I quit Social Media

I get addicted to social media quite easily. It doesn’t do me good, I tend to sink a lot of time into it.

I usually use only one network at a time. I have had accounts on:

• Facebook: because all my classmates were there
• Twitter: because people there were so funny
• App.net: because Tim Pritlove promoted it
• Reddit: (because many interesting communities live there)

Each of those was hard for me to quit.

I also tipped my toes into the Fediverse, a collection of decentralized social networks: GNU social (almost the same as Mastodon today) and Friendica (which I even hosted myself). While there were some very interesting communities there (mostly nerds and trans-people) I never got hooked enough to stay. The reason might be that those networks don’t work so hard to make you addicted to them, which is a good thing.

What I didn’t quit yet

I still watch a lot of Youtube, but I don’t “like”, “subscribe” or “comment” there, so it is not really a social medium for me, just a medium. I use it as a portal for video-podcasts. At some point I will probably have to reduce this, too.

I read a lot of Blogs (and similars) via my feedreader. The open web is just the best. And I don’t think I will ever want to stop that. My share of it is this blog you are reading right now.

I do use mail, messenging and phones. But those are not social media to me, I would call them social networks.

How to quit

From time to time I realize that I have a problem with an addictive website. And some time later I get a “It’s time to quit”-moment. What works for me then is quiting cold turkey, by doing some of those:

• Log out on every device
• Delete the account
• Delete the site from my browser history (so I don’t get suggestions when typing an url)
• Block the site via DNS
• Tell my wife/friends that I quit

This has worked well for me, and after a week or so I rarely feel the need to go back.