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The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use
- j45 3mo agoIt’s likely if this is a thing, that early internet users of the 90s experienced their equivalent of having enough.
- Retr0id 3mo agoEverything happens "quietly" these days...
- N_Lens 3mo agoClaudely
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoSocial media not adequatly defined in this article. It's hysteria, a buzzword. The article is just noise without specifying what they're talking about
- inigyou 3mo agoHysteria is not adequately defined in this comment. It's social media, a buzzword. This comment is just noise without specifying what they're talking about.
- bflesch 3mo ago> The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. The way you use the term hysteria feels wrong to me.
- bunderbunder 3mo agoIn 2026, expecting articles about social media to contain a definition of the term ‘social media’ is so peculiar as to seem disingenuous. Can you perhaps explain exactly what you think is so ambiguous about how they use the term that we can’t just assume the common meaning?
- rob-lag 3mo agoWhat's missing for me is that they never seem to mention which social media platforms in particular these statements are directed at. There are many social media platforms, some of them similar, but some are also vastly different from each other (e.g. Hacker News vs. TikTok) Making statements about all of social media without such clarifications makes them pretty unreliable for me.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoExactly
- alistairSH 3mo agoEven HN has a clout score, and seeing it move up/down, or slapping that up/down arrow, can trigger the same dopamine as social media by MegaCorp.
- close04 3mo agoAnd the content discovery algorithm is tuned to please the masses, the users drive the algorithm which promotes or buries the content for everyone else. I think the moment you use a socially driven algorithm to show/hide content from users is when you're planted firmly in social media territory.
- cryptopian 3mo agoIt's why I prefer not to get bogged down in litigation over what counts as social media. It's far more productive to look at the individual mechanisms that make web platforms bad for socialising.
- alistairSH 3mo agoAgreed. For me, "social media" is just any website/app that allows users to contribute content and make comments. HN is absolutely "social media", as it Facebook and WhatsApp. With that said, I do believe social media platforms exist on a spectrum of "mostly benign, maybe even useful" to "mostly harmful" with closed groups/forums well to the benign end, targeted subjects with heavy moderation somewhere to the benign end of the spectrum (HN falls here), and "free for all" well to the "harmful" end (this is where most of Meta lives).
- TomMasz 3mo agoSocial media isn't "social" anymore. It's algorithmically designed to keep you scrolling. Burnout is inevitable.
- gnoll_of_gozag 3mo agobig normie social media yes, but people still have hella actual conversations on bluesky and mastodon and (i think) they use chronological fields by default
- assimpleaspossi 3mo agoAnd then, tomorrow, it will be some other social media platform because someone said something wrong on one of those. Because they have to. Not because they need to.
- inigyou 3mo agoWhat?
- assimpleaspossi 3mo agoYou heard me.
- pasquinelli 3mo agoyeah but what you're saying is unclear. for instance, when you say because they have to, not because they need to... "have to" and "need to" mean the same thing, so i'm left with the choice of concluding your post is just mush or asking you to rephrase what you're trying to say in a way that's intelligible.
- assimpleaspossi 3mo agoPerhaps I should have written "because they feel they have to and not because they need to."
- daveydave 3mo agoI hope we can reach a point where there's enough research on the negative effects of social media (or more specifically which features of it e.g. scrolling videos) that we can inform people from a young age.
- callmeal 3mo agoThere is more than enough research. https://thehighwire.com/news/metas-internal-research-proves-its-platforms-are-addictive-and-harmful-still-it-targets-teens/ https://thehighwire.com/news/metas-internal-research-proves-... But nothing's going to change as long as we continue pretending that billionaires hoarding pieces of "special" paper (or numbers in a bank account) are less mentally ill than people hoarding pieces of regular paper (or other things).
- high_na_euv 3mo ago>But nothing's going to change as long as we continue pretending that billionaires hoarding pieces of "special" paper (or numbers in a bank account) are less mentally ill than people hoarding pieces of regular paper (or other things). Wut
- inigyou 3mo agoWe agreed that people have more or less power depending on this silly thing called "dollars", and because we agreed they have power, they have power. It's pretty weird how we did that even though them having so much power is massively detrimental to human civilization.
- dexterdog 3mo agoHe's talking about money
- qup 3mo agoYou think billionaires are hoarders because the shares they own become worth a lot of money when they build successful companies?
- pjc50 3mo ago> "Political content is pushing users toward the exit" The culture war is exhausting. The idealist dream of some sort of Athenian public deliberation has been overwritten by ragebait. It's both very effective at meeting social media goals (getting people to spend too much time online arguing with strangers), and political goals (Project 2025; the Hungarian/Russian/American conserviative project CPAC; whatever it is that Musk is doing with X; Cambridge Analytica; and so on).
- nottorp 3mo agoMy facebook seems to have trained itself to never give me "political content". Still, I open it about once per week to check for events at my favorite saturday evening hang outs, look at some cat photos and close it.
- assimpleaspossi 3mo agoI never had a Facebook account till about 10 years ago when I went to a funeral and found out about relatives who had one and encouraged me to join them there. I did but, today, they might post there three or four times a year to show vacation pictures and that's it. I, too, only look at it once every week or two in case there's an event that happened but that's maybe once a year.
- nirav72 3mo agoIt takes some effort, but you can get the recommendation algo to clean up your feed. My youtube account of 15 years was flooded with political content. Mainly just opinion stuff and lot of AI slop. So I just unsubbed all channels and started clicking the don't recommend this channel or I don't like this content. It took couple of months, but my recommended videos are back to what I liked watching. Mainly dev and hobby stuff. For channels that I do like that are non-political, I just keep bookmarked links that go directly to their channel page.
- nottorp 3mo agoHmm it's possible they still sneak something in those movies they try to cram down my throat every 3-4 text posts. But I never even look at those so it's wasted effort.
- inigyou 3mo agoI now realise that incogni and incognet are two different companies.
- q8zd3 3mo ago> "More than half (51%) of participants indicated that maintaining an online presence feels like work." Well, because it is. Social media turned most of its users into digital beggars.
- account42 3mo agoDigital beggars whose activity is enriching platform holders much more than what they themselves get out of it.
- kijin 3mo agoThis has been happening since a long time before digital became a thing. Remember Fagin from Oliver Twist?
- cryptopian 3mo agoOne of the most insidious aspects of social media is how the reward and discoverability mechanisms train users to become their own marketing department. It's most obvious on LinkedIn, where your presence is materially tied to career growth, but each platform does it in its own way.
- charltonraven 3mo agoIts strange for me. Some years ago, I only thought that the younger kids/adults was had the "separation anxiety" when it came to social media, but I have a 40 year old sister in law that is purely obsessed and it is crazy. I'm a big tech person but I know how to put my phone down. Heck most of the time I don't even have it on me.
- da-x 3mo agoUnderstand that social media endorphin-inducing algorithm optimizers, have made these sites optimized for _all_ ages, so it should not be a surprise. Very few of us are immune.
- charltonraven 3mo agoAgreed.I am a victim of doom scrolling
- reactordev 3mo agoThe biggest culprits are the senior citizens. They are the most addicted to social media.
- conductr 3mo agoMy MIL in her 70s has been staying with us for the past month or so and her phone habits are bonkers. I rarely use my phone at home, have young kids that are small-screen free; so we tend to engage in conversations and activities during family time, or even just watch big-screens movies/TV as a family. The MIL is glued to the phone/tablet and constantly wants to talk to everyone about it like it’s a shared experience. “Who’s this lady in the photo with Janet?” Like we know or care, maybe ask Janet or just scroll on. Anyways I don’t criticize her directly but my wife has even become annoyed by it and I’ve asked her to have a etiquette conversation with her or give her feedback some way because I can’t stand it for another month lol.
- reactordev 3mo ago
- weagle05 3mo agoI know many people who say they're "off" social media but they're still scrolling. They may post less or not at all, but the algorithm still has them.
- ericmcer 3mo agoI don't post at all and delete it periodically. The concerning thing is you still feel the `itch` of like... I can't just sit here and stare out the window or listen to this boring person or whatever event. So even with social media deleted my brain reaches out for something: Hacker News or Zillow or even stock market tickers get swapped in as the void-fillers. I wonder if life was always sort of boring and lacked meaning and people used to just sit in that reality patiently or if modern life has siphoned meaning off of it so we have had to replace it with these mindless activities.
- smcg 3mo agoI've heard people say that if your post on social media isn't making you money, then it isn't worth making. This is very different from early Facebook/Twitter where the majority of posts were mundane things about one's life. Going on Japanese Twitter was a very different and refreshing experience, because people still post random little life updates. But Westerners rarely do that now.
- Lerc 3mo agoBurnout is a symptom of prolonged unsustainable engagement. I think it is a false narrative to say that the majority of people who are leaving platforms were overcommitted to that extent. I think it is the simple fact that the platforms no longer provide enough to justify sticking around, People came for the pie, stayed for the pie, and left when the vendors started serving cardboard wrapped razor blades and tried to convince you it was still a pie.
- high_5 3mo agoChat apps have already replaced socialapps like FB long ago and the companies know it. Meta has FB Messenger and WhatsApp.
- HelloUsername 3mo agoRelated (should've been source at): "Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media" 12-jul-2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48879902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48879902 183 comments
- brador 3mo agoIt’s not burnout, it’s panic. The void is coming and everyone knows it.
- NoGravitas 3mo agoPlease elaborate.
- a1000regrets 3mo agoI am on a path to recovery from social media addiction (Twitter/x > Instagram > Youtube Shorts). Here is what has worked for me so far - 1. Uninstall the apps, but replace them with mobile browser views. All these services have functional web views that will feed your withdrawal, but adds friction to slowly wind you out. 2. Desktop/laptop (that you use for studying/working) - modify you /etc/hosts and map x.com to localhost. 3. Leave phone in the car when you get back home from work.
- soramimo 3mo ago1) Mobile browser views: I do this too, for extra friction don't store your password in your mobile browser and force yourself to type it manually when logging in.
- galleywest200 3mo agoAn additional suggestion would be to use uBlock Origin on a deskop/laptop and add the sites to the block list, which is what I did.