How I Made Social Media Suck as Much as Possible (and took back my attention span)
With higher screen times come bigger paychecks for the world’s most popular social media sites. I’ve saved up my emergency cliché phrase, “now more than ever,” for this article because our attention is being increasingly, unethically commodified by the day.
Social media exploits our monkey brains through subtle ways — making useless notifications the most urgent shade of red, pushing doom-scroll traps up in our feeds in the form of brain rot YT Shorts, and brainstorming ways to make wasting time as convenient as can be.
Like the hippie Gen-Z that I am, I’ve considered switching to an analog flip phone to get away from it all, but there’s no escaping the fact that social media has been so integrated in everyone’s lives that cold-turkey quitting can be detrimental to everyday communication.
So I kept my Instagram, my Facebook, and my Twitter (now X) but made them suck so bad that I wouldn’t spend more time than necessary on these platforms.
Here’s how you can do it too.
Chrome Extensions
This Chrome extension completely purges the news feed and replaces it with inspirational quotes. It was made in 2012 by Jordan West, but it still works extremely well for various social media sites in 2024.
2. Undistracted: Hide Facebook, YouTube Feeds
This is a lifesaver especially for YouTube. There are options to blur thumbnails and comments or get rid of the sidebar completely. It has an ability to hide Shorts and useful features for other platforms as well.
3. IGPlus — Remove Instagram Reels, Explore Page
IGPlus Extension has comprehensive settings for Instagram. I use it to disable the Explore page on top of the feed while still being able to access my messages.
Grayscale the Web is the cherry on top of my Chrome extensions. I’ve made it so that my social media sites will appear in monochrome no matter what, making them much more boring than other websites. For people who want to completely lock-in, there’s also an option to grayscale ALL sites.
Uninstalling Apps
As not all extensions work on mobile, I’ve completely gotten rid of all social media apps on my phone except those used for communication (Messenger & Telegram). Any time I want to post something, I would have to install the app and uninstall it after posting.
A Life Forward
I resent the hours I’ve spent mindlessly scrolling on social media, and I know that a lot of people do too.
With these tools, I was able to cut some time off the screen and go back to my creative, offline hobbies — painting, drawing, and writing. I hope that you, too, can take advantage of tools that harness against the draw of socmed.
Here’s the latest sketch I’m working on, a portrait of Harley Quinn from Birds of Prey.
