Reasons to Quit Social Media
I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it&#x27;s not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.<p>Is it the like&#x2F;upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.<p>My vote for what&#x27;s more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven&#x27;t done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don&#x27;t want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.<p>I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I&#x27;d love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.