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I've completely quit social media except for LinkedIn, which I need for my work, and Reddit, which I selectively use for product recommendations and advice on my career and relationships. And also Twitter, through which I receive the latest research in my domain. And Instagram, which my girlfriend uses to send me memes and videos. Occasionally Facebook for event invitations. And this website.

But other than that I've totally quit.

The pressure to quit is so large I keep quitting daily
It's like looking in the mirror
What makes Hacker News a social media website?
Love the dedication to a ‘low-social-media’ life!
> “I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.”

This is the crux of the matter. Social media isn’t real; it’s a type of video game for adults.

The unreality fosters the growth of so many other things which are even less concerned with truth: fake news, engagement bait, daily outrages, chasing followers in a vain attempt to “build a personal brand.” The vacuousness of influencer culture has only accelerated these trends since Newport wrote this post.

In some sense, some of us already live online essentially through these social networks. Almost always this means some level of addiction, with concomitant real life consequences.

Is it really worth it?

Problem is that it is becoming a new reality. You can tune out, but you can't turn it off, and it (and society) will continue without it. And I say this as someone who thinks we should largely turn it off. Society will adapt, which means society is becoming something different.
I think you make valid points about the downsides of "influencer culture" and usage patterns of some forms of social media. BUT. I'm think the term "social media" is too broad to be useful in this kind of critique.

This conversation we're having is a bit meta, but it's also "real", to me. We both considered Cal Newport's stance, Matt Green shared some thoughts about it, and Chris Weekly responded to it. Those are real people interacting in a potentially useful way. Being "addicted" to ideas and conversations is not necessarily unhealthy. /$.02

Unfortunately, it can be worth it. Having a social media audience can be very valuable to entrepreneurs. Someone who lives online with a personal brand can replace tens of thousands of dollars in ad spend with a single tweet.

As someone who hasn't had a social media presence for most of my adult life, and happy about that, I'm now seeing the downsides. I don't have Ivy League connections like some of my peers. Social media may be the only way I could build a network like the one they cultivated in university.

I agree with this, but it's worth noting the quote is from a journalist/blogger who was not talking about social media. He was talking about keeping up with a 24 hour news cycle by any means. The problem here isn't specific to social media. It's with overwhelming information flow, the vast majority of which is not actionable to the person consuming it. People come down with a type of awareness FOMO such that they feel like they need to know all things as they happen, even though the information is incomplete, often wrong, misleading, and doesn't impact their everyday real lives in any way.

This is what Andrew Sullivan was getting at. People should worry themselves with information that actually concerns and impacts their real lives. All else is entertainment. If it stops being entertaining and starts being anxiety-inducing, stop consuming it.

> engagement bait, daily outrages,

I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).

Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.

Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.

That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.

Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.

We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.

My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.

So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.

And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.

I would rephrase it to “quit ad-based social media”. The incentives are perverse, there is an inherent conflict of interest in the business model and there is an intermediary between the user and information/community they want to participate in. This leads to most problems we see in legacy, ad-based, social media.

Most successful social circles are ones where there is a barrier to entry. In life we do not let everyone into the friend circle. Having a barrier to entry model may work well for an online community, although this remains to be seen. Were there any successful experiments with paid social media?

I won't advertise but I work for a company which holds a social media for cooking and recipes. Folks there are totally averse to those and based stuff.

It has been hard for the company. The owner decided the company will die before using ads (for many reasons). The paid plan is stupidly cheap and when people sign and use for a month they stick with the company for years.

But it is hard. Company laid off 80% of the team some time ago and is fighting to survive. I won't defend the owner or anyone, but things came to a point where people think they are not having consequences by giving infinite permission for being tracked all the time. They think if they are not logged they are not identified so they can't be exploited.

It sucks because no one appreciates that. Though I have my opinions about business and whatever I kinda appreciate for the company not running on money from ads and not collecting a single piece of user information which is not required for work.

I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call. Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.

I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.

I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.

Related:

Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38720087 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)

Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16697004 - March 2018 (262 comments)

Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714509 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)

Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998698 - Nov 2016 (548 comments)

The NYT piece those were about is https://web.archive.org/web/20171114021224/https://www.nytim.... Not the same as OP but same topic, author, year.

Quit social media if you cannot maintain a healthy relationship with it. But please do not just pull the plug because someone on the Internet told you it would improve your life. This is far from a guarantee.

I quit Facebook a few years back because of enough conversations on HN convincing me it would be a positive choice. It was not, and I regret it. I've since rejoined FB but my network of friends did not completely recover.

People here will tell you that FB friends you don't go out of your way to contact via not-FB methods aren't really friends. They are full of shit. That may be true for them.

(2016)

Especially important because most of his commentary focuses on the dominant social media paradigm of the time. Mastodon barely existed when this post went live, Mike Masnick was years from writing the paper that inspired Bluesky[0], and it would be strange if someone whose whole thing is getting away from social media kept up on new developments.

This post is an interesting historical artifact, but shouldn't be mistaken for contemporary commentary.

[0] https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

It's very enlightening to fast from social media for an extended period of time (say about a month). If you return after that, you can almost feel the shift in your head. It's something I've experienced first hand.
I quit any non small community social media a few years ago and it's been really nice. My tolerance for trolls and thinking with people on the Internet is has dropped away down and I think I'm better for it.

Certainly feels better

I quit social media, but the problem is that in the modern dating world a lot of people care whether you have an Instagram and that sort of thing. I truly hate social media, but I find myself considering remaking it just to improve my dating life. It's kind of a depressing situation, to be honest.
My almost post-social media life has been interesting. I ditched Twitter, came back to it briefly, then ditched it again when it was purchased because I found my mental health growing increasingly fragile with the constant outrage, the need to keep track of who the main character of the day was or risk the ire of your circle, and the increasing filtering of my timeline.

I quit Facebook, other than keeping an account for announcing major life events to the older people who were still on it, because I was frustrated that I never received any posts from family or close friends in the heavily filtered timeline, I kept receiving time-sensitive posts (say about a hurricane event) for weeks after the post was no longer relevant, and Meta's increasingly metastasized privacy practices.

I joined Mastodon and found a calm, down to earth, almost boring place. The decentralized nature of the platform certainly means there are some not-at-all boring parts of the Mastoverse, but it felt more like being in an old-style forum than anything else. I'm still there, though my participation isn't significant.

I tried Blue Sky because all my Twitter people were there ... and it was IMMEDIATELY like hitting a drug after being off it for a while. It was all about main characters and outrage.

For me, in hindsight, it was like sitting in front of a slot machine, feeding in quarters, waiting for one to win. And watching people who did win inevitably milkshake duck themselves out of favor. It was briefly an amazing, buzzy world to share both humor and excitement about whatever events you wanted, but that certainly didn't last.

I don't miss it.

Social media is not problematic if you engage with intent and use alternative sources to check claims. People unfortunate to never have been trained in Defense Against The Dark Arts of Propaganda and Manipulation are at risk but that's always been true, even when all media was of the printed sort. Basic critical analysis skills are vital to survival and mental health in this world.

By 'engage with intent' I just mean not being a passive absorber of the stream of content that's being promoted at whatever site, but instead always have some focus on a particular topic that interests you. Incidentally I notice many of the 'quit social media' stories are published in outlets like the NYTimes which would instead like you to be a passive, well-conditioned absorber of their content, and hence off their advertising stream.

The corporation is run for profit, it doesn't care about the collateral damage it may cause as long as it doesn't impact the bottom line.

Would love to hear Venkatesh Rao / Cal Newport discuss this at some point: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/against-waldenpondin...

Another related post: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...

From the second link:

> Tenured professors with status in a discipline can tune out the world and do "deep work" peers recognize as "important" before it is done (with accompanying ivory-tower/angels-on-pinhead risks).

> But a free agent, with no institutional safety net, no underwriting of exploratory expeditions by disciplinary consensus, and no research grants, cannot afford this luxury.

Where does one advertise these days if not social media? Where does one learn about local goings-on outside of their _immediate_ circle of family/close friends/colleagues if not social media?

With a small local business, social media gives an audience. If you're selling anything visually captivating, it performs well in these spaces. We sell cut flowers on the side, so…

I don't ask these questions out of support of Instagram or Facebook, but I stop in there regularly because I don't know to learn a little bit about the greater community around me. My life is busy enough with work/family.

The cost of all this is being exposed to a lot of attention bait and I honestly don't like how I feel using it sometimes. But we've built up the social media ecosystem as a pillar of society at this point.

I'm 36 and somehow I simply avoided social media for the most part. At least never used platforms like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc.

It all just seemed like a time waster and not really anything interesting.

I use sites like this of course, and I suppose that is some form of social media though.

It depends heavily on where you are in life and what demographics you belong to. If you're a guy in your 40s with a wife and kids and a white picket fence there's probably no harm in quitting. I was drawn to social media (and earlier forms, like forums and IRC) because I grew up in a backwards, repressive rural community and was outcasted in school and was able to find "my people" online. Online social communities are how a lot of people who are rejected by society due to disability, sexual orientation etc. get all of their positive social interaction from.
He states:

> What the market values is the ability to produce things that are rare and are valuable.

> what the market dismisses are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value. Well social media use is the epitome of an easy to replicate activity that does not produce a lot of value [...] by definition the market is not going to give those activieis a lot of value [...]."

Yet in the years since this TEDx talk we have seen the rise of influencer and streamer celebrities who have gained an immense amount of wealth and power.

Isn’t it on the decline yet?

Facebook is for boomers.

Twitter is weird and we all realised how pointless it is to spend time falling out on there.

Instagram feels a bit long in the tooth.

LinkedIn is a parody of itself.

Reddit feels like it’s growing but I think that avoids the worst of social media.

TikTok and YouTube shorts seem popular but aren’t really social media. It’s just time wasting junk.

All in all, social media feels like it peaked a while back.

So, should I join so that I can quit?

The coming of the current cluster fuck was clear decades ago. Anyone who wasn't enamored by meme illiteracy never took that train...

The elephant in the room for me is that the person who bought Twitter and keeps shitposting also keeps launching rockets into space and landing them back, among other things that fall into the category of “how the fuck are we going to pull this off?”

I don’t know who Cal is and I have no idea what Deep Work he’s done since he quit social media, but, best of luck to the lad.

Social media or news or tv/netflix/streaming influence your life alot. Just stop using it and you will feel much better.
I quit social media after the Snowden revelations.
I don't use any of facebook, instagram, LinkedIn, tiktok, X, bluesky, mastodon, snap, ... and it's not even hard. On the rare occasions I took a look at those I found them boring beyond believe. Even mastodon following people I am actually interested in feels like a 90% waste of time.
Social media is about exploiting gossip and social comparison to make money. It has been from the start a stupid habit with no redeeming qualities. However, after Zuck released Llamma and other AI models for free, i consider it a fair tax on stupidity that is helping to advance frontier technology
The funny think, this youtube video it is on YouTube which is a social media platform
Less "social" media, more social research paper / life hack resharing makes the world a better place.

PS: Always hide the best meme in endnote 14 so your fellow meme scientists know exactly where to find the real discovery.

Several of the comments here certainly have some superiority complex issues as well as what would appear isolation issues. You seem cynical towards a large majority of modern society. If you need a hug, I’m here.
I'm trying to learn to use RSS to replace some of my social media use. I recommend RSS Guard, it seems to be the best client around. Liferea and Thunderbird are good options, too.
I use social media merely for distraction. Over the years I gained nearly zero benefit from using it. Shallow connections, useful looking useless content.
I'd reckon the median user is not someone who has been "publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week" at any point of their life and that the most likely risk is mindless consumption rather than endless production. But just quit following random strangers on the Internet, keep social media as a way to maintain your irw network of relations, and you'll usually be alright.

Sure, then we can discuss about the inherent issues of the platforms (which are many), but first one has to exploit their own agency to the utmost degree.

Still I'm glad Mr. Newport has a comments section on his youtube videos. He doesn't always explain things that clearly.
I would say he is write about LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Meta and its associated gram's, threads and face... BUT - HN has a different vibe, this is a community with sharing knowledge and information - on HN, I never doom scroll - there is genuine interaction and useful content. To some extent X provides useful updates from the main AI labs, so it is knowing how to use it and not be used by it.
Someone needs to make a good Facebook groups/pages alternative. That'd make it easier for most.
I did, deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X). And it helped me a lot to gain back my inner peace. My meditation was deeper, more profound, I genuinely gained back my inner peace. The constant bombardement with posts made to boost the ego of people is toxic for the consumer of these images / texts.

But then, in the context of the Gaza conflict, I realized that X is a very good source to follow intellectuals, thinkers, journalits whom I wouldn't read otherwise in Germany, where anyone is vilified who even wears a Kefiyeh. When you see how our western media frames, justifies, whitewashes a conflict caracterised as a genocide by many scholars, we need other platforms to hear those voices.

Now this sounds like the alt right that wants its platforms. But hear me out. There are intellectuals who show the headlines, the framing, and you cannot help but think that Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", written in 1988, is more relevant than ever.

X has the capacity to show different perspectives and can be invaluable. But it's also a curse exploited by many. Russia, China, Iran, but also our allies. See this for instance[1].

[1] "The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide - National Security & Cyber - Haaretz" // https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2022-1...

I’m about 9 months off social media (not including Hackernews, if you consider that SM). I have no regrets whatsoever. I’m in my late 20’s so SM came into my sphere when I was around 16. I haven’t quite “grown up with it”, but it’s been an omnipresent force for most of my teenage and adult life.

> I am better at making time to catch up with the people I really care about, be that in-person or over WhatsApp. > When I do catch up with someone, I genuinely have no idea what’s been going on in their life and that makes the catch up a lot more enjoyable and engaging. I haven’t passively kept up to date on their every movement through Instagram stories or Tweets like some kind of ghostly stalker. The best example of this that I can give is that my partner and I got engaged to be married ~4 months ago. Nothing posted on SM, just WhatsApp messages to close friends and family. I get to keep reliving the joy of telling people and witnessing the ecstatic surprise and pure love on their faces each time I catch up with someone I haven’t seen for a while. > I am much more aware of just how much everyone uses their phones. Take a look around you. Sitting on the bus, waiting in a queue, riding an escalator, pissing at a urinal. Our minds are being constantly bombarbed with mostly useless, inane shite. Cat videos, stories of that person you went to school with 10 years ago doing stupid drunk things, misinformation from your scary uncle on Facebook etc. I let my mind wander more and it feels all the better for it.

There is only one I use: Orange Reddit (aka HackerNews).
> Quit Social Media

You can follow the author at https://x.com/profcalnewport .

Quit? Ban!
I quit social media over 10 years ago, already having been a conscientious objector to Facebook and other platforms, much to the confusion of my classmates who didn't understand my idiosyncratic positions on digital privacy, attention span, banality, and brainrot.

It's gotten to the point where I view the narcissism of the modern 21st century social media user the same way I would view a crack addict smoking a pipe out in public, unable to pry their hands away from their glowing plastic rectangles, swiping incessantly in the hopes of getting just another dose of sweet dopamine with every refresh, or some artificial symbol of social validation in the form of more likes and upvotes.

Somehow even in the wake of the Snowden revelations people are still ambling off of cliffs for fear of being left behind by the herd of lemmings. I feel vindicated as the years go on with every news story or opinion piece I read about (dissatisfaction with) the growing encroachment of surveillance capitalism, ad-tech and social media into our personal lives, and all for what? Some shitty memes and "influencers" peddling their garbage through thinly veiled advertisements?

When I am exposed to mainstream social media content I can't believe people subject themselves to the digital equivalent of ass-to-mouth that is the brainrot of the algorithmically driven social media feed. If "you are what you eat" were analogized to an information diet, most social media users would be consuming informational shit and consequently producing the same 140-byte thoughts or reciting the same 5-second memes.

If the attention economy is indeed a real concept, there is a premium for the ability to hold your concentration on something for more than half an hour and produce thoughts whose complexity is more than just a few bytes.