In my humble opinion, the way modern social media is being used can’t be more toxic. We don’t really engage, have fun, or learn. You waste hours of your life doing nothing but scroll through an endless stream of meaningless content. Human lives should be wasted on nothing like this. I won’t be talking about why to leave, you are here because you already want to leave.

Why it’s so hard to leave

It is no secret that social media companies improve their products every single day. A part of this improvement is the time consumed on their platform, which results in the countless hours the average social media user waste on these places. Their goal is to make you always use their product, no matter your mental state. You are happy? Let’s share your happiness with the world! Sad? Let’s browse whatever may make you happy! And the list goes on. We are weak humans with powerful lusts controlling us against huge corporates searching for everything in human nature to exploit it for their benefit, which is, unfortunately, is harmful to us in this case.

What we should do

The approach I use depends on the fundamental idea that humans have no self-control. The only thing that may prevent us from harming ourselves is how hard it is. Thus, we shouldn’t try to stop using social media; we should make every social media platform we use unusable. The notion of having willpower that could move the mountains is — more often than not — a fantasy. Humans weren’t created to do the hardest thing in front of them, quite the opposite, the easiest possible thing they could think of. Conserving energy was the way to go for survival for cavemen, so we were created to choose the path that requires the least amount of energy. However, modern life requires a lot of energy wasted on things that cavemen are were not used to, and here the conflict arises between our conscious mind and our primal brain.

Fortunately, modern humans have many ways to surpass our biological limits, and our struggle with self-control is no exception; I would recommend the book that I am currently reading Atomic Habits since it tackles this aspect of human nature heavily. A rule of thumb for modern humans, who seem to be disciplined, is eliminating whatever stands in their way. We can’t just have temptations hanging onto our eyes and ignore them. Therefore, we just have to make it impossible to use social media during our day-to-day life.

We can’t delete them

It is not like corporates don’t know that they make our lives worse. They know, and they know some will try to stop using their platforms, so they made it harder to stop using their platform. Every lost user means less money. If you try deactivating your Facebook account before, you would notice it is pretty much useless, no change actually happened since you can as easily open it again. Even the complete deletion of your account needs 30 days to be done, which is a rather long time for a decision like this. The same for every other major social media platform. They can’t lose you, the dear valuable user.

Additionally, many people have some legit uses for social media. It is just sometimes unrepeatable. In these cases, just the idea of deleting them is not practical. Maybe you tried plugins like News Feed Eradicator or DF YouTube that hindered your harmful use of social media for a while, but after some time you have just disabled them. These plugins just add a layer of resistance but do not eliminate the use, which is better than nothing but certainly not the solution.

My solution

Based on what I have already mentioned, my solution was rather simple. Make social media as unusable as possible. I will talk about how I did this with Facebook and then you can apply similar stuff to other social media platforms. Because they all are the same in core, it won’t be that hard to apply the same strategies to most of them. Maybe you feel this is a little bit overwhelming; if you can’t even start anything about it, just delete the apps from your phone, this will increase the friction and this will be enough for a couple of days.

The main problem with Facebook is the feed of entities you follow. You won’t be wasting that much time on Facebook if there was no newsfeed, would you? Thus, the solution was to unfollow everyone on Facebook. This may have been tedious if not for the fact we can automate everything we can think of. This GitHub gist will help you unfollow all the shit you follow on Facebook. To open the console press CTRL+SHIFT+I and use the latest code found (at the end of the page) since it is the one probably working. It is advised to read the script that you are running and actually understand it, don’t just listen to whatever people tell you (including me). After this, you would literally be unable to use Facebook the way you used to. Your newsfeed would be empty of anything, and you won’t be able to follow all the things that you used to since they are just too many and you already don’t remember half of them. Now, when you open Facebook you would find nothing to do and close it after a couple of minutes instead of a couple of hours.

However, there are some platforms where your main feed isn’t who you follow, it is what the algorithm recommends. In this case, things are a little bit tricker, just unfollowing/unsubscribing to everything won’t cut it. Here, the only two solutions are to either make it as hard as possible or just delete them. This was what I have done with Instagram and YouTube. I have just deleted my Instagram account (and somehow it was immediately deleted), uninstalled it, and after some time (when I was sure that my addiction has gone for good), created a new one. Now, I rarely use it and only open it from the browser on my desktop, which isn’t the nicest experience to have. The same for YouTube, just delete your channel, all of your watch history, and thus your recommendations, are in your channel, not your account. This would make your recommendations duller, and ultimately making the experience way more much undesirable without deleting the undeletable super important Google account. Just don’t forget to also disable the watch and search history, or otherwise, YouTube will recommend you the same stuff as before after some time. After some time, I found using YouTube from mobile got really uninteresting, and I deactivated the application without looking back. If there is something that I really need to search on YouTube, then opening it from the browser is just fine.

Recommendations

Other things I have heard but did not try myself that I think may also work:-

  • Giving the passwords of your social media accounts to a trusted person and telling them to change the passwords; you will have to actively tell the person to give you the password, which will make it much harder.
  • Make a different account on your system with your social media accounts logged in and log out from your main work account and delete the passwords (have a password only available on the social media account to access them), this will make you consciously choose to open social media and stop working by restarting the machine.