Watch this if you want to watch experts talking about this
. This is more of a personal account of why I chose to do it.
Once upon a time, Facebook was exciting and charming. This was a time when I enjoyed the likes and comments and craved for more. Soon I joined Facebook groups and started tailoring my posts for maximum exposure. You upvote all your friends’ posts and tag them, you don’t express a divergent opinion, you have to be witty in your expression, and many more.
The fun of Facebook soon started fading as more and more of my family members started following me and I started to censure my online presence. The new start of social media for me was Reddit. Free of societal censure and a friendly subreddit for almost anything soon captured my need for open spaces. But Reddit also faces the same restrictions as Facebook and that is what upsets me most about social media. The very essence of them is to engage you and promote expression. It takes a more sinister form in the case of Facebook and its other avatars with subvert manipulation, coercion to share more information, and ultimately bundling that user data into commodities. Reddit takes a bit more innocuous approach by persuing less aggressive commodification of data and providing a higher degree of privacy.
The dopamine addiction of social media reached its peak for me with Reddit and r/memes. I had started amassing Karma to become eligible to post on r/memes and the grind was real. This is the biggest problem I have with social media, the dopamine-fueled compulsion to post and share. Again Facebook and its avatars are much much worse at this and deploy your own brain chemistry against you. Lack of filters for information, news, influencers, promotion of polarising content are not bugs but features of social media that try to keep us engaged. The more you engage with social media the more it changes you. Slowly and steadily it gives incentives to behave and project yourself in a certain way and the manipulatory techniques get better as they study your habits and make more and more addictive algorithms.
For me not being subject to the biggest involuntary human experiment is certainly appealing and so is stopping my free will and quirks from eroding. So the reason I stopped posting on social media is not that I hate it or it is boring but it is just simply too dangerous for my own psyche.