Quit Social Media
To be honest, I've never been the biggest social media person, but lately I've come around the fact that it's just Not Good, and it's time to go.
Success stories presented below in in relative order of priority (i.e. toxicity).
I left when it became X. Even before I started thinking about moving away from big tech generally, this felt like an obvious one. Interestingly, I had been on Twitter pretty much from the beginning and never really came to enjoy that kind of short form content. I haven't been at all tempted to replace this with Bluesky or Mastodon.
Meta properties (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp)
I'm lumping these together because Meta is a bad company that no thoughtful person should have anything to do with. To any doubters, please check this book out from your local library and let me know if that changes your mind.
I went inactive on Facebook over a decade ago and finally got around to deleting it a couple years back. Despite having no memory of creating an Instagram account, I apparently needed to delete that too. The profile was never even set up, so they must have auto-created that account at some point to inflate their numbers. Sneaky.
I have never used WhatsApp, and now that I'm on Signal I'm not sure what purpose it might serve.
TikTok
Never used it, never will.
I think by the time TikTok came around, I had pretty much figured out that social media wasn't where I wanted to be. I had considered that this one might be generational, but I don't think so. I see plenty of elder-millenial types consumed by this service.
This was a hard one for me. I had been active on Reddit since about 2006, and my account was created in 2009.
I curated my subreddits pretty heavily towards niche interests, but I ultimately decided that getting off reddit was still a good goal.
I currently block it on my phone to eliminate mindless scrolling, but leave it unblocked at the DNS level so that I can continue to access reddit hits in search results (because...in 2026, the only effective way to use a major search engine is to append 'reddit' to your search.)
Am I taking the easy way out by not deleting my account completely? I am still thinking about this.
YouTube
IMO this kind of counts as social media, due to shorts and the algorithmic home screen; basically the same problems I'm looking to avoid on other platforms.
Unfortunately, kind of like reddit, youtube is just too damn useful to get rid of entirely. So, here's the compromise: no using youtube logged in, ever. No apps, and the site itself is blocked on mobile to prevent random scrolling.
Can be used on mobile via RSS (the Unwatched IOS app). For now, this feels like a nice compromise, because there are a few smaller channels I still find value in. I plan to revisit this one in the future because, like with reddit, it may be possible to cut this one out entirely.
In the rare event that I must use youtube on desktop, I'll use the FreeTube app.