If you have quit social media, what was your last straw?

[alexela64]

This might be a hot take and you absolutely do not have to agree but for me it was social media's validation of performative activism.

Seeing the way that people in my life responded to the uprisings in 2020, followed by the genocide in Palestine, and subsequently Trump's election. Social media is the strongest tool of liberal reformist ideology because by pressing a few buttons, people can feel like they've made an impact; they are instead spreading information that may or may not be true, revealing their political/ideological standpoints to the feds and anyone caring to look, and oftentimes not caring about their immediate communities in favor of boosting international issues (not to say that's a bad thing, but as some people say, you fix your own house first -- especially in the US when your house *is* the problem.)

I already was never big on social media, as someone that was raised with open access to it, but I felt like i was drowning in a wave of carefully formatted canva infographics telling me why racism is not okay, actually.

[caracalled]

This might be a hot take and you absolutely do not have to agree but for me it was social media's validation of performative activism.

I actually feel similar and it was a big reason for me to leave, but it was a bit of a different situation for me!
I agree about the performative activism 100% and one of the huge changes I've seen since quitting was how much more informed I am in comparison? I have used the time and energy I have since quitting (since I'm not overwhelmed with other peoples hot takes and guilt-tripping anymore) for actually reading newspapers, essays and theory and I feel like the performative nature of online activism was actively keeping me from engaging with the topics in a high-quality manner (aside from the fact that it shifted what I see as activism - now I think of activism as things I do in my community in real life instead of what I post and I can see the tangible results of my efforts).


I think there were two major things I realized halfway down the journey (i had already deleted twitter and instagram) that I would say were the big reasons for my past (and then also future) leaving of social media:

• I could tell when someone (even someone I agree with) was getting all their information/ideas on tiktok and from youtube video essays and started to feel the dread of "oh, is this what I sound like? That's awful". It sounds very mean, and I feel a bit sorry for that, but i much prefer reading the actual texts instead of consuming the ideas derived from them chewed out in video form (realising that video essayists repackage texts that I can just... read myself? was really cool). Hand in hand with that also goes that a lot of the time the same talking points get handed around on social media, and I've been enjoying breaking out of that constraint!
• The realisation that most people on social media are shadowboxing their own algorithm, and losing. A lot of angry posts I (used to) see were just someone reacting to random noise of the algorithm. I like to say that they're fighting nonexistent people, groups so small they only exist in a sub niche of a sub niche of a niche, and therefor there's no reason to worry about the three people who believe whatever OP is arguing against, or about whether whatever OP is saying is true/applies to me/etc.

[Eunice]

This might be a hot take and you absolutely do not have to agree but for me it was social media's validation of performative activism.

Absolutely this! It's led to bullying. One has to show obvious support for the side that the prevailing opinion says is the "right" one, or else. I don't like it at all. Everyone should be able to express their own opinion in their own site without other people metaphorically yelling at them.

[lakes]

I tried a bunch of alternative social media after quitting Twitter and previously Tumblr.
I quit Tumblr for porn bots still being on the site while banning porn & also some personal stuff that had me overwhelmed. I quit Twitter a couple of months before Elon bought it because I was overwhelmed by people arguing all the time. I quit Bluesky & Mastodon because it reminded me a bit too much of Twitter, albeit with Bluesky being more liberal-coded & Mastodon being geekier. Plus I liked the #monsterdon tag event on Mastodon where people all live tweeted? tooted? the same b movie that had either monsters or aliens in it. But since I joined a political instance, there was a lot of infighting, Hot Takes^TM, etc.
With Pixelfed, I got bored. With Pinterest, I didn't really vibe with it and hated the algorithm blatantly messing with my search results. Plus they locked my account because I'd routinely log out when I was done & use it over a VPN. With Reddit, I used it for only 1 or 2 days but the community annoyed me. And with Wafrn (federated social media inspired by Tumblr), it seemed promising, but I had already gotten disillusioned with social media at this point. So I just quit.
Now the only social media I'm still on is Discord & mostly because I have friends from fandom spaces there. I still use Youtube, media loggers/review sites, and Peertube. But Youtube's only over open source apps that don't have as much of an algorithm and store my data locally and even then I'm reading more stuff than watching as of late.

[sunnyp4rk]

I was just tired of social media culture, and how much time I spent on different sites. Tumblr, Youtube and Discord are the only ones I use now, but tumblr is on thin ice. If they implement that age ID stuff for the US, I'm just going to leave.

[Dynaknights]

Superman (2025) made me want to actually try being a better person, so my bubbling resentment and apathy for social media boiled over.

It feels like everything's a falsehood of some sort; there's a shitload of bots for every one human on any given social media platform, people lie, instigate arguments, or play up incredibly personal situations for engagement, everything is for 'the bit' and anything taken seriously makes you a snowflake loser, debates are solely competitions with a winner and loser whose opinions will remain unchanged, videos are either AI or undisclosed ads, people only care about activism if it gets them engagement and money, everything that goes through social media is only permanent if it can be used to undermine and lash at someone, all of my data is being sold to fuck-knows-who, everything is too quick and too fast and too seamless and this is all fucking pointless so why should I bother wasting my time scrolling endlessly with seething envy and perpetually chasing something I will never attain when I can go outside and observe how the sunlight filters through trees with freshly grown leaves?

This is very rambly but when I graduated high school, I realized I had better things to do with my life and I won't be stuck in my nothing-burger city with no friends forever. I guess I just outgrew those digital spaces.

EDIT: Can't forget about the age verification and censorship.

[mortaki]

I was never big on social media to begin with. Youtube has always been my big thing, and I still watch it. Everything else typically bored me enough that I forgot about it. The only exception being Tumblr, which I no longer use all that often. I go there searching for new fanfic or graphics occasionally. I haven't scrolled on there... in a long time.

To me, it just... wasn't fun? I hate drama. I like to tell people I'm allergic to it. It feels like most social media is ALL drama. It's exhausting and uninteresting. To add to that, posting on social media feels really pointless. Why am I documenting my life for strangers? How do people become obsessed with this? That was the kind of mindset I had. There were simply many, many more interesting uses of my time. I literally couldn't comprehend the draw of it.

Because I was so outside of social media to begin with, I had a pretty objective view of what it did to the people around me. None of my classmates could survive a day without their phone. My sibing would spend hours wasting away on the couch, scrolling tiktok. My friends never quite learned how to interact with people in real life. I slowly saw the people around me get meaner, colder, callous. Suddenly, I was surrounded by adults my age who had never grown out of the black-or-white mentality where everything is simple and there are heroes and villains. It was sickening, in a way, and terribly sad. Before I knew it, I had moved from almost complete disinterest in social media to being generally against it. I refused to get tiktok or snapchat when those came out. I let my instagram die a natural death. I avoided facebook and twitter like the plague. Not because of any big coherent reason, but because I had watched those things core people out and leave them as lesser versions of themselves. I didn't want that; I refused to be that.

Even now, I don't really visit the youtube home page at all. I have an rss feed for all my most watched channels and I go to their new videos directly from there. Sometimes there are no new videos. I shrug and go do something else. I read, I write, I knit, I play video games, literally anything that feels more worthwhile than wasting away in a digital hell.

[rnottelovesowls]

because it's all fake. every last ounce of social media is fake. nothing on it is real. nothing matters. everyone is lying for stupid internet points to feel better about themselves because they have nothing better to do. they are so desperate for clout that they will ask chatGPT to generate something that isn't real and pretend to be talented, suffering, or whatever. i can't trust anyone. i don't know anyone. i don't know who they are as people. and they don't want to interact with anyone, unless it's to dunk on them for a spelling mistake. and chances are, there's no point in interacting with them, because what if they're actually racist, sexist, homophobic, or ableist, and so are their followers? good luck making any friends on these platforms. so why should i even bother?

yeah, why bother? one of my friends told me that if i wanted to "make it" as a professional artist, i have no choice but to become a content creator. i refuse; besides, all content creators seem to want to do is sell you a sham course, some crap from temu that you don't need, or a sketchy medical supplement that doesn't do anything. they lie to us constantly, and habitual users keep falling for the grift. they aren't even entertaining. is that what my friend wants me to be? i would sooner drink molten glass. because if everyone else is a content creator, than no one is. so why should i even bother?

yeah, why bother? i just know whatever i post there is going to be used by a grifter later to insult me because i disagree with his bad political takes, or my data is going to be sold to the highest bidder and used to train LLMs that nobody asked for. even if it's a photo of a family birthday party. i have no privacy, no personal space, and no boundaries. so why should i even bother?

why. should. i. EVEN. BOTHER?

[nexxlyte]

as someone who makes art, the takeover of ai and big corpos XD pretty simple. i also just cant handle stressing over numbers in general also as someone with heavy mental illness that it's just not!! good!! for me!! i used to spend hours staring at stats and optimizing my crap for the oh so holy algo that i gave up on LOL i like making crappy furry art. i do it for me, myself, and i.

[FinleyIsHere]

yeah, why bother? one of my friends told me that if i wanted to "make it" as a professional artist, i have no choice but to become a content creator.

can i add? its absolutely exhausting as an artist to be forced to use social media to even be ever so kindly GLANCED by the general public due to how social media is built, it aint for looking and admiring art its for bots to infest and everyone to be thrown at fist fights for pointless reasons or sometimes, no reason at all
im sick and tired of how we socialize in the modern day with social media especially tiktok, i LOATH how much it sucks you in a doomscroll where you forget your place and time as your thumb moves one direction and clicks on shiny buttons for the sake of it
i dont like wasting my time there so i just quit tiktok, sadly i havent quit twt and instagram because of having friends that use them so i only use them for messaging now

and rn im trying to read/play more as a person and do my responsibilities to keep myself from boredom

[sweetwana]

I realised recently that I was clinging on to Instagram as my final social media because I felt like without it, I would never be able to make connections outside the limited reach of my IRL life. I paused, and realised… heck, I’ve been on Instagram for at least a decade. Had I ever made a friend or meaningful connection there before? No. So what am I clinging to?

In some ways I feel like I was clinging to the ghost of what social media once was. Or at least what it promised. But nowadays it just feels like an endless array of billboards of people shouting for attention, never listening. That’s no environment for friendship.

So I’ve finally decided to exist on the internet on my own terms. I’m delighted that forum cultures like this still exist, and LOVE that it’s nothing but human interaction. My time on the indie web has brought more meaningful encounters than many years on many social media platforms combined. This is real 

[bloomingkiss]

First I thought there wasn't one last straw, but there was: my smartphone died. I was out of money, so I bought a long lasting Nokia. You know, one of those new builds of an old classic. That was about a year ago.

Only few minutes ago I realized, that it takes time to get rid of the addictive social media. Not in the form of apps (you can delete them in a minute), but of habit. Just today I was bored to death, really godawful boredom. And damn, I picked up a book. Haven't done that in ages. That made me realize how only recently I've gotten rid of the sickening addiction of mainstream social media. Earlier I'd have a smartphone screen locking my eyes to it's slot machine algorithm. Ding ding ding! Whirrrrrrrr, whizzzz, Bang! psssssh..... 

So it's been about a year. I found Mastodon, started pruning my habits out of instagram, only using it on laptop. Reddit was harder to leave, I still frequent one niche subreddit, that is important to my work. I think it's more important to kill the habit, not necessarily the accounts. But then I don't think myself strong enough to resist the urge to binge myself and stare at the abyss of a slot machine.

[MrsMoe]

I haven't technically quit social media altogether since I still use Tumblr, but I dropped Twitter completely due to the current state of the world and the rise of AI. My mental health was already in a terrible place due to the sheer amount of fuckery going on all over the world, but the SORA AI videos in early 2024 made me have to stop and completely drop everything. I feel like that was the moment where I was like "okay, if I have to see and hear about this shit every week, I'm going to be having daily mental breakdowns". To this day, I feel like I can't face the daily news cycle that other people brush through everyday, and that's why I avoid mainstream social media completely.

[fablefound]

i think the only platform i've officially "quit" per se would be twitter, and that's due to harassment i was receiving. not that i haven't been harassed on other websites (i have!) but they were really aggressive and, i have to give it to them, creative on the wretched bird site... 

like a few people have reported, unfortunately, a lot of real life is very super extremely online, which makes it hard to quit. i'm heavily involved in my local arts scene, and that means being active, sigh, on instagram in particular (and also occasionally tiktok). also, sometimes, certain platforms are useful for very specific things. like, i go to reddit for a lot of niche questions.

given these circumstances, i've gone something of a "harm reduction" route. all social media i use has one of these two limitations:

a) standard screentime restrictions and an automated downtime that locks the apps for a chunk of the day
or b) i use the app in my phone's browser, so it's not immediately on my home screen and also there's just a little more friction.

i'd love to be able to drop more of these pltforms. alas, for now i'm just making them harder to autopilot doomscroll on.