Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media? | Hacker News Reader

Have You Wanted to Quit Social Media?

36 points_v9nk45 comments

I'm curious, have you ever wanted to quit social media?

I 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?

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.

It has its advantages as you pointed out, but the issue is the torrent of garbage information it pours out. If it was possible to restrict your feed to only what you follows and have working filters, it would be great. But you don't.

And this amount of information on a singular person was only available if it was a roommate, coworker or a close friend. Which amounts to a small number of people. I don't think we were meant to deal with this.

While we also have a lot of information, interactions are starved. No real conversation is taking place. And it tends towards selfishness.

> To me the real enlightened view is to use social media as a tool while not letting it consume your life.

That's where the trouble starts. You don't have control when you use social media. By its very nature, it draws you in like a vortex. You can't get out.

I think it can depend on who's using it.

Personally, I live in a city with no natural community. I'm married but have no family here and only a couple acquaintances. I tried to quit Instagram a couple years ago but just ended up more isolated than I already am.

I think this type of situation is common for a lot of people. Social media is the glue that ties us to friends in distant places, which is why it's successful.

If you have actual community available to you quitting is much more doable.

I agree with you at some point.

I think the problem starts when you have no real life community. You are prey to the algorithms with nothing to balance them out.

You may be ok, but I know a few people who have been possessed by the algorithms and influencers. They have one thing in common, they live in isolation with no community.

Hot tip. also delete and create a new HN account often then you're not invested in the replies to your posts or how many upvotes you get

The points I get, but why replies? I thought the point of this site was conversation.

In addition I feel like an account here having a long history/high karma is somewhat unique versus other sites since some actions and features aren’t usable until you’ve passed certain thresholds. To me at least this is interesting to think about, but I also don’t have accounts in any platform besides this one, so I don’t know for certain what other places do.

I love this idea, but have to ask - why is your account 8 years old?

> I don’t watch or read the news either.

I could agree with everything you said except this. I believe it is important to have some source of news. Even if it is just reuters news or some conscious choice, one needs to be informed of certain events in daily life.

Ideally you read the news like you check the weather forecast.

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

Yes, but the fact that people don't respond to unsolicited door-knocking and pick up cold calls anymore prompt that I need social media as a way to stay in touch with others.

My Facebook account is only for the messenger and some local buy-and-sell groups.

My (private) Instagram account is for my friends.

My LinkedIn is for recruiters reaching out to me and contact my former managers for references. Former manager could've changed jobs so the old work email isn't any good anymore. A side effect is to research the companies and teams for my job interviews: Some recruiters did send me the LinkedIn profile of the interview panels.

Long lost friends and colleagues still have some way to contact me without knowing my phone and email. I don't have to proof myself through posting what I eat today and how excited about my work.

I really wish LinkedIn would stop trying to be a social network and would stick to being a professional network.

Word. So many people felt compelled to post and wrote meaningless gibberish on LinkedIn. See the subreddit r/LinkedInLunatics/.

Going 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.)

For those struggling with the above, I'd add one more step that I learnt here on HN - go to assistive settings and set your phone's screen to Black & White. On the iPhone, triple clicking the lock button will do this for you.

You would be amazed how much taking colour out of the equation lowers the addictiveness of the content. I guess the people that make poker/slot machines knew about this decades ago, but I think this one step helped me more than anything else.

I quit Facebook in 2017.

I quit Instagram in 2019.

I quit Twitter in 2022.

I quit Reddit in 2023.

I'm primarily on Mastodon and Threads at this point, but I soft-quit Threads recently because it was bad for my mental health.

I just don't think commercial social media is compatible with my brain at this point. The algorithms pull you in at first, but then they go sideways and you're addicted to garbage. It's like tabloid culture took over blogging. I hate it.

I quit Facebook and Twitter around 2010 or so. I quit Reddit maybe around 2018. I quit IRC in 2023. I haven't deleted my account on LinkedIn yet, but I haven't updated anything on there for a while now.

Reddit felt like an echo chamber. My biggest learning from combining social media and professional programmers is that in general most developers (90% or more) cannot measure things at all. Its the same in the real world too, but its just so much more noticeable online.

I did the same thing regarding Facebook and Twitter. Reddit largely around same time except for the occasional visit to some smaller subreddits. I would be interested to learn why you have quit IRC? I am thinking to become active in IRC channels sometime next year. Has something changed too big on there recently?

I spent most my time on IRC in JavaScript related channels. When I switched careers I chose to stop talking about JavaScript in my off hours. I just wanted to leave a bunch of nonsense behind and focus on other things.

I quit Facebook (and all others) like 5 years ago. I only have LinkedIn which I read maybe twice a month or once a week.

Sometimes (rarely) I think what it would be like to be able to make posts to bigger audience. But then I remember the algorithm and the reason it's there, to make you and Facebook closer, not me and my friends.

Thinking of my relationship for social media is like thinking those big decisions in life, out of curiosity, "What if I would've chosen stonemasonry?", as a fun exercise. But I'm never going back. Not as long as the rules and values are what they are now. Since they have not changed, I feel no reason to have it back.

Do I feel like I'm missing something? Yes, I'm certainly missing something, here and there. But in return I have free space in my system for something else.

Try for it, like for a month at first, see what you like in it and what not.

I'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 .

Already 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.

I never quit, but I dramatically reduced my usage, and generally changed how I interact with others online.

I am down to two subreddits that I visit by typing the URL in the address bar, and the orange site we all love. The other websites are write-only dumps where I interact with my website’s (very kind) followers. I don’t follow anyone and my feeds are literally empty. I use a Firefox extension to redirect from the feed to my notifications. I never tried TikTok or Instagram, and quitting the other hellsites was very easy post-covid; I just went outside.

Above all I just stopped engaging with bad faith comments. I just don’t get riled up by any of it anymore. I focus on positive interactions and lost interest in having the last word.

Interesting. You never had the need of doing social media marketing? I often wonder how would healthy relationship with social media look like if that kind of marketing is needed.

They are separate jobs done on separate accounts.

My business profile has an audience that I interact with. However I only go there if I have something to post, or to reply to interactions. Hence “write-only”.

I am not an influencer. My face is not on the internet. I am just a guy running a locally popular website, and I use social media to talk about the stuff I am working on for this website.

As much as everyone hates it, Facebook is the only social media site with an actual clear use case. If you drop out of general interest group pages, and join only pages with people you know in real life, mostly dedicated to planning events you'll attend in real life, Facebook is a mostly pleasant experience.

There's far too much advertising, of course, but I've developed some tricks to deal with that, too.

I was on Twitter very briefly. I'm experimenting intermittently with BlueSky and Mastodon. I'm mostly here, on Reddit, and at AskAManager.

What is the most impactful you get from AskAmanager?

AskAManager exists to be interesting (and occasionally helpful), not impactful.

Facebook 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.

I kind of did. I used to be fairly active on the Fediverse, until I got to join a small community on Discord. Now it feels like a Stammtisch, so a place I can just hop in and hang out with folks I know and I like. Sometimes we even get to actually meet irl, so it's real nice. I still have some "read-only" feeds like twitter, but that's about it.

I quit facebook 2 years ago; I never had accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Snap. I spend 5 minutes a day on Twitter and LinkedIn. Done like this, it’s ok.

I 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.

Yes, but it never worked. I once organically stopped using them without even thinking about it for around a year. This was the one year in my life when I had a reasonably rich social life. Therein lies the answer.

I did quit Facebook over 10 years ago. It is easy to know who is a friend now, because real friends have my phone number, or email, or other non-"social" apps/services to contact me on.

Just pull the Facebook plug. Don't keep Messenger either. It's great.

Yep; 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.

No. Because I never joined in the first place.

I don't think about quiting social media because it gets lonely but I do think about changing platforms occassionally

No, not at all. Hacker News is a great social media platform.

I quit facebook maybe seven years ago. I don't regret it one bit.

I joined Instagram because that was the only way to contact some friends. And progressively I get more and more into Instagram reels, which is tenacious, and bleeds into YouTube shorts, which is just the same thing but revenue for Google.

I'm annoyed that sharing memes is so fun to do with long-term, now distant (far away) friends.. we kick memes back and forth for a few months before one of us posts a larger life update: birth of a kid, marriage, job promotion, etc.

Reels are the only way I get a good chuckle with my mates now. And I don't like it.

I 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

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