Not quit, but I realised that I cannot spend the limited days of my life scrolling through posts or watching shitty videos. Did I enjoy it yes, but it became apparent it was a harmful habit when I tried to cut down and found it quite difficult at first, dopamine hits are enjoyable but it's just conditioning and brain chemicals
Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
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Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#12I need Facebook for Messenger, all of my contacts are there. It would be unwise to delete Facebook completely, which is why they still have so much market share.
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.
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#13Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over the past few years:
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.)
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#14Facebook is the only way that a lot of local organizations advertise their events, so if I'm not on Facebook I don't hear about things. So I'm on Facebook and check it most days. No app,no notifications, though.
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.
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#15I already have if you don’t count HN.
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?
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#16I did so years ago with the only exception being HN, as we cannot deactivate it our account nor delete our content...which is a sad thing in my humble opinion. No FaceBook, no LinkedIn, nothing; I have found my peace from narcissists and "successful" people that live in their fantasy world!
Hell yeah man! Join the club
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#17Yep; when it started becoming more about engagement and ad delivery than social networking.
I all but stopped using Facebook years ago and deleted it recently. I'm off all of the other platforms.
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#18Already did, but I still use forums like this site and Reddit in a mostly anonymous capacity. If you want to quit unfollow everyone and everything. It took time but one day my facebook feed just said "we don't have anything to show you.", and that was it, I was free.
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#19I already have if you don’t count HN. 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 Lin…
Social media has it's uses. For most people it's a way to kill time, which they usually have too much of. I don't see anything wrong with that.
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.
Re: Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?
#20I'm all in favor of media that is social, from my friends and family. It's the perverse incentives that drive the walled gardens that I strongly object to.
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 .