What social media presence/internet experience are you looking to quit?

[vampiredazai]

I think everyone is always adjusting their relationship to the internet. There's an old joke from 60s about how everyone should drop a***, stare at a dollar bill, and ask "what is money?". I think you could say the same for the internet: what is the internet?
I was never a heavy user/poster on social media. Currently, I only have few accounts. One is Instagram (which I never use and have 0 posts on and follow/am followed only by a few IRL friends. The other is Substack which I have mixed-feelings about. There's a lot of literary activity there and really good writing but it has all the problems of all social media platforms like rage-baiting or trolling. It's disturbing to see people who claim to know better suddenly all engage in mob-behavior. Whenever a topic starts trending, I'll tend to mute it because the scaling effect distorts the discussion and tips into some ugly places. I prefer just getting email newsletters. I'm also on some anime/manga and fantasy and SF sites which are outside of the mainstream enough that they really have different ecosystems.
One of the biggest changes for me is that for over a year now I don't have data access on my iphone. I now pay $20 a month for just talk and text and don't use my phone really at all. I really treat it like a portable computer. I'll have it in my bag, take it out when I have WiFi access in order to check email or do something at that moment. I'll have books on it to read on the metro to and from work but I always carry a physical book to read as well.
The thing I notice the most now is how different public spaces feel. I'm just not on my phone but I look around and can see everyone scrolling their their feeds. I live in a major city too. So the noises from people's phones can be intense. I can see how much it has transformed society.
I love the internet and what it could/is capable of. But the more I'm out of it, the more I can see its damage. I feel like a recovering addict or something. Like you have to admit you have a problem before things can change. From there just build the life you want. The emergence of the indie web and my accidental discovery of it has been the most interesting thing I've seen online in awhile. Now I just want to learn CSS/HTML to build a site.

[vampiredazai]

i also like to have a video in the background when i fall asleep

For years I've needed something to fall asleep to

I recommend an album by the composer Max Richter called Sleep. It's an 8 1/2 hour album designed to be slept to. He consulted neuroscientists to understand what sleep is and how it functions as well as what sounds can help. Besides being a beautiful album, it's a very conscious effort by a major composer to do something original to help people with sleep issues. It's widely available on streaming platforms. For awhile I used it to help me through a rough time. I think knowing someone had put the time to do this and assembled first-class musicians to accomplish it made it more meaningful too. It's not some money-grab but a thought-out and crafted piece of art. He even did concerts where he and the musicians played it live all night as the audience slept.

[Pippa_the_Prius]

My personal goal recently is to cut down on streaming media, since I've expanded my physical media library so much in the past month or so. I have tons of DVDs of shows and movies to watch, but my blue ray player collects dust because most times it's easier to cast YouTube to my TV from my phone or watch something on Hulu.
I have so many DVDs I need a literal cabinet for them; I should watch them more often!!
Also learning to get offline more in general, do things that I enjoy without getting lost on my phone scrolling for hours without realizing. Literally feels like a video game trap, or something in a movie, but it's my phone and I willingly kind of let it do this to me everyday. 

[Skyweaver]

I've managed to regulate bsky and tumblr use by simply only using the following tabs (and occasionally curated fandom feeds). For tumblr in particular, I disabled infinite scroll. On Discord, I have a grand total of 3 (three) servers, all with a member count below 1000.

I've been having issues with Reddit and Youtube, however. I find myself drifting to one of the two and wasting too much time on either site. However, I'm working to regulate my Reddit use by using leechblock and only allowing a few "trusted" subreddits (i.e: small-medium-sized fandom subreddits). I've also installed an extension that forces reddit to the old reddit look so I have pagination. On Youtube, I only have an extension that removes recommendations and other distractions entirely. If anyone has some kind of extension or feature that reminds me to take a break after watching a video, let me know.

[Noah_S]

I was never an active poster on any of them. But I still ended up with the mindset from them, and I'm looking to recalibrate my brain. I'm relearning to respond to stuff that was posted even a few days ago because that's discouraged on social media. I'm breaking out of the box I put myself in when trying to please the algorithm the times when I did post something. I boxed myself into making digital art of animals, and it was mindblowing yesterday when I realized that I can put a traditional drawing of a ship on my website. With ship I mean boat, not characters I want to end up together. I complained about typecasting when Liam Neeson got stuck with only action movies, but I ended up typecasting myself for social media and then taking that into my website. I just disabled the module with links to my social media accounts because that's not where I want to direct people. And I added another page with texts about my pictures. Many of them ended up longer than would be allowed on social media. Next time my brain is in "write long" mode, I plan to write something about my other interests and publish that to continue breaking out of the box. And next time it's in "learn something new" mode, I'll look into RSS feeds.

[poesu]

google search/google chrome

I've gathered a few alternatives to Google search, including how to improve search experience overall. You might start with staying on Google but with uBlacklist add-on, which I provide lists for in the aforementioned link. It's an absolute life-safer! On top of that you can block AI summary element with uBlock Origin, it's an adblocker, but you can manually block anything with it.

The easiest browser to switch to from Google Chrome is Brave. It looks literally identical to Chrome, but with some perks, including privacy and an ability to turn off AI features.

Don't be hard on yourself! This is a difficult journey!


So, my own battle is that I constantly check YouTube and mindlessly scroll recommendations (and just FYI, I only watch YT on desktop). I click "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" all the time. YouTube doesn't even know what to recommend me anymore, only showing like 6 videos in "New to you" sometimes if it shows this tab at all. I refresh the page tens of times in hopes of seeing something. I now open YT kinda just for doing this and it's irritating. Steps I took to mitigate this issue:

• Bookmarking "Subscriptions" tap instead of home page
• Adding all creators I actually regularly watch to my web feed reader, so I don't visit the site for updates (but I still do…)
• Tried having animated background if what I seek is visual stimulation, so I can just minimize all programmes and look at it. Didn't help.
• Tried watching YT via FreeTube, which offers anonymous accounts and no recs, but the app died and I wasn't able to figure out why. It was good experience, if only short-lived.
• Turning off autoplay in the browser settings (I don't mean automatic jumping to the next video, I mean that when the page loads, video doesn't start playing until I click on it). Creates a point of friction. I do like this and it's genuinely helpful.

But a lot of it doesn't really help. My strategy for basically any kind of quitting is creating friction that also feels organic and makes you not want to engage in the first place. For example, increased load times (limiting cache, disabling pre-loading, etc). Timers and reminders just interrupt the flow and are easily dismissible, at least for me.

I don't actually want to quit YT entirely because I enjoy a lot of creators. But I don't know what the hell is this craving. I don't remember who said it and how exactly, but the gist was that infinite scrolling is so "addicting" (I don't really like this word in this context, but that's a topic for another day) is not that they provide satisfaction but the very opposite: You're never full, nourished, accomplished so you crave even more in hopes of finally getting the satisfaction…

sexual stuff

…which, to think of it now, reminds me of how if I start masturbating and get turned off, I can't really just abandon it because it feels so bad to not get anything out of it.

[close]

Any thoughts would be helpful cuz I don't really know how else can I increase friction. I'm NOT going to disable my adblocker after all, hahaha.