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As a sibling said, I'm not sure WhatsApp is "social media". To me (a very occasional user), it's just a messenger (which may come with strings attached since it belongs to facebook, but still). Am I missing something?

Other than that, on what do you think you'll miss out, especially since whatever you're looking at leaves you angry? As someone who never really got hooked into facebook nor twitter [0], I don't get the impression I have a harder time reaching people than before these were a thing. Yet, most of my peers seem to always need to check something on the phone, scroll whenever they get a second, etc.

The only "social media" I've used is Instagram, by "following" some photographers whose art I enjoyed. Maybe a month or so ago, it started showing me random new crap once I "caught up" with the people I follow. Short videos, tik-tok style, not related in any way to the content I follow. This really pissed me off, since it seemed so... useless. I get trying to get me "engaged", but maybe show me some content which you've already seen my browse for? If I wanted to see practically naked girls jumping up and down, I'd just go to some porn site. Needless to say, my time spent browsing Instagram practically vanished.

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[0] I've never "quit": I never got hooked in the first place, since they never managed not to bore me to tears in more than 2 minutes flat.

> I'm not sure WhatsApp is "social media"

Until Zuckerberg starts pushing "recommended oneway groupchats" or whatever I would not see WhatsApp as social media any-more than ICQ.

There's probably some linguistic confusion surrounding the word 'media'.

WhatsApp is without a doubt a medium for social activity, in the same way that telephone lines and the postal service are.

However 'media' has kind of stopped being the plural for 'medium' and is now a term on its own. This means you can interpret also social media to mean the social exchange of information media, though perhaps it is more accurate to consider them an extension of the other broadcast media as social media seem to be increasingly in the grips of media magnates who fill it with advertising.

Moreover, I'd say "social media" has also stopped being a term where the component words matter. I'd argue in today's society "social media" itself is a standalone noun referring to many-to-many internet platforms where you are able to see other's content without an active subscription (as opposed to messengers, RSS, etc).

I successfully quit Twitter. I used to be on it ~2 hours a day, now I haven't opened in for almost a year. Unfortunately that habit has been replaced by others and I still have FOMO from not being on Twitter when I see colleagues sharing Twitter links.

It's incredibly hard. The only thing that seems to work for me is to create a system to convince myself that I'm not missing out. For example, set aside a fixed 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours on a weekend, to go through the top links of your favorite social media state to satisfy the craving (I use RSS for that). That way at you can at least stop wasting time becoming distracted at random times during the day. Treat it like a cheat meal.

Another thing that has helped me cut some habits are reviews. After you spend a fixed hour on Twitter, ask yourself: What did I get out of this? Was it worth it? How did I feel before and after? Write it down in your journal. If you read your old entries week after week and they're all saying "I spent an hour on Twitter but I didn't feel like I got anything out of it" it makes it easier to quit.

Still, I can't help but feel that optimized social media feeds are the worst thing that has happened to our society in the last 10 years. Our brains haven't evolved to deal with this. And I don't think people have realized just how bad it is. Sure, we see news that social media is bad every day, but I don't think we as a society have truly understood the full implications. I think it's much worse than most think it is.

I'm on Twitter mostly out of morbid curiosity....and I've noticed since Elno took over that: -The unending doomscroll is now about 6 inches long -There are times where it's ad | ad | ad | content | ad | content -IF you look at what IS there and categorize the entries as positive (+) or negative (-) it looks like: - - - - - + - - + - -

It's much easier to see the patterns now.

I heavily curated FAcebook to get rid of any hint of politics. At the worst of the midterms, there was nothing of note there.

Mastodon is a blast of fresh air, I really like the vibe and people...and it's not big enough (on my instance) to overwhelm with content, which makes it easy to disengage.

So, am I using social media? Yeah. But it's not as poisonous when you're AWARE of the poison, and it makes it really easy to disengage.

We're not evolved to deal with it, but it IS learnable. Much like we weren't evolved to deal with pretty much ANYTHING in this modern age...yet here we are.

To me cutting off WhatsApp would be akin to canceling my phone line 10 years ago.

I also don’t see it a social media per se. Otherwise Apple Messages or SMS should also be considered one.

Everything you mention here is well understood psychology of addiction, attachment, social conditioning and intake management.

I always feel cheap to "plug" what I write (not great at marketing) but please, if you've time, read some of Digital Vegan which re-frames many of these digital harms through a metaphor of diet (here's a review [1]).

I am myself quite surprised at what a useful and powerful metaphor this has been, and the reported success rate amongst readers who message me to say they successfully beat their dependency and sense of subjugation to tech after reading. Hope you find a way out.

[1] https://techrights.org/2022/12/26/oliva-on-farnell-and-moody...

Yep. “You’re not curating your feed” is nonsense in 2022, and it has been for years. The only platform I’ve gotten close to this on is Instagram. Facebook and Twitter both exhibit the literally cancerous property of showing you what your contacts are engaging with. Once a social network does that, it’s basically game over unless you only connect with people who are similarly disciplined, which is just…untenable.

My Instagram feed is curated because it’s entirely for cat images and cat rescues, which for better or worse, there’s an over abundance of on the internet, so Instagram will never really need to start putting random depressing stuff on my feed.

Everything else I’m off of.

A necessary first step for my social media detox was deleting the apps. I started by only accessing them through the browser, so I wasn’t fully cut off, but I also didn’t have the fully curated experience that allows the social media platforms to really take over your senses.

I don't follow this argument. If you are following people whose engagements are triggering for you, surely that is on you? I follow ~300 people on Twitter and I only see content from them, or things they like.

I have no issues unfollowing overly political/negative/complaining people on Twitter (including what they 'like'), and my Twitter feed is full of people doing interesting things in the fields I'm interested in. Yes, sometimes this means you will need to stop following otherwise interesting people if they are net negative -- but I already do that IRL, so I don't see the issue.

I don't have any other social media, so I don't know how their algorithms fare, but Twitter can definitely be curated with little to no effort.

There are some twitter clients that allow you to follow other users without an account. I use Fritter on Android. It doesn't show ads and it only shows tweets and replies of those people that you actually follow directly.

Cutting out WhatsApp and losing connection with half of your family, vs cutting Twitter/Tiktok/Instagram and losing connection with random people on the internet.

In my opinion, that's the wrong way around.

I specifically have Telegram and WhatsApp to keep in touch with family & friends. I specifically don't use those other websites because of the reasons you mention.

  > and telling people to quit is unreasonable.

well, it's not :/. Just quit.

omg, why didn't I think of that?

https://i.redd.it/5tqpouqebvp11.jpg

My whole post is about how I've been trying, have tried, and how I've failed.

I'm 33 now, I've quit many other addictive things but this one seems to rope me back.

Just post something that will get your account suspended.

Have a friend change your password to something you don’t know.

:D

Curating Twitter is almost impossible. The most interesting accounts are also the ones that will occasionally tweet or retweet something that is likely to leave you angry, and after awhile you end up following enough of them that your feed will always have at least one person tweeting stuff that will just leave you feeling upset. My solution was to just walk away from the entire thing.

> I'm still on Instagram, I'm on tiktok, I'm on Twitter.

Tik Tok is another one that I just didn't see the utility in. Why would I want to watch a video of somebody being stupid? I just need to look around at people doing that in the normal walks of life.

You're really downplaying Tiktok. When it was starting up it was mostly a collection of teens dancing and making memes. Now there's content for everything made by a huge spectrum of people. Every person that relies on social media to maintain a brand needs to be on tiktok now. You scroll long enough and it'll feed you content hyper specific to your personality. I don't want to join Tiktok specifically because I know it'll show me things I enjoy but in a condensed form that will slowly rot away my attention span.

Doesn't Youtube provide the same utility?

TikTok has more variety (and a lot more garbage) because it's less severely overmoderated than Youtube.

I wish you the best.

I do pick up on the part about Twitter leaving you feeling angry. Is that due to conflict or politics or something? Do you like to feel angry? It’s just an observation but I think that feeling may be key

> I can't quit because I feel like I'll be out of the loop

The main insight is that FOMO can apply to "a normal life without social media" too ...

Have you tried quitting cold turkey?

Like going to delete your Twitter account right now?

Or a cold restart. You could delete your current accounts and start a new one. I’ve recently decided to try having an expiration on online identities like email addresses. I mean this account is nearing 15 years old. I’m thinking this is too long for most social networks.

I've been doing this with my Reddit account. After 12-15 months, I delete all content and the account and then start from zero.

Does it make you (money | happy)?

If not, don’t do it. Learned this from a podcast.

WhatsApp isn't social media

This is basically the social media addiction bargaining version of "I can't quit drinking, I will lose contact with all my friends at the bar!. Just have to accept that alcohol is part of society and social interaction."