Do you ever/have you ever gone "scorched earth" on your online presence?

Hello everyone,

If you've used this forum for any period of time, you'll have likely seen me all over the place from about 2008 onwards. So, you'll know how active I've been on here, for better or worse.

I've been thinking lately about my relationship with the phone and laptop, and I really just...hate it. The amount of time I spend online every day is just so unhealthy. It's not even the fact of the physical time I'm spending on devices (I imagine 99% of people on this forum have had some form of "Tech Neck"), but just...the quality of the time I spend online too just absolutely stinks. I will say, that the Giant Bomb forum, is actually one of the shining lights in my online "portfolio". It's always been absolutely brilliant on here for the last nearly 15 years, with great people, great discussions and an all around fab time.

But, that's about where it ends. In the last 5 years or so, I've just come to absolutely despise my time spent on the internet. When I think about the big culprits, I'll break them down and try to explain their downsides, but why I use them

Facebook: The big one. As someone in his mid to late 30's, it's almost impossible to avoid using Facebook. I barely have any people on there anymore, outside of very close friends and family, and the people I work with. I hate the platform, because it's so filled with racism, sexism, misogny, AI generated crap, porn, and an all around awful base of content. The algorithm is horrific, and I hate the sorts of content it puts in front of me, seemingly at random. I think I hovered over a picture of Billie Eilish for longer than 0.5 seconds, and then the last 4 months have just been increasingly disturbing photos of her with ridiculous fake tits, and the most abhorrent content.

But...you can't really avoid Facebook. Almost everyone I talk to is through Facebook messenger, including my family, my in laws, and my work colleagues. There's just too big of a base of people on there that I talk to. And it's the common way to contact people nowadays. I can't go out there giving my WhatsApp phone number to everyone and expect them to all change over, because nobody will. So....I really don't know what to do. If I could delete the website, and keep the messenger, that would be super.

Instagram:The least agregious, but the one I spend the most time on. Instagram to me is the equivalent of watching a Blockbuster movie at the pictures. SO MUCH content, all varied, all technically "interesting", but just...absolutely zero value, mentally and emotionally. I need to keep it, because there's certain people on there that I'm friends with that are ONLY on Instagram, but i hate the amount of "Doomscrolling" I do on there. We all do it don't we? I just hate the amount of absolutely unfulfilling content on there. It's just kinda...out there, and it exists, and you acknowledge it for 3 seconds, then forget it for the rest of your life. Again, if I could delete the site, and keep the messaging, that would be great

Reddit:Just the worst place on the internet (Maybe tied with 4chan). Absolutely vile, toxic, devoid of any intellectualism, outside of faux intellectuals. Reposts of reposts of reposts. Little Hitler moderators who are the Kings of their very sad little kingdoms, and just absolute echo chambers of little sweaty nerds. The kind of people who will outwardly shun doing anything in real life, and think that sports are the "worst things ever" and "Why should I give a shit about these olympic losers", but if you dare to question the quality of those anime shows designed for sex offenders, they all jump down your throat. You know the ones. "Well actually in the lore, she's 3000 years old!!!" and the like.

Youtube:I actually like the content on Youtube, for the most part. If you have very specific niche interests, there's some great content creators out there. Joseph Montecillo is creating some remarkable content about Pro Wrestling from the 90's in Japan, when it was at its boom. Steve1998MREInfo is making really good MRE videos, that are a very niche, but historically interesting topic. But then, for everyone with care and craft, you get 500 of these AI generated video farms, literally designed to farm clicks and ad money and have zero point to them. The MrBeasts that focus on poverty porn. The Joe Rogans that appeal to the lowest common denominators.

The biggest problem with Youtube is the ads though. Every video is LOADED with ads. You can't avoid them. You think you've dodged a 40 second ad, but then the CONTENT OF THE VIDEO has a "In video ad" for Squarespace, or some other equally pointless product. Youtube is the very epitomisation of late stage capitalism, where it feels like every single video is just a vehicle to milk every single penny out of it.

I'm sure many of the rest of you have equally toxic habits with your relationship with your online life. Have any of the rest of you considered completely nuking your online life? Have you ever done it? How did you manage?

I'm not saying I want to move to the Frigid Norths of the Canadian Wilderness in a log hut for the rest of my life, but honestly, if I could get rid of my phone, and my laptop, i just feel the quality of my life would increase ten-fold. But you can't, can you? You NEED a phone in EVERY avenue of modern life. I can't log onto my work computer without using a 2FA to get on the local intranet. I need it to book train tickets. To pay for things. To use maps It's unavoidable

I appreciate this is a massive rant from an old fart, but God I am so fed up with the proliferation of the internet in our daily lives. I want to escape.

Just rip the band-aid off. Tell the people who are actually important to you that may contact only through Facebook and then delete it and it's gone. It's not a monolithic presence no one can escape from, the press of a button can cast it into the void.

The way I see it if there are people not willing to keep in touch with you otherwise then they're not actual connections to worry about keeping anyway.

I barely have an online presence. I have a few forums I still haunt, I have a reddit account I mostly use for very niche subreddits that aren't anything like what you describe, and I have a Linkedin because it's kind of necessary for some fields and job applications but I don't spend time on it.

I could tell very early when all this social media stuff was coming into being that it was going to be bad. I never had a Facebook, never had an Instagram, never had a Myspace, barely had a Twitter that I only used anonymously to post jokes, and I've never felt compelled to have any of those things. The people I want to keep in touch with have my phone number and email and that seems to work.

I did have a Livejournal back in the day but that was barely social media. It was just a place I blogged. Kind of like I do here from time to time.

I'm a little older (early 40s) so I have clear memories of the Internet before it became a series of walled gardens and it was better. And I'm not the kind of middle aged dude who thinks everything was better when I was younger. I think the video games were much worse! And the TV! But the Internet was much better before algorithms replaced links and searches as the means of content getting in front of people.

This site is the only place I have any sort of online presence. I don't do social media. I had a Myspace page that I maybe used a dozen times 20 years ago. I think I had to make a Facebook account for my Quest headset, but I've never touched that site in my life outside of that. I had a Twitter that I had to make as a recovery option for an app, posted maybe three times there, and promptly deleted it after Elon bought it. No intentions to ever engage with anything on reddit. I stick almost exclusive to channels I'm subscribed to on youtube and don't care to venture into any of the garbage outside of that.

All of that is to say it is possible to live a life of very limited online presence. I probably have an unfair advantage in that I don't own a cell phone, which I understand is not a way of life that the vast, vast majority of people want, or even are able, to live. Regardless, my policy is that none of this stuff can be truly as essential as people make it out to be. Life got on just fine before any of this stuff came along. Cutting back on it now might not be as hard as it may seem.

@brian_: A lot of this depends on the people you have/want in your life. There are some people, especially among the youngs, who won't keep up with you if you don't do social media. Whether that matters to you or not is kind of up to you, but if you have like young cousins or nieces and nephews who you want in your life but don't like phone calls or texts then you may feel kind of stuck.

Simply put, I'm already on this path. This forum, GB's chat, GB-adjacent Twitch streams, and a couple smallish Twitch channels are the only things left that I do on the internet. Everything else I liked in the past has either been killed off or ruined.

At this point, I feel like it's reasonable to say that the modern internet is no longer fit for human consumption. It's not just social media either. It's everything. Anything useful is now being completely buried by garbage optimized to make somebody money even if in doing so they either misinform you or otherwise trick you into looking at a bunch of ads. Web search is now optimized to not actually answer your questions but to maximize revenue for the search provider (this isn't a conspiracy theory but an actual thing that came out in the recent Google anti-trust case. The old, longtime head of search at Google was pressured into optimizing search to make more ad money at the expense of search quality. When he wouldn't go as far as c-suites wanted, he was replaced with an ad exec). Even key functions of the internet like the news and informational websites have been destroyed. If you try to keep abreast of any given news topic, unless you go out of your way, you are probably more likely to be served tabloid or AI slop than you are actual level-headed coverage of a story from a good outlet when searching for it (and good outlets are becoming harder to find as they all get bought up by VCs or killed off).

Social media is the worst it's ever been. Even worse, the people controlling much of it now have a vested interest in not fixing the many problems making social media, and in turn the whole world, worse. Twitter's been going down hill since 2014, and has accelerated in this trajectory under Musk's supervision. Once the exodus of normal people from Twitter started around 2014-2018, the service slowly stopped being any good. All that's left on it now is the terminally online and people there for work. I see lots of claims that Bluesky is better but it only is in that bots haven't taken it over yet. I tried using it for a bit but it didn't feel worth it. Almost none of the type of people I actually enjoyed following back in the day are on it and most of the people left on it are not people I want to follow. Facebook is a complete disaster. I tried TikTok for about 2 hours before realizing it was doing something weird to my brain so I deleted my account and got as far as possible from it. The only one I still use is Instagram, but I only look at posts from accounts I follow, never engage with any of the algorithmic stuff, and use a comment blocking browser plugin to block all comments on there. It's been such a fucking bummer watching all of my older relatives retire, get into social media to try to keep up with friends and family, then get sucked into the misery void. Some of them have become noticeably different people as a result. It's akin to when people describe watching their parents turn into angry people after they start watching Fox News, but for the internet at large. Social media was initially intended as a way to keep up with friends and share positive things, but the companies realized turning the platforms into ragebait/clickbait machines made them more money so here we are.

Regarding phones and computers, I'm in the same boat. I've started to genuinely hate everything that modern phones represent. I've been doing everything in my power to get away from using my phone as much as possible. I went from using my phone 4-5 hours a day to less than an hour, most of which is tracking my exercise, things I have to use my phone for, or texting people. I try to treat my phone solely as a communication device whenever possible now. Part of the reason I got into iPod modding last year was so that I could decouple listening to music, audiobooks, and podcasts from my phone since those are a big part of my media consumption. Similarly, I bought a Steam Deck so I could get away from using my desktop for most games (I mostly play older games these days and the Steam Deck can run those perfectly). There's still a few games I play on my PC but I've found that being away from my desk and computer has a positive impact on my mental health. I've also been trying to get into hobbies that don't require computers.

It's just too much. All of it.

@sombre I've done forms of this before, but I have a strange relationship with social media.

Facebook: When I went to college in 2010, I had about 500 friends on Facebook. One night, a friend of mine and I decided to basically do a friend purge. I felt guilty for the first two friends I deleted, but after that, the power trip took over/it felt cathartic. I got down to about half that, all of whom were people I cared about seeing updates from to varying degrees. Over the years, Facebook has become more and more shit, and now not only do I barely have friends who use it, but thanks to things I've done with various ad-blocking tools, the site barely functions on my browser. I keep it active in case I want to reach out to anyone or anyone wants to reach out to me, but I barely go on it.

The major qualifier here is that I'm very lucky in that nobody in my life is toxic or spewing the kind of stuff you're talking about. I don't know how I got this lucky, but I did.

Twitter: I started a personal blog in 2016 and created a Twitter account for it that was basically my personal account. I wasn't following friends, but artists I admire and writers and just generally public people. I have to admit that I had a lot of fun on Twitter for a few months. Then the 2016 election happened and my Twitter feed became one of the biggest sources of anxiety in my life. I taught myself to stay away after a while. Then I deleted my Twitter the day they announced they accepted Elon's bid to take over the company because I wanted that data point to exist. One of the best decisions I've ever made.

Instagram: I have a lurker account that I've never posted with. But I'm not really on Instagram. I've been tempted to start a real account. When I went to the 2023 Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes, I met all these incredible artists and the first question most had was "What's your Instagram?" (This is not a judgment of them. It just is what it is.) But I've been down this road and know I shouldn't take it.

Reddit: All the subreddits I'm subscribed to are about as harmless as harmless can be. Gif recipes, Serious Eats, some movie ones, and so on. I hate to say it, but the most negative subreddit I subscribe to is Giant Bomb. But even then, compared to the worst Reddit can be, it's so mild that I don't even think that counts.

Discord: I got a friend discord, I jump into the Giant Bomb discord every now and then, I got the Album Club one, and like one or two more niche ones. But that's it. Again, I'm lucky in that everyone in those discords are cool for the most part.

Letterboxd: Letterboxd is the social media I spend most of my time on these days. First and foremost, it's only as much of a social media as you want it to be. If you just want to use it as a movie logging tool or a place to get recommendations, you can. But because it's just about movies, and because of the UX and so on, it's just very chill. Movies are my number one thing (despite running the album club here), so it's also just easier for me to say there in general.

Rate Your Music: I have an account, but I've never written a word on it.

The Giant Bomb Forums: I was never a forum guy anywhere or a comments guy except for some extremely niche screenwriting sites. (And even then, I haven't commented there for years.) I have a real lurker mentality when it comes to the internet. I don't know why. I'd like the be more active here, as I think the people are chill for the most part, and it would probably make me better at running the club as I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. But it's hard to retrain myself to think about it differently.

My point: It's hard for me to think about it in terms of nuking my presence because I've always had one foot out the door. I wish I could say this was some brilliant foresight I had, but really, it's more anxiety based than anything. I think I could delete all my accounts and I wouldn't really suffer that much. But I do feel a need to communicate with people. My circle is small, and I think it's good for me to mingle outside of it, even if only digitally. And it's not just that my therapist says I have to or that I spent all of COVID isolated. It's just about making it work for you. Interacting in spaces with people who share your interests and can demonstrate that they know how to be cool.

Something I've observed is that older millennials/younger gen x (I'm 32) seem to have the worst relationships with the internet. They can still remember when it was smaller and less toxic (or at least seemed less toxic) and they seem to have a hard time adjusting to what it is now. Which isn't a judgment, mind you. In many ways, that's a blessing. But I think those are the people who were there when the Internet became The Internet, and being the first ones into the breach, they just have way more to unlearn.

So be where it makes you happy. Leave where it doesn't. Sometimes it really is that simple, even if it doesn't seem so. I have to tell myself that all the time.

The only place I have any sort of presence is here. I deleted all social media accounts ten years ago. I sometimes lurk in reddit but never post. I havent posted on twitter or anythjng in ten years.

Everyone who i needed to keep in touch with just messages me on any of the other twenty messaging apps everyone uses. Also via text. Most phones have group text ability now if you don't want to use a messenger. The idea that not using Facebook = losing touch with everyone simply isn't true. I haven't lost touch with anyone, and it took zero effort.

The benefits of no social media have been amazing. There was a physical and mental weight that lifted a few months after disconnecting. I felt literally lighter and less anxious.

I feel like my online presence continually shifts over time. However, one rule I've held to is not spending time on places that make me miserable. For instance, you mention needing Facebook to stay in contact with people. I use it similarly (and for the groups due to some volunteer work), but I never, ever engage with the main feed. There's simply no point. Oh, and I'm not friends with any of my family. With Youtube, I only ever engage with maybe 3 channels at this point? I never click on any recommended videos so I don't worry about the algorithm. I don't have a Reddit account, and only ever venture there if the only answer to a technical issue is in a Reddit answer. To be honest, Reddit is among my most disliked social media for the simple reason that it sucked all other internet forums dry (including this one), while having a truly terrible user interface. I honestly don't understand how a website with an interface that bad became the biggest site on the planet for nerds to interact. Forums tend to have much more of a community feeling, at least in my (very limited) experience.

In short, I think a key to a more pleasant online presence is curation, and not wasting your time on things that make you unhappy.

I was never a big social media person. I don't have Twitter. I don't have Instagram or TikTok. I had a Facebook account, but I never used it, and it recently got hacked after being abandoned for over a decade. Email is the only way I can get contacted personally. And I only post in two places, here and TV Tropes where I make entries for fun. I used to write fan fiction for fanfiction.net and Media Miner, but that was well over a decade ago.

@sombre: On new years of 2020, before the pandemic threw everything to shit, I deleted my facebook permanently. It was a decision I made for my mental health after I spend a decade entirely too online. I could not control my need to express myself, all the emotions, at all times. I used my facebook status as a blog/therapy as I went through some good times and fa lot of very bad times.

I traveled a lot for work from 2008-2015 and made quite a few friends in other countries due to it. Facebook was the default way we communicated, but as we all got older, I really wore out my social capital them and other as I just spewed every negative emotion I felt in real time for everyone to see. So, eventually, I started getting unfriended, which contributed to depression, with made me spew out more, which made more people unfriend me. It was a real shitty cycle.

So I had to make an executive decision. I put in the request to get an archive file of all my photos, I DM'd my contact details to those I didn't want to lose touch with, and I accepted the fact that I was going to be leaving the majority of my international pals behind forever because folks just wont do anything that isn't convenient anymore.

And it was worth it. It's actually one of the single best things I have done for myself and my long term health. I won't say my became amazing afterwards, but after only about a month, I stopped missing it. I sometimes wonder what happened to some old pal, but by and large I accept that friend come and go.

And, I'll be pretty frank, it also effectively quarantined me away from the absolute worst members of my family too, and that is a godsend as they have descended into trump-induced madness. Being away from a constant stream of ranting was bliss compared to what my poor parents were subjected to (we are the black sheep in a MEGA conservative redneck family) which I have heard second hand from my folks pretty much the whole family went absolutely apeshit during the pandemic and have not slowed down since. Not that losing touch with family is always a good thing or would be for you, but in my case it absolutely was.

The choice is yours, but I highly recommend a facebook delete. It is remarkably easy to adjust to life without it with the only real downside is people look at you like you are a bit out of touch, and maybe you will be, but that isn't really an inherently bad thing.

Most social media has gotten progressively worse over the last t years that I've inadvertently removed most of it from my life without any conscious thought about it. Facebook went years ago, before their ridiculous Meta rebrand, because it was already becoming a complete cesspit of randos instead of a feed of people you follow.

Some sites you list are as good or as bad as you make them. I still use YouTube, but with an ad blocker and NEVER leaving my subscriptions page. I don't want to see the crap their algorithm thinks I'd like, because it's VERY wrong.

Similar with Reddit. Treat it as a directory of forums and only subscribe/visit the ones that actually interest you and have a reasonable community. NEVER go near the front page. Sadly, it's the closest we'll get to forums of old.

I never thought I'd miss/look back fondly on newsletters, but it's so hard now to keep up to date with news on specific things you like without social media.

I’ve always been a reluctant social media-er, so I’ve found it easier to drop services over the years. I was into Twitter for a little while, but ended up deleting my account. I didn’t sign up for a Facebook account until it was practically uncool to do so, and it was actually to try to win an original iPad from a contest run by Tested, as funny as that is. Never had MySpace. I sometimes still dip my toes into Instagram, but keep it mostly for messaging, like seemingly a lot of people.

I think I’d echo some others here and recommend that you just let the most important people know that you’re finding ways to simplify your life by trimming out all of these services, and if they want to keep in touch, you can provide them with your preferred methods.

I don’t think I’d recommend going scorched earth, so to speak, but choosing a couple services and cutting them out and seeing how that goes could be healthy. You could continue down that path with more services as time goes on.

I also think some mindfulness journaling could help you think through things as you make some decisions on how online you want to be. I always like to recommend 750words.com, but you can always open up a notes app or word document too. Or hey, paper notebooks are still a thing!

And then on the topic of Giant Bomb, this was a real unique one for me as I initially came here following Jeff, Ryan, Brad, and Vinny from Gamespot. I was very briefly starting to get into the community there at Gamespot before everything went down with Jeff, but Gamespot was the first experience online I’d had in that way, where I could page through forums and read the thoughts and feedback of so many other like-minded people. I thought it was so cool, and was glad to see that same spirit carried through to Giant Bomb. I was super invested in this community as a result for quite a while, though at this point it’s been much longer that I’ve been distanced from it than I was close to it. I still do pop in and enjoy reading some forum posts as it reminds me of those formative years of my life, but ultimately I decided to mostly step away from dedicating myself to being so online because ultimately it didn‘t put me in the right mental space. I’m forever grateful to this site for that time though, and providing so many fun memories and opportunities to be a part of a larger community of cool people doing cool things.

Everyone just needs to decide for themselves what the right amount of online looks like, and what provides that healthy balance.

I've been on/off twitter a couple times but I'm done now. With Elon taking over the site has lost a lot of its best users and in general it's just a fucking mess over there with the spam, broken checkmark system, advertiser exodus etc. Obviously he's catering to the right wing freaks and Roman avatar guys now, but there are truly too many terrible political takes to go around.

And I definitely share OP's hatred of reddit, even subreddits that should be fun like r/nba are full of dickheads for no reason

I've never really been a social media person. I started a Facebook account probably around 2010 or so, hardly ever used it, deleted it in 2020 and haven't missed it at all. I have a Twitter account but I very really tweet anything, I just have it to view stuff.

I dunno, maybe social media does make it easier to keep in touch with family etc., but eh. As others have said, if those relationships are that important, you can find other ways to maintain them. I stay in touch through gaming with friends. I know email seems hopelessly old-fashioned now, but it does exist. Failing that, invite everyone to a Discord server? And if other people don't want to switch off of Facebook or whatever, that's on them, either they will want to keep in touch or they won't, either they'll eventually figure out that these are hellsites, or they won't. I don't think everyone remaining miserable together just to be "together" is the solution.

Life is too short to continue dealing with shitty social media.

Kinda sounds to me like you've mismanaged your internet bubble. Your internet is what you make of it. I've used reddit to follow games and keep up on major news for over a decade and never run into any of the issues you're talking about. I used Facebook for a while, but only as a messaging app for friends and ignoring everything else, and that was totally fine. YT requires some finagling due to the overly aggressive algorithm, but at least it's quite predictable.

At the end of the day all these sites feed you what you put into them, so the question really becomes how well you're able to manage them. If you're struggling with self-control then yeah, maybe try to go cold turkey on some of it, but I would suggest just trying to be a bit more intentional with how you use social media and not allow it to take the lead.

As Ares42 said, much is what you make of it, of course, some places make it way harder... As someone which often post illustrations/renders, cosplay and jfashion photos, I used a handful of those sites:

Facebook: I joined with between Orkut dying and because of university, I had some good times there as I shift my use to follow local conventions, cosplay and alternative fashion, however as the FB start dying and most people or events which I follow, stop posting there I sort give it up, specially due low visibility and the place becoming worse.

Twitter: For me, it was never good, and as the service declines, it becomes way worst, visibility is almost zero, if not zero, but it used to be sometimes good, I remember the old days I somehow could get a lot of views on an illustration by careful usage of hashtags, but now... good luck. As twitter erodes, I reduced my use to just only direct check a small amount of profiles there, like rpgsite, gematsu and a few others, maybe post an illustration, and them just close it. This is the one which I am almost ready to just delete it, if it was not for those profiles which I follow.

Tumblr: I used this one for a while... visibility there was never good, but that might be me not knowing how to proper use it, if watching Strange Aeons videos teach me anything is that tumblr is a lot tricker to use with a lot more history behind. I often wonder on returning to it, but... I would need to do a clean-up.

Instagram: It sorts is the main social media site I use, visibility is weird, but I often only used to post illustrations, cosplay and jfashion photos, and follow people related to it, I managed to curated it enough that it is overall good experience there.

Reddit: Sometimes I wonder if I should use it more, but I barely do, I often feel a bit scared of posting art there, due to the nature of the place, like whenever I do, I often dread what could happen next...

Discord: Depend much on what discord is, because each one is quite unique, I like there because it feels more like you have forum style of interaction, sometimes...

I’ve been able to manage these services pretty well for my mental well being. For reference I’m 37 years old. Honestly I have zero complaints about Reddit. I usually use Reddit to seek guidance or opinions related to hobbies. So many knowledgeable people there. If I comment at all it’s never negative or arguing with anyone.

I’ve never once been interested in Twitter. I don’t care at all about someone’s useless “drive by hot take”. It’s lame and I don’t care!

Instagram I use when I need a quick laugh. Only really follow comedy related stuff. My favorite being last_place_comics (check them out if you haven’t).

A ton of my “tv watching” time is just YouTube. Give in and pay for premium monthly, it’s more than worth it. I consume a ton of gaming content there. I have learned a ridiculous amount of skills and knowledge from YouTube.Took apart and fixed my washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, so many other problems fixed over the years because someone else already had the same problem and made a video with the solution. There are plenty of reputable people related to exercises and physical therapy that have been invaluable to me and my body. All up there for free. These services are what you make it. Don’t ever doom scroll. That’s when you get garbage.

The only one I will give you is Facebook. That place went DOWN HILL. I only use it to keep up with friends and family. So why the hell is my feed constantly showing women full on breast feeding? A bunch of other videos of girls trying to expose their crotch to the camera. It’s freaking weird and I can’t believe Facebook allows it.

For better or worse, no. I've used the same alias across all of the internet from basically the beginning when I joined the IGN forums at age 11 or whatever. For most of my late teens and mid 20s I outright felt like I wanted people to know if they met Nodima that was Nodima. I never really liked the idea of being a stranger or anonymous.

But I will say in the past two years or so I've basically completely retreated from Facebook and Instagram, I just don't have anything I want to share anymore. I'm a single guy in my mid-30s that plays video games and listens to podcasts in between bar post-ups and random hookups, there's just not much to share or say unless I go on vacation.

But I'll always leave those old accounts around. I spent time doing whatever I did on them, they may as well linger.

I had something similar happen. I was lucky in that I didn't actually get the algorithmic home feed or videos for years and years after everyone else did (it seemed like a glitch. I only saw friends' posts in reverse chronological order until about 2021 or so. Other parts of my account were broken too but I didn't care). Then suddenly a few years ago it was clear whatever glitch had happened had been fixed. Suddenly my feed had a bunch of algorithmic bullshit videos. At first it was what appeared to be US military adjacent posts (I'm not American and extremely not the type of person who would have any interest in that), then it was people doing dumb things with cars, people doing dumb things in general, or conventionally hot women doing random stuff. None of the recommendations had anything to do with anything I had liked, anything I had posted about, or anything else I had indicated interest in. They just pointed a fire hose of garbage at me and hoped something would stick meanwhile they buried anything from people I actually knew. At that point I took stock of who of my friends was even left posting things and it was like a half dozen of the people while nobody else had not posted in years. So I got rid of my account. I knew the algorithmic feed stuff was bad but I didn't know it was that bad.

I had no attachment to my online personae, so I could enter closure after many of the trends. I did what I could to lighten my friends day, take the defence for those trolled by others. In the current times, I mostly use Facebook selectively towards the real people I know who cherish things positivity. I have a Discord, but the older friends I had from back in the day just migrated again to other platforms. I use my Twitter under a new name to help Developers or Content Creators rathar than deal with the double minded ways of general people (if they aren't close to me). It used to be stellar that we used to do things together, sometimes meet-ups or conventions if we can break the social barrier, but I suppose the times to live for oneself started years ago. Most of the time I'm working on more ambition seeking ways to renew my life, perhaps with new people, since I have to acclimatise to bring peace to real people.