never social media apps on my phone (no email either).<p>- Only access social media via laptop&#x2F;desktop.<p>- Use services like Mailbrew to follow Youtube channels I want to follow (very few).<p>- Never save my session, always enter the credentials every time I want to check social media.<p>I do however follow Twitter &amp; HN. More like a passive user.

This article seems to miss that a number of people use groups on social media to organize activities in real life and keep in touch with family, and the nontechnical friends and family aren&#x27;t up to the task of building their own solutions for this. For these uses it isn&#x27;t a substitute for a fulfilling life but rather a help. And unfortunately network effects often mean that the only effective option is to use a service that most people are on.

I would take this more seriously if this person wasn’t hocking a $150 a year book summary service and a twice-monthly newsletter. I’m not shading the hustle, you do you, but it just feels <i>weird</i> to advocate cutting out social media in your life, yet actively asking people to pay you with their attention and money to hear your thoughts and feelings. His first theoretical reason for using social media, for validation, seems to be what he’s after with his summary service and newsletter. Like, why write this blog at all if you aren’t after the validation? There is nothing wrong with wanting to connect with others, and this idea that only in-person connections and friendships matter is really absurd.<p>If social media or anything else is causing more harm than good, I say stop doing it. Even if quitting is hard. Don’t invest more into something than you get out of it, is something I firmly support. I have essentially stopped using Facebook because of that, but I recognize that for many people, quitting Facebook would have a negative impact on their life because they get more out of it than they put into it.<p>Still, I can’t get behind the whole “you should quit becusss x, y, z” thing. Like, as much as I like to rip on social media (especially Twitter), my life has been changed and enhanced and is demonstrably and unquestionably <i>better</i> because of social media. I realize that isn’t the case for everyone, but for me, it is. I use what has a positive impact on my life and don’t use what doesn’t, the same as with anything else.

The mindset of someone who would willingly engage in social media (reddit, insta, FB, TikTok, etc) is the real crux of all of this.<p>The need for attention, validation, to fit in, and be seen fitting it. It encourages the worst traits of old internet forums. The upvote system is a compounding factor on all of this because it gives direct feedback. Violating the group think is instantly punished. Conforming to the group think is instantly rewarded. They are thereby programmed to attempt to appease the group constantly. They live for the rush of validation and dopamine when the upvotes start ticking.<p>This shit becomes such a powerful feedback loop that they really have no grasp on reality at all. I&#x27;ve had the misfortune of talking to some IRL hardcore redditors face to face. They&#x27;re socially inept in an entirely unique way. They&#x27;re capable of basic social graces that an actual mentally ill people aren&#x27;t, but they still lack critical self awareness. They don&#x27;t know how to differentiate between the internet and real life. They&#x27;re gullible and will believe anything even if it&#x27;s half way agreeable to them. Its tragic, they&#x27;re virtually lobotomized. Genuine NPCs.

I have an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and many more, but I don&#x27;t use them actively or passively. Maybe the occasional browsing.<p>On facebook I made it a point to unfollow all friends so that my newsfeed is blank at any point of time. When I did this initially a few years back I felt.. weird. But I got used to it and now I visit once in a while for the facebook groups. After that I don&#x27;t end up spending time on FB. For quora after I blocked a majority of tags&#x2F;topics, the feed was cleaner, but it got boring to be a passive consumer. Similarly for Twitter, I blocked a lot of topics&#x2F;tags&#x2F;people and followed a certain few which has made it easier to scroll twitter once in a while.<p>I have an app (StayFree) on android which calculates the time spent on each app. When I see it now for the last 7 months, I see I have used it for 185 hours, of which 40 hours are on reddit. With whatsapp at 11 hours, the rest of the apps are below 8 hours of usage. I also have trackercontrol which blocks the trackers in my phone. In my browser I have ActivityWatch which shows HN is my most visited apart from the occasional reddit.<p>For me, the benefits of being a part of these social media comes <i>after</i> investing the time to filter and refine my experience. That does take time. Overall I feel my experience with social media has been better, I&#x27;m able to interact with people around the world and learn and ask questions. I dunno if I&#x27;ve turned these evil entities (social media) into my friends.<p>Maybe off topic, does having an account on these social media sites &#x2F; apps on phone be harmful in any way when you don&#x27;t consume it that much? If yes then what sort of harm does it have? Is it mitigated by having trackercontrol? What <i>evil</i> happens if tracking my account gives these companies nothing but close to 0 activity? Are there others like me here?

I actually use Social Media to promote my music... The things platforms don&#x27;t understand is that there are multiple potential uses for social sites. That is why the one script or narrative they create and impose on their user base to manage everyone is severely flawed from the &quot;one platform fits all: model.<p>That&#x27;s also why tightening moderation and introducing complex protocols for success&#x2F;productivity&#x2F;satisfaction&#x2F;merit&#x2F;growth over a large user base drives people off of platforms and kills a user base quickly... It&#x27;s better for social apps to stay relatively small and tight knit. They all grow and wither as monopolies, with no way of returning to the past success as far as I&#x27;ve seen thus far.

I actively block out content and tell social media platforms what I&#x27;m interested in and what I&#x27;m not interested in. This have improved my feed a lot and my social media have become a lot more enjoyable.<p>I have considered building a twitter filter program. Where instead of scrolling through endlessly content, where 90% of them isn&#x27;t even good. I could just ask my twitter filter program to show me the most retweeted content, show person X last tweets, show me the most liked tweets of the people that I follow... etc. This will prevent me from scrolling endlessly, and speed up the process of information gather.<p>Social media if used correctly can have a lot of benefits. But takes some time to build up a good feed.

I&#x27;ve written a few posts of my own like this. My biggest win in terms of SM strategy has been to actually get back on to SM to build an audience, and to schedule posts. I use Hootsuite to schedule Instagram posts over a month in advance. It&#x27;s transformative in terms of user experience. I totally forget I have an SM presence because it&#x27;s on autopilot. And when I do post, I don&#x27;t have the constant engagement hooks confronting me that Instagram has. Instead I&#x27;m using the hootsuite calendar to just schedule stuff, and then leave it alone.<p>I don&#x27;t work for Hootsuite and I&#x27;m sure there are plenty of other options. Also, it&#x27;s not free, so there&#x27;s that. But it works for me.

Maybe I&#x27;m not the typical user here, but I don&#x27;t have most of the problems described in this post. I use Twitter somewhat heavily, but I just use it to post jokes, and mostly follow people who use Twitter the same way.<p>It&#x27;s definitely a time-sink, and to some degree the &quot;fake sense of belonging&quot;, so I&#x27;m being less social irl. But I don&#x27;t think I can blame the second point entirely on Twitter, and I think I&#x27;m ok with the tradeoff of Twitter being a time-sink in exchange for the entertainment it provides me.<p>So imo, the solution to around 30% of these problems is just not to follow the &quot;Jim just purchased a BMW&quot; people.

#3: Your old-ass relatives are on Facebook and they want to see your kids.<p>Def feel a validation dopamine fix from engagement...but it&#x27;s not the only factor.<p>(This is why I love Tinybeans and hope it rockets. It&#x27;s like Instagram but for sharing family pics.)

I have a problem with the way the author frames social media. I seem to not clearly fall into either the observer or validator camp. I generally use social media as a way to try to add value to others through comments. I care less about the actual content and more about the discussion around the content. Thus, a lot of the author’s points are irrelevant to me because I see social media as an uplifting, positive thing. Why would I then want it gone from my life?

Honestly this seems like an argument to quit everything _except_ facebook. For me, fb is the only social media built to enhance relationships with your real friends.

All things in moderation!<p>As others on here have said, I think social media use has various benefits - I&#x27;ve discovered lots of interesting papers and researchers on Twitter, come across life updates on FB, scroll through cool photos on Instagram. Yes it can be bad, so like many other things that can be bad, it&#x27;s a matter of using it mindfully. This binary use&#x2F;don&#x27;t use mentality seems rather simplistic to me.

&quot;Or, the tendency to avoid fixing your unpleasant reality by doing something about it instead of participating in the fantasy world of social media.&quot;<p>The reality is that a lot of people don&#x27;t have the wherewithal to &quot;fix their unpleasant reality&quot;. Hence drugs and alcohol, daytime TV, and various other kinds of destructive escapes from reality exist. Social media is just the latest one.

I don&#x27;t have(and never have had) any social media accounts...ie facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, etc. The closest would be an HN account.<p>That said, could someone tell me what I might be missing? Ignorance is bliss, but it&#x27;s also ignorance - is there any critical information or happiness that everyone else [who uses social media] enjoys that I do not?

In reality, when people quit social media, they don&#x27;t start using their time better, they mostly shift their time into different time waster websites. For example, people quit using facebook for 2 hours a day just start skimming reddit for 2 hours a day. They aren&#x27;t going to start writing a book or bettering themselves in some way.

He is co-founder of a baby boy.<p>Those who are not, must be feeling unworthy now.<p>He is a professional &quot;book summarizer&quot; too.<p>I feel like a professional commentator now.

An interesting list, though I feel it omits the elephant in the room:<p>In becoming the largest single media platform ever, operating at fantastic scope, speed, and with the ability to selectively filter and focus attention, today&#x27;s social media platform monopolies have also become the heart of epistemic warfare.<p>This isn&#x27;t simply a room with a few friends, it is a substantial fraction of <i>everyone</i> (2--3 <i>billion-with-a-B</i> monthly average users) on the same place at more or less the same time. The Facebook logo is among the most reproduced and seen icons anywhere, rivaling the Cross, the Crescent, the Dollar, and the Yuan.<p>As my friend Wooze pointed out a few years ago:<p><i>Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.</i><p><i>We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we&#x27;ve now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5wg0hp&#x2F;when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5wg0hp&#x2F;when_ep...</a><p>This is far more the case than any lunchroom, cafe, street corner, agora, or meeting hall.<p><i>Assembled audiences have value, and that value is in manipulating them.</i> Usually not in their own interest. And usually by multiple different third parties, each with its own motives.<p><i>That</i> resulting dissonance is itself mind-warping in is effects. It also has profoundly dislocating and disruptive effects, in the worst possible way, on entire nations and cultures.<p>A related question is &quot;What makes an information regime oppressive vs. liberalising?&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6b32jo&#x2F;what_makes_an_information_regime_oppressive_vs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6b32jo&#x2F;what_ma...</a>

Quitting Facebook has been one of the most positive experiences of my life. I still use Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, but the mildly anonymous aspects of those platforms mean that I use them for what I want to use them for, not as an extension of my life.<p>HN is social media too, lest you forget.

Personally, I use social media as a way for inspiration. As an artist, I’m always curious about a new style or something I’ve never seen before. Social media does a good job curating it so I can explore my hobby more . Don’t feel that this is covered well here.

The biggest problem with twitter is low engagement. You can comment on popular stories and likely no one will see or engage at all. Same for sending direct messages or replying. Much of twitter is just a few thousand big accounts doing all the broadcasting.

I&#x27;ve also done the &quot;no-follow&quot; approach. I have a Twitter bookmark folder and a Facebook bookmark folder with bookmarks directly to people or groups I do want to check on. No news feed. Also no ads it turns out!

Social media allows lobbyist groups and foreign powers (not to mention domestic intelligence agencies) to continually modulate public discussion, opinion, and perception. The Overton Window is completely influenceable by these groups.<p>What a truly terrible idea.

I think the best way to quit social media is to make people more social in real life.

I was reluctant but, since quitting all traditional social media other than imageboards I feel like my online life is much less toxic. Which is ironic considering the type of verbal abuse one is to tolerate from said websites...

many of these are problems social media <i>on smart phones</i>. the convenience and presence of an internet device is an irresistible entrapment.

Quitting social media is more than unfollowing: it&#x27;s deleting your accounts on the social media services so you are uncontactable via them.

Social media is addictive but dangerous. I retire my username every couple of months or so. Internet points don&#x27;t matter.

It would be easier to make a list of why NOT TO QUIT social media, because it would be a much shorter (or even empty) list.

11 seems like &quot;I&#x27;m no longer addicted to smoking, but I do smoke sometimes&quot;.

Your site blocks read-only access via Tor with a CAPTCHA.

I didn’t know there was a reason to be on social media.

Is HN &quot;social media&quot; ?

Quit.<p>But does HN qualify as social media?

TL;DR<p>You don&#x27;t need a reason. Just quit.

Once the current regime let us go back to church, I deleted my Facebook. It&#x27;s much better at church. Firstly, they feed me. Secondly, I can say what I think without being censored.<p>It&#x27;s not even that people all agree with me at church. It&#x27;s that they treat you like a human being. Those who are unvaxxed are just some guy down the street, not someone who we are supposed to target in our hour of hate and wish death upon as the more uncivilized amongst the internet regularly do.<p>I feel sorry for those who have to substitute something so vile for something so wholesome.

I have quit all social media except for HN and Reddit.<p>Although on Reddit I just use a burner account for comments and I have a cron job that deletes all my comments&#x2F;submissions at 5PM every day so I&#x27;m not providing any value to the site. Has helped me wean off of just endless scrolling. I only use it about 15 minutes a day now.