[mudrockbestgirl]

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 Unfortunately that habit has been replaced by others and I still have FOMO from not being on Twitter when I see colleagues sharing Twitter links.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.

[Damogran6]

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.