Stop the scroll: Muting everyone on social media can put you back in control

The first thing I did when I got my first smartphone this year was remove all of the pre-installed social media apps and turn off notifications for anything other than alarms, phone calls and texts.<p>I can access the web and email, but I usually don&#x27;t.<p>It would drive me insane having random interruptions every few minutes from my phone. I don&#x27;t see how anyone could live that way.<p>When I do use social media, I use my desktop computer, with a screen big enough for my failing vision, and I can usually scroll the days feed in less than 5 minutes each for email, twitter, fb, discord.<p>HN on the other hand, is a bit of an obsession.<p>[Edit - apps were pre-installed]

OR... delete your social media accounts and stop using it. Especially on the phone. I don&#x27;t use my phone for anything that would encourage me to scroll over and over.<p>Aside from the ringer (which is always set to vibrate), I disable notifications for every application. Even e-mail, and yes, WhatsApp&#x2F;text! If it&#x27;s important to require my attention in the short-term, they&#x27;ll call.. and if it&#x27;s an emergency, they&#x27;ll leave a voice message - of which I have notifications turned on. Most people won&#x27;t leave a voice message if it&#x27;s not that important.<p>In short, I don&#x27;t react to my phone. I use it, if I need to look something up- use the map, take a photo, listen to a song. If something requires me to react it, I either silence it (if it&#x27;s important) or uninstall it.

I&#x27;ve often used ignore on various forums&#x2F;etc to mostly adjust signal-to-noise. I&#x27;ll still unhide such posts periodically though, since I generally don&#x27;t have anything personally against such users and sometimes need context.<p>One site that handles this use case terribly though is Discord, where anyone ignored <i>by design</i> can discover they&#x27;ve been ignored by not being able to add emote reactions to posts of yours and more recently they&#x27;ve added an absurd viewport shake when doing so to make it even more obvious. When I became aware of this I un-ignored most users since I didn&#x27;t want anyone getting the wrong impression but it&#x27;d be nice to have more control over content seen without such social side effects.

it&#x27;s important to consider the potential drawbacks of this approach as well. By muting everyone, you may miss out on valuable information and perspectives that you might not have considered otherwise.

I am waiting for the ML-driven browser extension that can block a person&#x27;s entire existence. Images, references to, articles of, screenshots of tweets, videos of. Like they never even existed. That&#x27;d be the dream. And it&#x27;s actually something I would pay for.

Years ago, I changed my bookmark for Facebook to the Events page [0]. Just that helped a lot, because the page has the notifications &#x2F; messages jewels, but no feed; so getting to the feed requires waiting for FB to load, being dissatisfied by the jewel state, clicking on the feed, and then waiting for the feed to load.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;events&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;events&#x2F;</a>

That&#x27;s literally what I did in Facebook, but then it revealed what I already knew: it&#x27;s completely useless to me.<p>So I just kept NOT using it as usual!

Simpler way: just turn off notifications. Look at it when you have time and you want to, not because your phone beeps.<p>Ideally notifications would only be used when your work colleagues or family members are trying to reach you, not for some random person&#x27;s comment.

I put the phone on mute and vibration off a few years. That&#x27;s a best way for me to focus on what I am doing.<p>Mute everyone on social media is a good idea. But I prefer mute anything interruptive, when I want to check social media it still there.

I unfollowed everyone on Facebook and it was very effective at getting me to stop using the platform. Now I just keep it for occasional event invites and to look up old info on people I know. I check it every few months or so.

It is a nice idea. But I don&#x27;t believe Facebook actually follows through on letting you mute or unfollow people. Their posts will slowly creep back into the main timeline that you see.

For Facebook I installed the FBPurity.com web browser add-on. I set the feed to chronological and set it to not show things my friends like, share or comment on. Now all I see are things my friends actually post. Some of them never post. It now takes less than a minute to scroll through my friend&#x27;s posts each day. I also don&#x27;t have the FB app on my phone, just FB Messenger.

I’m being actively rate limited by HN even though I haven’t posted anything since I walked my pup and made dinner. Dang I’m not posting too fast! You slow down. Thanks!<p>Edit: this went through after I walked my pup again. We didn’t slow down any. We were really slow to begin with.<p>Edit 2: I had actually relevant thoughts, but I don’t have them on my pasteboard anymore because HN told me I was posting too fast so I went and walked for awhile with my pup.

If the goal is to mute everyone, then an alternative solution and more effective solution would seem to be sign out&#x2F;delete the myriad apps.<p>If you’re really concerned have a friend to set a random password on your accounts, etc<p>All this assuming that you have reasons that make deleting your account impossible (my wife’s university would organize things in FB for example)

Or try engaging with random people on the fediverse. Seems all of the people who used to write on tumblr and the YouTube comments migrated over there.<p>A few days there might make you swear off social media forever.

Did this years ago. Can’t recommend it enough.