Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.