The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use

dderbOac about 3 hours ago 52 commentsRead Article on blog.incogni.com

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Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

charltonraven•about 1 hour ago

Its 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.

cryo32•22 minutes ago

My partner was for a bit. She deleted Instagram and started reading books again. This was surprisingly difficult to pick up again after a year of Instagram apparently. It does form very bad habits.

da-x•about 1 hour ago

Understand 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.

reactordev•32 minutes ago

The biggest culprits are the senior citizens. They are the most addicted to social media.

charltonraven•about 1 hour ago

Agreed.I am a victim of doom scrolling

j45•20 minutes ago

I have noticed the same.

Silencing all notifications and checking it on a timer is a big step.

HelloUsername•about 1 hour ago

Related (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 183 comments

TomMasz•about 2 hours ago

Social media isn't "social" anymore. It's algorithmically designed to keep you scrolling. Burnout is inevitable.

gnoll_of_gozag•about 1 hour ago

big 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•about 1 hour ago

And 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.

peaseagee•16 minutes ago

Say what you mean and you might be better received.

inigyou•26 minutes ago

What?

weagle05•about 1 hour ago

I 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.

q8zd3•about 1 hour 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.

cryptopian•43 minutes ago

One 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.

account42•about 1 hour ago

Digital beggars whose activity is enriching platform holders much more than what they themselves get out of it.

kijin•28 minutes ago

This has been happening since a long time before digital became a thing. Remember Fagin from Oliver Twist?

Lerc•about 1 hour ago

Burnout 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.

smcg•about 1 hour ago

I'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.

high_5•about 1 hour ago

Chat apps have already replaced socialapps like FB long ago and the companies know it. Meta has FB Messenger and WhatsApp.

bcjdjsndon•about 2 hours ago

Social 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•about 2 hours ago

Hysteria 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•about 2 hours ago

> The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera.

The way you use the term hysteria feels wrong to me.

bunderbunder•about 2 hours ago

In 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•about 1 hour ago

What'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.

alistairSH•about 1 hour ago

Even 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.

bunderbunder•38 minutes ago

I’m not sure how much it makes sense to pick this nit for a public opinion survey of this nature. The survey is being sent to people who mostly won’t think of the term in such precise ways, and even in social sciences it’s considered poor form to try to measure more precisely than your noise floor permits.

That said, I would assume most respondents have a more popular conception of the term. That’s going to be inherently a little fuzzy, but implies implies sites like X, Facebook and TikTok count, that Reddit is marginal, and that more “oldschool” things like webforums, chat services and even Hacker News are out.

bcjdjsndon•about 1 hour ago

Exactly

bcjdjsndon•about 1 hour ago

Some people fear paedos talking to kids, others fear kids watching bad videos or reading bad comments. They are two vastly different complaints.

One is about communications, the other is a more general concern about content that could extend to and audiovisual form.

Yet another definition is essentially a synonym for tiktok. Or sometimes they mean just twitter.

The UK online safety act leans heavily towards communication (ie comments or DMs, hence Wikipedia being caught up in it)

> assume the common meaning?

Which is? Point me to a defintion

j45•20 minutes ago

It’s likely if this is a thing, that early internet users of the 90s experienced their equivalent of having enough.

daveydave•about 2 hours ago

I 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•about 2 hours ago

There is more than enough research.

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).

qup•about 1 hour ago

You think billionaires are hoarders because the shares they own become worth a lot of money when they build successful companies?

TheOtherHobbes•about 1 hour ago

Circular definition. Number go up = "successful".

A non-hoarding economy would look very different, be far more exciting and inventive, and wouldn't be staging an ecological suicide run.

datadrivenangel•about 1 hour ago

It's like playing cookie clicker except the higher your number goes up the more social status you and power you have.

high_na_euv•about 1 hour 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•24 minutes ago

We 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•22 minutes ago

He's talking about money

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

Everything happens "quietly" these days...

brador•22 minutes ago

It’s not burnout, it’s panic.

The void is coming and everyone knows it.

pjc50•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

My 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.

nirav72•3 minutes ago

It 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.

assimpleaspossi•about 1 hour ago

I 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.

inigyou•about 1 hour ago

I now realise that incogni and incognet are two different companies.