With all the recent developments in the US, I started doomscrolling reddit about a month ago. It’s clearly affected me emotionally.
Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.
It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.
You know what worked for me to get rid of Facebook? I turned it into a chore and eventually broke it.
When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth.
I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages.
Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry.
I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.
Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.
It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.