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Comment by bckr | Hacker News Reader

I think this article is insightful, but I am compelled to short-circuit the conversation it would start, by offering a rude injunction:

Go touch grass.

Really, stop using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and their ilk. Restrict your use of media like Reddit.

OR you are doomed to be caught up in the mass emotional-intellectual toilet-circling that these platforms are a vessel for.

One of several quantum leaps in emotional vibrancy I've experienced over the last few years was refusing to scroll through Facebook anymore. It is right up there with not calling a toxic family member and taking an antidepressant.

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My cheap self-enforced act to stop using Facebook for a month:

Every time someone come up on your feed (which you watch constantly you crazy bastards), hide them for 30 days. Eventually, within 5 days, barely anyone is going to be on your feed. You'll get to see that rarely seen message

"You are all caught up for now"

And thanks for writing this. It's been a year and I need another small break

I just unfollow people. It started like that then I realised that I didn't care about any of it. Now my feeds are blank.

However I follow your approach for subreddits. Old Reddit lets you remove subreddits from /r/all.

There's only HN and a heavily filtered Reddit left. I checked Reddit while logged out yesterday, and it's just awful. The purge is working.

The only problem is when websites suggest content to fill the void.

You know, deleting your account is way more effective.

My (probably useless 2c) opinion is that this something like "cheating", in the sense of conceding defeat and inability to deal with it, in a similar sense to the saying "if you hate something, you are defeated by it".

The stronger way to deal with it is to work out a relationship with the medium that doesn't harm me, and leaves me access to it should that ever be useful someday. Otherwise you're only waiting for the next mega addictive thing (say, TikTok) to come round and facing the same problem all over.

As someone with addiction problems (particularly of the computer variety) I know it's easier said than done, but I see shades of the "abstinence instead of safe sex" argument in there.

Unless you need the account for a reason or another.

And, have you got any positive prescriptions to offer? The social institutions that Twitter (and, let's be honest, television before it) replaced have since atrophied, and there's not much of a society to return to. Or, at least, it would seem from a certain "impoverished" vantage point.

So, please, without mockery, offer some positive prescriptions? Once one has "touched grass," then where are they to go? Join a bowling league?

Join nicer (online) communities, and aggressively filter out the rest.

I'm down to Hacker News, a handful of subreddits, and literally nothing else. I forget about the toxic internet like I forgot about the internet without an ad blocker.

I don't think that most of it needs replacing. I meet friends and friends of friends, and occasionally strangers, and I get plenty of interesting interactions that way. Twitter and the like were never a substitute for that.

Sure thing.

I get most of my social interactions through alternative spirituality groups I belong to.

Bowling league sounds great. I'll be attending a runner's meet-up this week. Can I run? Barely, but I want to get better.

I have weekly phone calls with long distance friends.

I have dinner / go to concerts with a cousin who lives 45 minutes away about once a month.

I have a domestic partner.

There are a number of other social pursuits that I want to take up, like using coworking spaces or makerspaces, and starting to cultivate a network of people interested in coliving.

It's challenging. I put effort into it. It's always top of mind for me to be cultivating my social life. It's very much worth it.

Same.

It took working at a social media company on ad ranking to make the thing stick; I saw how much effort is going into putting stuff in front of my brain that is sorted in terms of the likelihood that I will react to it.

Never got on Facebook, fortunately. Quit Twitter last May. I'm still on Instagram because I get a lot of good recipes, exercise tips and underwater scenes - I guess it seems lot more positive for me than the others, but possibly that's because I've been careful about who/what I follow there.

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