Stepping back from social media

From the moment I posted my first status on Facebook, back in 2009, I’ve always loved social media. Shortly after I started blogging in 2011, I started posting on Twitter. If I loved Facebook, I was OBSESSED with Twitter.

I used Twitter to promote my blog, but mainly just to share the thoughts in my head. If people didn’t respond, that was fine, but if they did, even better! Before I knew it, I’d made friends on Twitter. Many of those people became real life friends and some are still friends today.

Apparently, since I joined Twitter (as it was back in the good old days), I’ve posted on there more than 250,000 times.

I joined Instagram in 2013, back in the days when people turned every picture into what looked like an old Kodak print from the 1970s and just shared pictures of their dinner and arty flat lays with things like a book, a flower, a pair of glasses and a necklace.

I never joined TikTok or Snapchat. I never went on to do Reels on Instagram, I just stayed as I was, posting thoughts from my head, chatting to the people who had become friends and promoting my blog.

Over the course of several years, Twitter turned into a bin fire. When it got taken over by the evil Elon Musk, it turned poisonous. But I still called it Twitter, rather than X, and still remembered the good old days of chatting with my friends.

Then, in 2023, Threads appeared. It was just like Twitter in the good old days. Some of my old Twitter friends were on there and I made new friends too – mainly people who liked running. I loved Threads just like I’d loved Twitter. It was less widely used than Twitter ever was and a lot of people forgot it even existed, but for me, it was great.

And it stayed great for quite a while.

But it was dominated by Americans who assumed the world revolved around them. They ‘didn’t understand’ what we Brits were talking about. Or they chose not to.

The algorithm was good – it put me in touch with so many runners. But the feed always defaulted to ‘For you’ rather than ‘Following’ and some of that stuff definitely wasn’t for me.

For a long time, I stayed on X (as I’d finally learned to call it, because it was nothing like it used to be) and Threads – spending most time on Threads. Then, earlier this year, I realised I couldn’t support the despicable excuse for a human being any more. Even though I wasn’t giving anyone any money, I couldn’t be a part of anything he was a part of. Leaving X meant leaving behind a few people I chatted to because they weren’t on Threads.

But, by this point, Threads really wasn’t much better.

At best, it was boring and repetitive – people constantly saying ‘can we normalise’ (my response in my head – you don’t need to normalise, just do whatever you want!), people saying they were pregnant and asking what your grandma’s name was (never your grandad’s), people asking really thick questions like ‘does anyone read books?’ and the endless discussion about whether people really used to cover school textbooks in paper.

This stuff started to really irritate me and there was no way of shutting it out. You could block someone, but someone else would say it 20 minutes later.

Then there was all the judgement and being told to boycott everything from Cadbury’s to Spotify. Again, I feel like people should be free to choose. Maybe Cadbury’s isn’t as nice as it once was, but if people want to eat it, let them eat it, without 300 nasty keyboard warriors having a go at them.

There was just downright nastiness. People would jump on others and have a go at them for no reason at all.

But I was still sharing the thoughts in my head and the things I was doing, like I did way back in 2011. One day, I shared a quirky little story my son had shared about an experience he’d had. And people, who couldn’t relate to the story at all,  just started having a go and telling me I was wrong and it wasn’t true.

And I’d had enough.

I realised I didn’t need this in my life any more. Even without people having a go at me, Threads was starting to take over my life and weigh heavily on me. It was frustrating me, it was tiring me out, it was making me angry.

So I decided not to post on it any more and not to look at it any more.

After I’d taken the decision, the last post tagging me was from a very nice Threads friend responding to a call for book recommendations. She recommended a book she’d enjoyed that I’d recommended. Then added ‘I’m reading a Richard Osman now’. And someone completely unrelated to the conversation jumped in and said ‘I don’t like Richard Osman’.

And that really sums Threads up. Nobody asked this person whether she liked Richard Osman. Nobody needed to say anything at all. If you don’t like Richard Osman, just scroll on by. But people on Threads are incapable of that and it’s exhausting.

I thought stepping away from social media would be hard, but it was a lot easier than I expected. Sometimes I do still want to share the thoughts in my head, but I just either share them with my family later in the day (which I always did anyway) or just keep them to myself and let them go.

It’s a shame not to talk to the nice people any more. But my head feels clearer and I feel happier.

I’m still sharing pictures on Instagram like it’s 2014 and I’m still on Facebook, where my small number of friends consists entirely of people I actually know. But I genuinely think I’m done with Threads, X and any other social media like them. I don’t need that negativity in my life.