I deleted all my social media 3 yrs ago and I hardcore regret it everyday

This person is just making things far more complicated than they need to be.

> cant make a new Facebook in 2023 and add all these old friends. Literally psychotic behavior.

There is nothing "psychotic" about signing up again and adding some old friends again. Many people leave social media and return when they feel more comfortable. They are the only thing blocking themselves from the social interaction they are missing.

> I live alone by choice with my cat and separate from my parents and all my siblings and yeah we all text but it’s still nice seeing social media posts from everyone. Maybe I’d feel less isolated. I also feel left out when they talk about some stuff they see.

Again they isolate themselves by choice then complain about isolation. There is nothing stopping them from socialising. Nobody has 'ghosted' them or excluded them from anything.

Seems to me like this is somebody that took things too far with a total cut of all social contact rather than just removing some of the more toxic elements of social media from their lives.

I don't use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok because I didn't enjoy the never ending stream of content but I still use reddit, Hacker News (obviously), Discord and Slack for keeping in touch with "online friends". You don't have to go to absolute zero for social media to cut out the majority of the toxic stuff but still get some of the benefits from it.

I am in the opposite boat. Deleted all my stuff never looked back. Best decision. This is probably the only social thing I read now; its like 5 minutes a day to scan the front page, then close it.

I still have discord, but I am super careful to make sure I only stay in channels when I need them and then immediately leave when I no longer have a use for it.

There is no "normal" way an individual can relate to these things(, or relate to the world at large). Social media is more a financially backed mind-altering alien invasion than some extension of human social life. And yet, people regularly shame each other or themselves about it. Or they provide prescriptive statements as if its about how many cups of water you should drink a day. Its all just a silly circle of normativity on top of a framework that just more or less sells and delivers ads.

Just kind of reflect on your impulse here to be mean to this person, or to poke holes in their story, show their hypocrisy. Why? Whats really at stake here? Is this really something like a moral failing? Do you counter them with a more normal way to be a person? It is precisely bad faith, in Sartre's schema, to act like you know, to forget the ineffable uncertainty of being human and to act like, actually, we are all users, and there are good ways to be one or not, or good places to be a user or not.

To find superiority at all in yourself for your particular consumption or social habits is, if you reflect honestly for a second, the truly shameful thing. We are all figuring it out.

Coincidentally, I was telling to some friends that I deleted all my social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit) years ago and is one of the best decisions I've ever made. Reason being mainly, that in a more or less subconscious way, social media (and internet in general might too) alters your perception of many things and create by default very bad habits. The most relevant for me are:

1. Intensification of tribalism.

2. Manipulates you making you to believe that certain things are a widely accepted trend or consensus.

3. Create, on the big scale, the habit of consuming short content, demolishing your attention span.

4. Makes you to dehumanize very easily people as what you get is a virtual representation of a human, and IMO, makes easy to become arrogant and discard opinions and depreciate the value of others.

5. Gives you a false expectation of reality (like traditional marketing but worse IMO)

Of course one could still be using social media and fight oneself against those things but I think:

1. There is a multi billion conglomerate of companies investing for making you to fall in some of the aforementioned points among others not mentioned.

2. There is no point. I consider that the value of social media is, in big part, just an enchantment we've fallen in. It has way less value than we think.

So, what I try to do these days is to force myself to consume content that requires certain cognitive effort I consider beneficial. Personally: books, play videogames, watch movies, play instrument, learn new languages, write code, do sports, focus in real people around me and learn from them etc. Always trying to analyze and think on what I am doing and focusing as much as possible.

No, I haven't become some kind of ascetic but I think that overall it has helped, a lot, with developing more empathy, humbleness, less anxious and stable in my ideas and my perception of the world surrounding me.

PS: Yes, I still use Hacker news that some might consider social media, but I do because the content, whether are comments or articles linked, has good quality and the mindset of the community is quite rational and common sense prevails most of the time.

I wonder how many people who feel so much better after deleting social media, used social media to be in contact with strangers and people they don’t like.

I’d never felt the need to delete my social media, mainly because it was a tool to stay in contact with friends, and people I care about, and stay up to date on events without having to personally ask all the time.

This doesn’t really work anymore, nowadays, as FB didn’t get enough engagement from this use case and destroyed it, but it was great while it lasted.

Facebook was so great back before they monetized it. About 7 years back, I loaded up some mobile version of Facebook intended for feature phones in developing countries. I don't recall what the url was, but it was really basic, and it just had a simple chronological timeline you could piece through. I went back to my years in college, and it was just friends saying hi, asking to hang out, talking about mutual interests. There were no news articles or public posts, effectively no memes, and zero outrage. I know these sorts of observations are nothing new on HN, but it left such a stark impression on me that I still remember it all these years later.

I delete my reddit account every 5 years or so, mostly because if someone really wants to, they can probably know everything about me if they look back enough, there's also the folks that look at your entire history trying to disprove something you said, which is beyond creepy and discards the idea of people changing their minds about something. Truly disgusting behavior. So I wipe it all and start anew, the only problem with it is the bookmarks, the "save" functionality is a hindrance, its unportable and at the end of the day if the account or the website closes, there is no way to determine if the url is still alive. while you can programatically do that with your bookmarks file, you cannot do it if its in the website.

I didn't delete my Facebook account, I just don't ever look at it. I find a certain subversive delight in knowing that people might be sending things to me that I just ignore. Deleting your social media presence is a strident, overt act.. signaling a type of desperation, IMO. If you really want exert an level of control (or perhaps a more humble 'f you'), stop looking their dumb, time-wasting pictures and posts. Like having booze in your house that you don't drink. I never spoke to most of 'my friends' anyway.. it's clearly more fraudulent to keep up the facade of interest. Social media has some utility (and I also realize I'm probably the minority here_, but it's gone way beyond that now is mostly mindless chatter, reduced to either bragging or complaining (two things I abhor). I'm not 17 anymore, and I really don't care what 'my friends are up to'. I already know.. nothing really.

That's because they're still on reddit. Need to wean off completely from social media addictions, not only halfway through, and reddit is even more toxic hivemindish than most other social medias. It's healthier for your mental health to have real life friends timelines with stupid posts and the zuch on your shoulder than it is dodging mass amount of downvotes on reddit for speaking honestly. Anything that will bring you back to your devices at a notification's notice is bad for your sanity. Control how you focus your attention through and through.

I soft quit just before the pandemic on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. Just said "Taking a break for awhile". No regrets and haven't been back.

This person gets to get outside. I don't know what to say - social media isn't great for those w/o friends or loners. Just makes you sad.

Maybe I'm weird in a way but I never saw the appeal of social media besides casually keeping in touch with friends. I have social media accounts but almost everyone I have added as a friend are people that I know in real life. I never feel the urge to check compulsively to see what they've posted.

Although it would be hypercritical in my part to not point out that I do waste a lot more time in websites like Reddit or Hacker News where I'm anonymous but still talk with others so it is a kind of social media. I guess it would be very difficult for me to go completely free of social media. Even though I rarely use Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

Facebook was a great way to keep in touch with friends that I don't really speak to anymore. Ex: People I went to college with 10 years ago. Now that FB is mostly unused, I have no idea what is happening to these people.

Whenever I read these I interpret it as reading about an alcoholic. They also have to call it quits completely and can't have a little buzz during social events or enjoy some wine, or find an interesting new craft beer, all because they couldn't cope with it. Regular people that keep it in check can enjoy it and not have to make a big deal about how they quit. Same with social media. If you use it regularly, don't spend all your day on it, post every detail of your life there and get your self worth from it, obviously it's better to use it.

I think the problem is basically the extremes, when they look at it, a lot of peoples social media use is pretty extreme if you consider how many hours they spend on it or how many times they check it a day, particularly with how much they check it during times they are having fun / with friends etc, i've been at many concerts and the usual complaint it that people are constantly taking photos and videos to post on social media, but lately i've seen it get even worse, where people are just doom scrolling during the show, during monologues of the artist, a song they are less interested etc.

So to me usage is already pretty 'extreme' by most people, the issue being that cutting it out completely is also 'extreme' considering how much of it is part of our world now. There are a lot of great things that i see, learn and get to experience through social media or at least the internet, things like hacker news, reddit etc are more valuable to me in this way, but it does enhance my actual life, because it's the core communication and marketing tool now, so to find out about new and interesting trends, it is needed in some way.

We need just to find a better relationship with it all, the problem is the tools are generally designed in such ways to avoid us from finding that better relationship, because that doesn't serve the service, they want the ad revenue and as much attention as possible.

For me that is reddit and Hacker news, I have instagram that i browse on occasion too, to keep up with a few peoples day/life, but then i avoid the rest like the plague, I still really need to cut down my usage of some of those though.

Facebook became totally unusable for me the minute they started to publicise your likes, comments and interactions all over the wall, broadcasted to everyone you know in your network.

Who wants to get involved in a political discussion, or have their more quirky hobbies and interests silently judged from afar by the work colleagues or elderly relatives among your facebook friends?

I deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, but I'm still here on HN. You don't have to quit all social media to get rid of the toxic sites. If I was on Reddit, I'd just sub to things like gardening and cute animal memes. If I was still into car clubs I'm sure I'd still be posting on the old car forums.

I was a part of the nosurf community at it's inception, for what little community there was (given that it was a group of people trying to convince themselves and one another to disengage from the online).

I've seen a handful of cases of people like the reddit OP who seemed to try to divorce themselves from the content mills, in spite of the fact that they had a healthy relationship with social media, and an internal drive for these little interactions with old acquaintances that facebook is great at fostering. It's not clear why some of these folks, including the OP, choose to fix something that's not a problem, but the outcome he received is largely the outcome that is intended.

The idea of divorcing yourself from social media is to achieve a bunch of subjective goals. Less time wasted, less distraction, less meaningless interactions etc., are all in the eye of the beholder.

I never posted anything to facebook. I deleted my accounts 5 years ago during all the Cambridge Analytica stories.

I honestly couldn't stand it before. I saw so much crap from "friends" that I wasn't interested in. My real friends never posted anything interesting because we already had private group chats or emails for anything funny or controversial. If I want to discuss religion or politics then I want to discuss it in a smaller group not on a public forum where random people I don't know that well try to get in a cheap shot.

I realized that stupid facebook posts and the ads were there to make me angry and interact with the platform.

I never bothered with twitter. Never made an account and only go there when I follow a link from another site. It just seems like a horrible way to communicate with such short sentences. The top comments always seem to be racist, sexist, or both and the inability to downvote makes me just leave the platform rather than interact with anyone there.

Instagram has turned into 3 ads for every post from a friend. Everyone else said the same thing and we all stopped posting there.

I've never looked at tiktok.

Now I have 2 Slack groups with friends and 2 Whatsapp groups. At least for now there are no ads there.

I love reddit because it is anonymous and I am the one who decides which subreddits to follow rather than some algorithm feeding me crap. I subscribe to about 200 subreddits and most of them are niche interests. I only spend about 5 minutes a day on the "popular" or "all" pages these days while I spend over an hour going through pages of my own subreddits that I love.

I like interacting with people in real life, my friends online, and random people online but I want to choose what I see.

As for all the losing your posts and pics, back it up first. I've got 100TB of data with photos older than me and files from 1991.

The idea that the COVID era is "easier" with social media is a fantasy.

When I dropped social media, I did lose a few friends. I stopped being invited to certain things. I don’t have as much to talk about with some people. Still worth it though. My brain rots so fast on socials.

Not just social media, i'm bad for watching 'self help' youtube content that actually doesn't add as much to my life is I would expect. I am not really sure about it all, because I am interested, want to learn and grow but then so much content is just filler and so much social media or reddit is mildly intreasting but not that great.

What is a good healthy way to use the internet and how do you establish that?

i left stackoverflow years ago. at the time i was one of the highest rated C++ answerers, but got fed up with the new company direction and insane moderation, but i haven't really missed it. i have recently rejoined just to add the odd comment on the C++ tag. several people have welcomed me back, so i don't really thing there would be a problem with this guy re-engaging.

edit: not intended to be specifically about SO

The issue OP describes seem to be the effect from them cutting social ties and not replacing them with new ones.

They basically voluntarily isolated themselves.

To be honest, dealing with isolation is I think the hardest thing for people under 20 to do since they crave social interactions and constant validation from their peers.

Unfortunately a lot of things in life -- that is if you're going good at them --require long periods of isolation, from hours to days. Reading, studying, homework, writing papers, research etc....

It really reads like a marketing psyop to convince people to not ditch the cash cows that are social media doom scrolling sites.

Deleting my social media accounts tangibly improved my life. It’s been many years now and I don’t care to look back at all. A nice side-effect was how much more productive I became (in a number of ways). It also made it much clearer who my real friends were and who truly cared about me. Zuck couldn’t pay me to get back on Facebook.

I dropped all social media in 2017. It was hard to let go, but I could no longer justify spending my time on it. I haven’t missed it at all. It just made me realise who my actual friends are: the ones who still gave me a phone call or a text and who remembered my birthday without FB telling them.

This guy would probably benefit from some therapy, it doesn’t sound like the lack of social media is the problem.

I hardcore regret it...but not enough to just open new accounts and re-add people?!

I never deleted my social accounts, but I never use them. The small groupchat with my close friends that was started pretty much on day one of the pandemic, though, is still going strong.

I deleted all my social media coming on 8 years ago and I only regret it when I see something on facebook marketplace and have to coordinate with a friend on facebook to contact someone.

Yeah, Reddit is one of those social media sites I've stopped using.

A great choice in my part.

Not gonna click through to see if he understands he's still posting on a social media site.

I used to use FB until 2015 when divisive news was pushed hard to increase interaction metrics. I wish we could go back in time to prevent news article sharing unless by DM.

You can always message people personally and I would say that will create a more deeper connection.

The problem is that they isolate themselves from others, not that they deleted social media.

Surprised about the FB thing, it has been as good as dead in the Eastern European country where I live when it comes to interactions with friends and family. No-one posts personal stuff on it anymore (and that's a good thing). I personally still do use it as a reddit-replacement, i.e. commenting on news items and the like.

I'm afraid she's going to be unhappy no matter the state of her social media.

I thought HN was better than upvoting the ramblings of random braindamaged redditors.

I hardcore don't give a fuck.

This has to be a troll

Really sad post.

The whole point of not using social media is to push you to actually meet people in real life. Form real connections instead of reading single sentence comments.

This guy is too scared to even make a new profile because he would have to send new friend requests to all of his "friends".