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Have you quit social media? Do you want to?
I am looking for feedback on an idea I'm writing an essay about.
This is shorter and more direct than my usual posts because I want to hear from you rather than share an essay or story. Please read to the end and give your input. Thanks!
Just before the pandemic in 2019, I read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now. At the time, I only had Facebook and Instagram but I scrolled both for hours each day.
By May of 2020, holed up for lockdown, I was a full-blown addict. This was even after curbing my decade-long habit of getting into arguments in comment sections.
One day, in a clumsy “rip the bandaid off” solution to my doomscrolling, I just deactivated both Facebook and Instagram. I told myself I’d stay off both for six months, but it felt so good it became more like two years.
By late 2022, I was back on both platforms but used them sparingly. Around that time, I joined my first Discord group to meet other writers. I also took an amazing online writing course that, for some reason, hammered into us that Twitter was an essential platform for writers. They argued we should be on it posting and replying to network and build an audience. So I joined Twitter and got to posting.
Intrigued about networking and distribution for my writing, I kept joining new platforms. As of July 2024, I am not “addicted” to any one platform like I was with Facebook circa 2012-2020. But I’m on over a dozen platforms that I check regularly. This is too much.
I am going to pare down my platforms. As I do this, I plan to reread Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now then write a review and reflection. In addition, I wanted to hear from you about your experience with and opinions on social media.
I have three questions I’d like to ask you about social media.
Feel free to answer any or all of these:
Which social media(s) do you use and why?
Have you ever quit social media? (Do you want to?)
Are there any other thoughts or opinions you have on social media you want to share?(For example which platforms are better than the others, or why people should or shouldn’t quit, etc.)
If you don’t want to comment here, feel free to reply via email and I’ll read them but keep them to myself.
To jumpstart the comments on this, I will share what I shared on Notes. I already shared about when and how and why I quit. These are the ~dozen Social Media platforms I check with some regularity, organized in order of how often they get checked:
1. Instagram - I keep this to read memes from my wife primarily, but always get distracted.
2. Reddit - Local news and niche topics
3. TikTok - Recipes and mindless scrolling
4. Twitter - This used to be networking and audience building but it's now mindless outrage scrolling
5. Substack Notes - Talking shit about writing
6. Warpcast - Just started using this and enjoy it but people on there talk about it as if it's going to implode any minute now
7. Discord - Communities around writing, AI art, drawing and other niche topics
8. Facebook - Seeing what people from high school and my parents' friends are doing
9. LinkedIn - Work, publicizing what we do at work
10. Campfire - Small Bets (entrepreneurship) community
11. Threads - Literally just to open the occasional interesting thread I scroll by on Instagram
12. Circle - Writing communities
...best decision i ever made was killing facebook a decade ago...quiet quitting twitter six months ago...substack might be next on the list sadly the notesification of it all is really trying...