Goodbye, Social Networks

Monday, 2023-01-29

Over the last 2 months, I’ve deleted my Reddit, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts. I have been thinking about it for a while now, and I’d already stopped using Facebook in 2016. I switched to Instagram, and while I had some memorable posts there, the short-video format that has plagued every video platform thus far has been an enormous attention drain. I stopped using the app mid last year, and I deleted my account in December.

I haven’t really opened Instagram much besides to send some memes to friends, which was once a month or so. But the cognitive overload has not done me any good, so I decided to get rid of it completely.

Then Reddit. While I consider Reddit to have been a great source of fun to me personally, once they purged the third-party apps, I could no longer use my app of choice, Joey. Joey allowed me to filter posts on Reddit so I wouldn’t see posts on topics I particularly didn’t want to see or cared about. I had keywords removing political posts from /r/india, removing cosplay posts from /r/OnePiece and removing cryptocurrency stuff from /r/technology. I had about a hundred or so filters, and my experience was pretty amazing. Now that it was gone, I didn’t fall back to the official Reddit app. I instead used the webpage, and defaulted to old.reddit.com. But lately I decided I was spending too much time there as well. So I figured I’d just get rid of that as well. I deleted every alt account I had, and I also deleted my primary account, only after purging all the posts and comments entirely so as to remove any history of my usage.

Finally, I realized Twitter had to go as well. I wasn’t using it much, besides to ping around and ask questions about the city or something in general into the void. I realized I was headed down the spiral of the tweets there too and thought it’s time I said goodbye completely.

So, how you do you reach me if you want to?

The short answer is, you don’t. I don’t want to be reachable. I want to be private in my life and I have a lot of friends I cherish already. I don’t really want to exist in a bubble where I have superficial relationships with people I am coaxed into impressing.

I still am on LinkedIn, for my career sanity, and on Hackernews, but I might purge that too. I don’t want to share my posts here as thought I have something to say that no one else already has. I want to write these posts for myself, to preserve my semi-public notes.

And that’s why we used to have websites back in the day, wasn’t it?