What it’s like to have a social media detox

Honestly, it's very difficult to cut social media.

We like to tell ourselves that those who managed to quit (and are informing us of how bad it is) are being snobs or acting superior: but the truth is unfortunately that we are just feeling defensive of our inability cut the habit.

I managed to get off of facebook and my mental health improved greatly, enough that I actually notice it. However, that was insanely hard and I did it years ago... and to this day I get tempted to go back.

I'm still on Instagram, I'm on tiktok, I'm on Twitter.

Twitter in particular always leaves me angry when I close it: people keep telling me that it's my fault, that I'm using the tool wrong, that I don't curate my feed enough.

I don't care, the truth is I can't quit because I feel like I'll be out of the loop, that people will not be able to reach me and I'll lose out on being a member of society.

For example: I lost connection with half of my family when I deleted whatsapp.

At some point we have to recognise that we've transitioned the majority of communication to these platforms: and telling people to quit is unreasonable.

I say this as a person who has tried, I recognise it is hard, I even believe it to be _necessary_ and even I can't do it.

I just wish FaceBook was presented to me like HackerNews:

  - My Favorite Group is meeting next week at a local restaurant
  - My Neighbor is on yet another amazing trip with his perfect family
  - My old classmate found a preachy article that he wants to share
  - etc.

I crave the connection, but there is such a thin line between that and bragging. I love it at a party when I ask what someone has been up to and they have an interesting response. I would hate if that same person just walked up in my face and said, "I went to Aruba, a Paul McCartney Concert, and that new trendy restaurant in town". Then I also hate that I feel that way.

I could do a better job of self moderating if the presentation wasn't so intentionally in my face.

I got off Instagram and Facebook about 2 years ago and never got on Tik-Tok and I can safely say it was one of the best choices I ever made. I am still on Twitter which I check about once every few days for about 10 minutes.

I realized how my peers (umivesity students) are affected by social media, most of them are endlessly circling instagram and tik-tok every time there is a spare second. Once I got off I discovered how much time it frees up for thinking and/or doing other activities. I get the feeling that people are losing the joy of being alone with one's thoughts. The hard part of being off social media is the fact that it is such a central part of our social interactions, sometimes I feel "out of the loop" and I still get A LOT of weird looks when I say to people that I am off social media.

All in all I am still convinced that being off social media is a net positive and I definitely advise people to try and see how it works out for them.

Social media has taught us that some human group dynamics work at small scale but not at large scale. At large scale they have a much more sinister effect on society. One of these seems to be shame. Social media creates purity spirals, driven by fear of public shame. These spirals lead us to highly unethical places where not only are individual lives destroyed, but the progress of humanity is held back by kneejerk thinking, dogma and puritanism.

It's great that more and more people are starting to question whether social media is having an overall positive or negative affect on their own mental health. I'd like us to recognise, discuss, and combat, some of the wider problems that social media have brought, and how they're degrading to society as a whole.

We often forget that we are easily scared mammals that love gossip from neighboring tribes.

The Internet broke the information firewall between nations. Today we just need to watch the TV for 45 minutes and to get an unhealthy dose of death and misery across the planet. The same thing goes with just about every news website.

Social media not only deliver this information to your front door, it also carries the other reader's comments that too often comes in forms of outrage, disgust, sadness, which then breeds more negative feelings.

It pains me to see a friend of mine constantly, just forever, in a depressed state. I do realise of course that social media isn't the only, or even probable, cause of depression in the first place but god damn does it keep you there!

Constantly getting wound up over rage bait material. The people posting these things literally did it that way so that you have a passionate response and engage ffs! Anger is easier to manufacture than happiness and you fall for it every time!

I used to call it as I saw it whenever they tried to share the rage with me but I realised all that was doing was making them dislike talking to me. At least the attempts to share the rage with me stopped.

Pull the thorn out of your brain and you might not be so pissed off and miserable all the time!

It's great to see that some people have experienced the same thing I have.

I have deleted Facebook and Instagram 4 years ago. Best decision I ever made. As @smeej said, there's benefits to it, but there's too many downsides to it so in the end, for me, it's definitely not worth it. Have also done the same thing with mainstream media, television and streaming services (Netflix & co). Instead I focus on reading books or blogs that I am really interested in, I take time to write, take notes, think, spend time with my loved ones and pursuing hobbies.

I'm sure I do not even need to elaborate on the privacy aspect of all the (mainstream) social media apps ...

Also, I will be transitioning from Whatsapp to Threema in the next few weeks. People ask themselves "how to", when you have friends, groups or whatever in Whatsapp. At one point, you need to take a decision. Your well-being and mental health and/or privacy or being "mainstream" (or whatever term fits inside the quotes). I personally do not care (as I am a privacy advocate). I will notify everybody and then I will move on. There's still other ways they can contact me if needed and they do not want to ditch whatsapp, and tbh, I am not asking anybody to do it. I somehow think that the better way is to lead by your actions. So I will try my best.

There is a way out. I'm not saying everybody should quit, but everybody should assess the impacts all of it has in their own life. I'm also thinking it might be important for us to realize this pretty quickly, because in the end, we might create a system that resembles the one they have in China, i.e. you do everything from your smartphone and you're tracked 24/7.

For e.g. a poll in Germany found that 23% of 18-30 years think that it might be good to have a social credit system [1] (this tendency is up around 30-40% in comparison to the same poll a few years back). This is scary. And imho, social media is greatly contributing to it, because the main point in social media is to hook people, i.e. providing addictive dopamine shots.

Anyone who has dropped social media and looks around notices that most of social media users are completely addicted and zoned out of (real - [whatever this is supposed to mean]) life.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/d4i6ac/20_of_germa...

I deleted all social media over the span from 2016 to 2019, and after an short period of actively missing it, I don't even think about it anymore, unless the topic comes up as one of societal concern, or in connection with my kids. Phones are still distracting without social media, but materially less so. Being off social media has not just been a net positive, it is almost an unmitigated positive. The social connection it promises to provide is illusory, and it gets in the way of actual social interactions. It is sad to see people who obviously know each other sitting next to each other while staring at their phones, many of them presumable looking at social media. I see it among young people at my kids' events, among my social set, and especially among other families out to dinner.

The harm it appears to be causing to kids is my main concern, given social pressure to do what other kids are doing. Banning communication platforms for kids would be hard to implement in practice. A good starting point would be to ban phones from K-12 schools. They are raising a generation of kids with really bad habits and poorly developed social skills, attention spans, and creativity.

This is why I hope Elon does burn Twitter to the ground, whether or not he means to.

On net, I believe it makes the world worse. Even if there are some who benefit from it, I think it's at the expense of far too many other people to be worth the cost.

I've been getting back into social media via Mastodon.

Social media never had the hold on me that it did for some of the people interviewed in that article, but I had stopped checking Facebook and Twitter a few years ago, largely for the negativity and argumentativeness I felt it bringing out. I don't know if that's due to algorithms designed to maximize engagement, or if it's just human nature. If it's the former, then Mastodon may offer a path to the benefits of social media without optimizing for addiction.

Mastodon currently has nowhere near the reach of Facebook or Twitter. Maybe it never will. But in the meantime I'm enjoying following interesting people on Mastodon and the generally positive discussions I've seen there. Curation is certainly required since there's no algorithm making an effort to hook you in.

What is it that attracts people to social media? Ever since facebook started it seemed full of people self-promoting which made it look sleazy . Things haven't changed since , it 's just that now it has become normalized to be sleazy. What is it that attracts people to social media?

It's a good idea to give up the Grauniad too for better health

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

I've gone years without social media at a time and now I've finally learned to just balance it better.

- On Facebook, I heavily scrutinize the friends I accept and use the "hide" button judiciously. I also only check it about once a week, max. I do find value in Facebook groups and Facebook's event scheduling features. As someone else mentioned, I wish there was a way to tune Facebook to a more community-driven view than whatever trash they want you to see to drive max "engagement" (see: conflict).

- On Instagram, I just don't see much value in it. I have the account so I can authenticate when I need to.

- TikTok, I just enjoy. The interesting thing is the "social" aspect of TikTok is off-platform for me - I generally share TikToks via text message or show my phone in person. I am a little creeped out by how addictive it is, but for right now I'm ok with it.

- Twitter, I see value in as a news site but the social aspect just never caught on for me. It all feels very "extroverted".

I do agree with the idea that, largely, social media is toxic and we'd be better off without it. But that could also be said about much of the Internet and mainstream media at this point.

Like what I said yesterday, the only solution is to delete your social media accounts. [0]

The solution is obvious but perhaps the digital crack / cocaine is so addictive to many, I don't think people have the guts to delete their accounts let alone avoid the site in the first place.

Until you are off of social media, then you can see that you are not missing out on anything. If celebrities can do that, what is your excuse?

The mistake one can do is to open another account or attempt to replace it with another, which solves absolutely nothing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34161859

I deleted all my social media 5 months ago, and I feel amazing. I didn't think I would be able to do it, but after all this time without it, I almost forget that Instagram and Snapchat are a thing. I no longer see the selfies of people who bullied me in high school every day. I no longer feel like every experience and accomplishment needs to be milked to boost my reputation to my peers via social media. It's so freeing. And the amount of extra free time I have now is great too

I bailed on all social media some five years ago. The most shocking consequence was how interested I became in people when I saw them in person. I had questions about their lives, the careers, family, activities and more. I suddenly didn't know everything about a person and had to ask.

This post reminded me I haven't looked at Facebook for a month or so (the frequency dropped hard after I stopped doing it every day). I saw about 5 ads in 3 min, reported 2 of them for misleading content. Nice. See you in a month or so (for some updates from my brother mostly).

Been at this for 6 years and counting.

No, HN is not social media - it's a forum.

I've never seen the point of Instagram so don't really use it. But Twitter is a garbage dump of toxicity that has been done a favor by The Musk buying and destroying it.

Twitter and other social networks have rules against hate speech, but their algorithms do everything they can to provoke their users to express hate speech.

Some people have real problems, like PTSD from wars where real people really die.

Anyone who equates social media to that is being either weak, or unserious, or simply incapable of dealing with life. People need to get a grip.

Remember that anything you feel from a social media interaction is self-inflicted -- it is your own reaction to what you saw.

Going to give everyone some frank advice.

Instagram and TikTok - Delete this nonsense if you have any self respect. Why would you, a grown adult, be engaging with a platform where people share information via frivolous pictures and video clips.

Facebook - Yes you should have a Facebook account, and you should use it to stay in touch and up to date with friends and family. You should log in every few days and “like” some posts, give people a little bit of validation which they’ll appreciate. Occasionally post a holiday snap or a funny anecdote.

Whatsapp - women probably should not join whatsapp groups (except immediate family), but it is a good medium for banter among male friends.

Twitter - It’s reasonable to spend a lot of time reading Twitter, given the quality of content and its primacy in global discourse. You must disable “media preview” so that it’s text-only by default. Your account should be anonymous, or at least, not obviously associated with your real name and real identity, given that it’s public by default. In general it’s a mistake to become too invested in your online persona - I suspect most social media addicts make this mistake. Contribute sparingly. Forget “the algorithm” - carefully curate your feed and unfollow anyone with a bad signal-to-noise ratio, or who tweets excessively.