My life after quitting social media

The biggest upside is that I'm completely disengaged with a lot of things people are angry about, because they aren't on my radar at all. In practice, I don't find that closely following breaking news is all that useful to me, since I'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.

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.

Twitter, Instagram, Hacker News, etc. are all attention sinks but I realized I wasn'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.

The joy I get from Twitter is being able to consume topics highly relevant to me, and I aggressively curate through blocking/muting, grooming followers, and interacting with very smart people in their respective fields.

The pain I get from Twitter is a feeling I'm never good enough. I make a good salary which pays for my entire family of four's well-being, but ... there'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 / wealth. Hm.

Some sample strategies to adopt:

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're bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet.

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're around your computer. Social networks really excel at this pattern of usage. You'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).

I am sure I am butchering some of his advice, so worth reading the book.

I used to think that this is not that bad, after all, I'm consuming actually good content, not silly stuff like in those other networks. But then I was shocked to see how much time I'm actually spending on these networks. This is easy to see in the "Digital Wellbeing" section of modern phones. It was hours, several each day.

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'm spending so much time on social media. It's consuming all my free time. I don't watch TV anymore, I rarely watch movies or read books. Most of my free time is being devoured by social media.

The key word here is "addiction". It doesn'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.

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's because most of this content is so unimportant that it doesn't stick in my brain. Other slower sources of dopamine aren't like this. A good movie or book leave you with something to remember. Social media rarely does.

I now understood that I have an addiction to social media. I have yet to overcome it though (after all, I'm here on HN). But at least I know that I have a problem.

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.

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't compare.. but I think I do it unconsciously.

I still have social media accounts. I posted a last message once I knew I wasn't going back to social media.

We are slowly forgetting how to interact in the real world.

This is the key. Either you use technology intentionally or it uses you. You don't have to quit altogether, but it's important that you use it as a tool.

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.

[0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful

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.

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.

Product designers don'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.

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/method for success on them, and that's a massive failure to the different reasons users use them.

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.

It'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.

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.

Formally, I was bit more active on Facebook. I still have an account (for Oculus, mostly) but I've scaled down my presence on Facebook a lot. I found signal to noise ratio not great on Facebook. There's maybe one in fifty or so post that worthwhile to look at.

I'm still fairly active on Twitter and Discord -- mainly because I'm so involved in VR stuff, and that's where a lot of people socialize and coordinate projects. (at least for Japanese people that I deal with a lot.)

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'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's easy to pick out things that matter the most for me.

This also could be coming from that I'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 ("following" someone without friending) but I don't think this is primary use case on Facebook, making it fairly useless.

There's also a flood of people's ideas/works/projects (Hackaday). I guess having personal goals is nice to pursue/not compare against.

As they say talk is easy

I used to be active on FB and unfortunately I started to post like crazy/cringe things on there, thankfully I became self aware/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/acquaintances from 20 yrs ago) trying to get to know me/ask me for money (people from a third world country).

I'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's the thing it's captivating/paralyzing the few seconds of media constantly changing (scrolling memes). But on the days when my brain doesn't function anymore, this low effort content is nice to pass the time till I fall asleep/ready to function again.

I want to get back into the groove again, isolate myself, pursue something with time. There's also that sense of being a producer vs. being an audience like the person making the videos on YT vs. the people commenting.

I wonder as well if there'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'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've met several of them in person now - but I'd be losing a huge channel of communication with them if I went dark on social media.

Which, when worded like that, almost sounds like they're trapping me on there, but I also have no desire to quit. I'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't spend hours just scrolling, and I don't follow people who say things that will only make my day worse. I don'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.

The comparison to cigarettes and alcohol is ridiculous in my opinion. I don't buy the premise that social media, by default and for most people, makes your life worse. Maybe I'm just the exception? I have no idea.

You should only see messages and notifications when you specifically choose to open the app.

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's still strongly what the site is.

Pinterest is probably the least interactive social media platform in terms of communication between people, but it's probably the most useful, even if it's nothing but a collection of bookmarks.

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.

Plenty of research proving the link between anxiety/depression and news consumption. What is there to gain by watching the news anyways...

If I want to find out more about something, i'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.

> 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.

Hacker News and soemtimes Reddit is all I visit.

I did feel better after quitting Twitter, seeing as what an rage fest it was

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?

EDIT: To be clear, any addictive substance is a bad choice. Please entirely disregard this analogy in that sense.

You know, I think we'd all be better off if everyone took a break from that one for a year or two.

You're not really quitting if you still keep all your accounts. It's like stopping drinking but leaving a bottle of whiskey in the cupboard just in case.