The year I quit Facebook
In 2016 I deleted my Facebook account. The reason was boring and entirely human: the constant conflict and drama had worn me down. Arguments in comment threads, passive-aggressive posts, people I barely knew weighing in on every aspect of life. I'd had enough.
What I didn't know at the time was that 2016 was, by every measure, the single biggest year of social media growth ever recorded. A 15.32% spike in daily usage according to SOAX Research, pushing the global daily average to 128 minutes. I was swimming against the tide and I barely noticed.
Facebook was just the beginning. Over the following years I worked through the rest of my accounts: Imgur (primarily an image host, but one with enough community features to generate its own nonsense), LinkedIn, and Reddit. Gone, all of it.
What the research confirms
At the time, leaving felt like a personal quirk. Looking back, it follows along closely with what researchers have documented.
A longitudinal study of 175,000 U.S. College students from 2004 to 2016, published in the American Economic Review, found that Facebook's rollout produced a 7% rise in severe depression and an 8% rise in anxiety, attributed largely to social comparison. A 2021 Pew Research Center study found that 64% of Americans believe social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country. That's not a fringe position. It's the majority view.
The conflict I experienced on Facebook wasn't incidental. Research published in PLOS One found that polarization online increases specifically because of the ease of sharing political content, intolerance for opposing views that triggers backlash, and the volatility of opinion changes when users face pushback. The platforms don't just host conflict. Their mechanics produce it. Studies also show that interactions between users with opposing ideologies are characterized by negativity and toxicity, while same-ideology interactions trend positive. The result is that everyone retreats further into their corner.
Platform by platform
LinkedIn felt like a performance contest: optimized job titles, humble-brag announcements, engagement-bait posts dressed up as professional wisdom. The underlying dynamic wasn't networking. It was status signaling with extra steps.
Reddit could surface genuinely useful technical discussions, but the tribal structure was hard to ignore. Communities organized around shared beliefs, and disagreement from outside those beliefs was treated as an attack. Research from the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley describes exactly this pattern: social media amplifies moral and emotional messages while organizing people into groups built around tribal conflict.
Imgur was the smallest footprint, even though I had over 800,000 points when I killed my account. Even a comment section on an image-hosting site can go sideways fast when the design rewards engagement over quality.
After the purge
As of February 2025, the average internet user spends 141 minutes per day on social media. Nearly 15 hours a week, or about 32 days a year. I got those days back.
A study in the Behavioral Sciences Journal recruited 43 adults for a two-week social media detox and found improvements in sleep duration, interpersonal connection quality, and reduced chronic stress. My experience matched that. Without the constant drip of notifications and comparison, the background anxiety that I'd normalized simply dropped off. I stopped measuring my opinions against the reactions of people I'd met once at a party.
Nicholas Carr's 2025 book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart argues that we'd be healthier using these platforms less. Or not at all. He's right, and I reached that conclusion nine years ago by accident. The drama I was escaping on Facebook turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Leaving was the correct call.
I encourage everyone to do the same. Instead of reading posts, I'm back to reading books. It's much better and more relaxing use of my time.