Iāve been progressively trying to detach myself from social media and am finally calling it quits on the last network I checked with any sort of regularity: Twitter. I just donāt think anything good comes from scrolling through an endless feed of bad news, echo chambers, and bottom-of-the-barrel hot takes. Or worse, doomscrollingāĀ which is a phenomenal term. It just feels like youāre binging on the brain-equivilent of doritos. Iāll still keep my account around to syndicate content, but this is done automatically at this point so I donāt actually need to log in (and subsequently be tempted to start scrolling).
Instead Iāve been subscribing to interesting content via RSS (using Feedly). I find this to be much less stressful, as thereās a finality to the feed of content that doesnāt exist on social media platforms. Once youāve browsed through all of the new items in your feeds, youāre done. Thereās nothing more to look at.
If youāre a hacker news user, Iād also recommend replacing the front page with one of the feeds at hnrss. Iāve subscribed to one that surfaces any post with >200 points, filtering out a lot of the noise that would previously consume my time. 1Blocker on iOS or Impulse Blocker on Firefox are also a huge help in ensuring youāre not subconsciencely navigating to social media websites to take a hit of content dopamine.
If you have any other tips/strategies for taming the internet, drop me a line.