> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube

Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.

I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit

Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.

They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.

Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.

I have a predisposition for that, and Reddit is indeed poison for some of us. I blocked it with pihole, along with most other social media sites, years ago.

Just the friction of a dns record (that yes, I can easily override) was enough to keep myself away from all of it.

And when I need the rare bit of practical information from one of them, I can hit the 5m override from a widget on the phone.

It’s ultimately self control, but that’s easy for me when there’s just a tiny bit of hassle in the loop.

I'm a frequent Reddit user. Recently they have been bringing some of the more poisonous elements of social media over to their platform. Pushing a "for you" feed, and prioritizing a "Best" sorting algorithm over "new" or "hot".

X is honestly among the worst of the worst. People give purposefully bad takes just for the engagement and it's overall super toxic

Reddit is awful too, completely accurate things can get downvoted to oblivion because of the hive mind

YouTube is still overall decent but mostly brainrot I habitually watch/listen to in the background to such a high degree it's hard to even imagine completely cutting it out of my life

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