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Sometime last year I deleted my LinkedIn account. When I retired, I thought I would maintain the account so I could keep up with friends and acquaintances and former colleagues there. At first, it was interesting to see what people were up to. But after a while it all started to sound almost eerily similar; people seem to have a very particular way of expressing themselves on that site. It doesn't sound real, sort of unnaturally positive and expressed in very particular "diplomatic" or "professional" phrasing. I found myself getting annoyed by it all, and after a while, I suppose because I'm no longer invested in that work milieu, I found I really didn't care to try to read between the lines to understand what people were saying. It all seemed like a type of performance and it wasn't interesting or enjoyable to read about.
When it occurred to me that I could just delete my LinkedIn account, I didn't let myself ponder the decision too long, and it felt really good to just get out of there. One less thing to have to maintain. One less site to grab my attention on my phone. I've already deleted Instagram and Reddit from my phone. I only look at Instagram occasionally because there are still one or two people whose posts I want to check out, every now and then. I don't post there. I deleted my Twitter account a few years back (when Musk bought the site). Facebook too. I still look at YouTube, but only on my desktop and I try to limit my viewing there.
I think I will eventually delete my Instagram and Reddit accounts too. Basically, I will stop maintaining an account on any platform which encourages mindless scrolling. Sometimes I feel a bit angry that I was ever sucked in to the social media space. When I look back to the early days of "social networking" and "web 2.0" and how it all seemed so exciting and open and one could connect to people all over the world and the possibilities were endless... How naïve of me! And now it's just trying to keep you scrolling, trying to sell you things, and increasingly it's full of AI slop. Ugh.