The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use
46 points
1 hour ago
| 13 comments
| blog.incogni.com
| HN
HelloUsername
2 minutes ago
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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
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charltonraven
22 minutes ago
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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.
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da-x
10 minutes ago
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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.
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weagle05
18 minutes ago
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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.
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Lerc
13 minutes ago
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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.

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TomMasz
1 hour ago
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Social media isn't "social" anymore. It's algorithmically designed to keep you scrolling. Burnout is inevitable.
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gnoll_of_gozag
42 minutes ago
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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
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assimpleaspossi
15 minutes ago
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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.
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q8zd3
39 minutes ago
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> "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.

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account42
4 minutes ago
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Digital beggars whose activity is enriching platform holders much more than what they themselves get out of it.
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smcg
16 minutes ago
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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.

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high_5
10 minutes ago
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Chat apps have already replaced socialapps like FB long ago and the companies know it. Meta has FB Messenger and WhatsApp.
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bcjdjsndon
1 hour ago
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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

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inigyou
1 hour ago
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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.

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bflesch
1 hour ago
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> The word hysteria originates from the Greek word for uterus, hystera.

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

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bunderbunder
56 minutes ago
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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?
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rob-lag
36 minutes ago
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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.

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alistairSH
30 minutes ago
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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.
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close04
26 minutes ago
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And the content discovery algorithm is tuned to please the masses, the users drive the algorithm which promotes or buries the content for everyone else. I think the moment you use a socially driven algorithm to show/hide content from users is when you're planted firmly in social media territory.
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bcjdjsndon
34 minutes ago
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Exactly
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bcjdjsndon
34 minutes ago
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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

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daveydave
57 minutes ago
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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.
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callmeal
48 minutes ago
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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).

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qup
18 minutes ago
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You think billionaires are hoarders because the shares they own become worth a lot of money when they build successful companies?
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TheOtherHobbes
3 minutes ago
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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.

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datadrivenangel
11 minutes ago
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It's like playing cookie clicker except the higher your number goes up the more social status you and power you have.
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high_na_euv
30 minutes ago
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>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

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pjc50
49 minutes ago
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> "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).

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nottorp
46 minutes ago
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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.

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assimpleaspossi
9 minutes ago
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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.
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Retr0id
1 hour ago
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Everything happens "quietly" these days...
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inigyou
41 minutes ago
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I now realise that incogni and incognet are two different companies.
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