Comment by hedayet
1 day ago
I used to spend 4+ hours a day glued to Facebook. Last November I hit a tipping point and quit social media altogether:
Facebook: deactivated Twitter: deleted my account altogether LinkedIn: removed the app—now I only post and check messages via desktop with a news-feed eradicator Google + Chrome + Youtube on mobile: deleted. now I just use Safari in incognito mode.
Once the apps were no longer at my fingertips, quitting was surprisingly easy. I don’t miss them at all and I’m enjoying life much more.
As for HN, I browse only sporadically—and it’s never felt addictive to me anyway.
A tip is to also have Leechblock on Firefox mobile such that you can't easily cheat.
I realized I had this muscle memory vising some detrimental sites in a loop so I blocked them.
Individual quitting could be a bad solution for the systemic effects of social media though, if it leaves the remaining population of social media users even more radicalized. (I'm assuming that individual quitters tend to be more level-headed than the average user. If you self-assess as being high-risk for radicalization, then yeah I support individual quitting in your particular case.)