In general I think modern social media is unhealthy in large
quantities but I'm not ready to write the whole effort off
as a waste of time. Just like eating a candybar or drinking
hard liquor, social media can be enjoyed in moderation.
I will fully admit my guilty pleasure is spending time
swiping through instagram stories to see viral videos and
videos related to my interests. This is a fun pastime but
it is so incredibly easy to become addicted and waste hours
swiping through these videos. Companies like Instagram and
TikTok design their apps to do this.
One of the easy way I combat this is to just unload the
instagram app on my iphone. When you unload an app in iOS,
the app icon remains and in order to open that program again
you have to download it. On cellphone data, downloading an
app like instagram is rather slow and annoying depending on
your personal cell data connection.
I find that this has a great effect in preventing the casual
unconcious habit of flipping to your phone when you are bored
and launching instagram for lack of something better to do.
Additionally, I've completely uninstalled the facebook app
from my iphone as well. When I need to check facebook I will
launch it from the web browser on my phone. The experience
of doing that is just annoying enough that I don't often do
it. But I will admit, the facebook habit is pretty hard to
kick. But if you delete the app, at least you have a pretty
good chance of reducint your time spent browsing through
all the algorithmically selected content.
If facebook ever improved their mobile website enough, then
it might be difficult to stop checking it. Luckily, facebook
doesn't appear to give a crap about how bad their mobile
experience is on native iOS safari.
