A long time ago, I was curled up on a hotel bed, scrolling through reddit, seeing it through waves of tunnel vision and mild hallucinations as I worked my way through a maliciously-delivered salvia trip. They had told me it was weed. I knew I was in for a bad time when the first tunnel vision hit, but I latched on to a safe comfort: I can just browse reddit until it goes away. Whenever I felt awkward, or bored, or in any kind of negative situation, I could always just hide by scrolling through reddit, infinitely. The obvious downside: I was spending a lot of time on reddit.
I’m addicted to comment sections. Youtube, reddit, hacker news, digg, facebook, twitter, random forums. My reddit account just became old enough to get a driver’s license, and has 300,000 comment karma. When I was active, I was banging out 20+ comments a day. Checked it just now, my last comment was 2 months ago, in a niche subreddit, one of the few reasons I’m “allowed” to use reddit now. I have my addiction nearly under control. It took about two years to get to this point. I’m going to share my process to offer a method that may work for other people, and probably is transferable to other social-media related addictions (e.g. Instagram scrolling). I’m also going to share why it’s a very good idea to do this even if you aren’t addicted.
The Process
The basic premise is I would go for successively longer periods of time without using social media. Anybody can do this: “Tomorrow, I won’t open reddit.” You don’t have to logout, uninstall the app, put your phone in black and white, or use any of the other “tricks.” Rather than telling yourself, you could also try asking yourself if you can go a day without opening reddit, a strategy I hadn’t discovered back in the day but which seems effective.
It seems easy, but what I discovered from just doing this “just one day” strategy was how incredibly deep-rooted my addiction was. When going to the bathroom, or standing around the house, I’d feel a distinct urge to pull out my phone and do the highly memorized thumb movement I used to open reddit. When I was waiting for an app to recompile, I’d feel in my fingers the desire to C-t r RET to pop open a tab with reddit. The physiological sensation was a wake-up call. The need to use reddit had infected my bones. It went way beyond a simple habit or hobby.
For the first day, I recommend choosing a very normal day. Of course there’s days, such as on a trip or camping, when you “accidentally” don’t use social media, and you can have that fun moment of “oh wow I didn’t look at reddit even once the last two days,” but I think experiencing an unfulfilled sensation of craving by forcing yourself to not use social media is enlightening and important.
From there, I’d say to myself, “I went a day, surely I can go a week.” I’d think, “do I want to get to the end of my life without having had a single week where I didn’t use reddit/twitter?” For a week break, combining with a trip is a good idea. I’d say “I’m not going to open reddit while I’m in Japan.” I’d force myself to find literally anything else to do - even if it’s just watching local TV, or staring at a wall.
After a week, the craving started going away, and I found myself thinking about reddit less. I noticed that when I was showering, I wasn’t thinking about how I wanted to structure a reply in some online debate I was having, instead I’d be processing my day, or just thinking about nothing. I suddenly had a lot more time. I realized that I had often pulled out my phone to engage in some argument with strangers when I was hanging out with my partner or friends, and was probably annoying them quite a bit with this behavior. I wasn’t randomly angry anymore, wasting mental compute cycles on riposte ideas in an online debate. I wasn’t exposed daily to racism or other abhorrent beliefs.
A week off would give me space to start wondering, “what am I getting out of using reddit?” What were all my comments amounting to? Maybe I was influencing some strangers here and there, but beyond that, what impact am I really having on the world? I had this thought of “if I see something wrong, I have to correct the record, I can’t leave it unchallenged.” In reality, I would only be addressing less than 1% of all the “wrongs” in comment sections that needed to be “righted.” Later I’d learn that intolerance of things being “wrong” is a common symptom of ADHD/autism, and when I used reddit, I was basically engaging in constant, targeted, self-inflicted psychological harm.
From a week, the path forward was clear: reddit is doing nothing for me, I need to try to get off it entirely. I uninstalled the app and logged out on browsers. I deleted it from “recent sites” or any other bit of UI that would present a “reddit.com” link to me. I didn’t go so far as blocking it my hosts file or anything, I wanted there to be a mechanism that hinged on me personally making the choice to not use the site. So, can I go a month?
I’d fall off the wagon - something would happen in the world that I just had to comment on, or I’d stumble into the site because I’d be looking up some niche thing that had a solution only on reddit, or I’d just be so incredibly bored or the itch would become unavoidably strong and I’d cave and log back in. There was also a lot of self-deception happening around engaging in my addiction to other platforms, like twitter, hacker news, youtube comment sections, or random forums. The urge to argue online was huge. So I expanded my rules: try to go a month without reddit, hacker news, or any of these other sites. A month without participating in an online comment section.
There were bumps, but about 2 years ago I succeeded in a full month of “good behavior.” From here I’d acquired a couple useful tools: the use of reddit or other platforms felt dirty. I knew I was harming myself and my goal, I’d feel guilt. If I ever felt the CTRL-t r RET urge, I’d immediately also feel disgust at the thought, and purposefully go find something else to do. It was getting a lot easier. And of course, once I hit a month, the question became - can I do a year?
So far, no. But I now use these sites maybe a couple times a month, which isn’t too unhealthy in my opinion, though I still want to try to not use them at all. Sometimes the usage is “valid,” such as when I’m sharing my solution to a niche technical issue. Oftentimes it would be some world event driving me to the relevant forum, where I just HAD to set the record straight. Often during these times I’d be up late, late into the night, banging out arguments. These were infrequent enough that I’m not too upset it happens, but I really do want to try eliminating these instances as well.
The Reason
A good many reasons to stay off the platforms. Most people probably have some idea of it, the same way most people know why they should exercise. For me, the question was “why should I use these platforms?” Really, what did I get from posting so much? The answer is probably “stimulation,” which I discovered I crave after going through a half year of asking myself the same questions every day and looking at the results. My ADHD brain is desperate for stimulating puzzles to solve, and combined with my autistic inability to leave a wrong un-righted, made reddit a feast - of candy.
This video on the idea of “dopamine holes” makes me see in hindsight that I was feeding my dopamine system high sugar, high carb, high calorie hits that burn out in minutes, leaving me craving more, feeding a scroll/comment cycle. I’d frequently close reddit only to instantly reopen it, driven within seconds to find another fix. When I take away “dopamine candy,” I slowly restore homeostasis and leave my dopamine system open once again to things that take longer to digest, but are far more fulfilling. The tricky bit is that throughout my journey getting off reddit, I was constantly substituting other dopamine candies without realizing it. At least that helped me get off the primary addictive site, but in the last half year I’ve identified a couple other insidious “replacement” dopamine candy I’d let through the door, such as meme-sharing discords or youtube videos. Once I stamped it all out, entirely, and left myself with nothing to do when going to the bathroom but stare at the wall, I felt recognizable positive changes to my mood and motivation. Things that I wanted to be enjoyable, but weren’t, finally started getting plugged into my dopamine cycle and leaving me wanting to do them. Habits such as lifting weights, journaling, studying Mandarin, or editing photos, all slowly converted from chores that required willpower into hobbies I genuinely enjoyed and even sometimes looked forward to.
The realization that I was swapping in secret other dopamine candies was important. Quitting reddit took about a year, but it took two years for me to find and stamp out all the replacements. Things were much better after I got rid of reddit, but the largest gains only started coming when I got rid of all the candy entirely. Keep an eye out for those.
A couple other reasons motivated me. The largest reason that kicked this journey off wasn’t mental health or time, but instead the sudden realization that every time I put text into Twitter, I’m increasing Elon Musk’s net worth, for nothing in return. Social media platforms gain value from users adding content, which brings in more users, which makes advertisers willing to pay more for our attention. We do all the work, Elon gets all the money, for what in return? Conversation? We can deploy FOSS platforms that are feature parity now. We can extract some value from the network itself, when we want to advertise some project or company, but that’s “us as advertiser / corporate entity,” not “us as poster / user,” so I don’t count that. It’s an imbalanced relationship, and the thought that each tweet was putting money in some asshole’s pocket was very motivating to kick the journey off. Rather than give someone else money (by posting), why don’t I fire off a little blog, or work on a personal project, or just stare at a wall? There’s plenty activities that are more valuable to me personally.
Another reason is protecting my psyche. The Elsagate scenario introduced me to a term that I think about a lot, when someone described the strange combination of characters engaging in hypersexualized fetish activity on videos ostensibly targeted at kids as “psychofauna.” These companies - Facebook, Twitter, Youtube - have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on developing psychological manipulation techniques to keep us on their platforms, so as to increase their platforms’ value and eyeball time for their advertisers. I’m not going to pretend I’m an ubermensch, there’s no WAY I can develop a psyche hardened against someone spending millions on finding ways to “program” me. The only safe choice is to not use the platforms at all. It’s not just the corporate owners, either. State actors use the platforms as well. Who knows how many people I argued with about Taiwan’s sovereignty were just bots sent out to exhaust people like me? How much of the radical right wing movement in the USA is attributable to state-sponsored social media agitators?
I would be interested in other people’s efforts in dealing with these sorts of addictions - if this is something you’ve dealt with, please email me! caleb at this domain.