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Comment by hshdhdhj4444 | Hacker News Reader

I quit Facebook in the early to mid 2010s, well before social media became the ridiculously dystopian world it is today.

Completely coincidentally, I had quit smoking a few weeks before.

The feelings of loss, difficulty in sleeping, feeling that something was missing, and strong desire to get back to smoking/FB was almost exactly the same.

And once I got over the hump, the feelings of calm, relaxation, clarity of thought, etc were also similar.

It was then that I learnt, well before anyone really started talking about social media being harmful, that social media (or at least FB…I didn’t really get into any other social media until much later), was literally addictive and probably harmful.

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https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

In 2014, Facebook published a paper showing how they can manipulate users’ emotions with their news feed algorithm.

Facebook ran this test on 700k users without consent.

I deactivated my account the day I read that paper and never looked back.

I never really liked fb or any other big application that much, so kicking them after 2016 was not that bad, but I used to be heavy user or forums and kicking some of them felt pretty similar to kicking tobacco back in the day.

We are super social insane monkey creatures that get high on social interaction, which in many ways is a good thing, but can turn into toxic relationships towards family members or even towards a social media application. It is not very dissimilar how coin slot machines or casinos lure you into addiction. They use exactly the same means, therefore they should be regulated like gambling.

That's interesting. When I quit Facebook after years of heavy use, I felt no better or worse.

The News Feed killed the positive social interaction on the site, so it had essentially become a (very bad) news aggregator for me.

I wouldn’t say I felt better.

Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking.

A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc.

Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.

I quit Twitter/X about a month ago. Had the exact same feeling.

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