Tell Us What Changed (For Better Or For Worse) When You Cut Back On Social Media

It's not your imagination: people really are posting less online.

For several years there, it seemed totally normal to a lot of us to post just about everything we did on social media. But lately, it seems like a lot of us are moving away from this kind of hyper-engagement. In my friend group, most of us rarely post anything at all anymore.

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If it feels like your feeds have more posts than ever from brands and professional content creators and less from regular people, it's not your imagination. 

According to a December report from The Wall Street Journal, fewer and fewer people are posting about their daily lives on social media, but many still log on to lurk.

So if you've stopped posting as much (or even gone ahead and deleted your accounts), we want to know why and how you're feeling about your decision.

Maybe you were someone who used to share photos every day of anything from your order at a cute new cafe to your cat's latest silly sleep position. However, you started to notice more and more negative comments everywhere, even on the most innocent content, that made you feel like it would be better for your mental health to scale back how much you post. You still lurk, but you feel better now that you're not dealing with trolls on your posts.

Photographer, Basak Gurbuz Derma / Getty Images

Or perhaps you stopped using social media altogether because you didn't like the way it made you feel. The people you were following often made you feel bad about yourself and where you are in life, and it's been freeing to let go of those emotions. But at the same time, you sometimes feel like you're missing out on news, gossip, and invitations to events.

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Or maybe you didn't like what apps like TikTok were doing to your attention span. It was way too easy for you to get stuck in endless scrolling mode, but one day, you realized that it just wasn't satisfying you. You deleted the app from your phone and started a new hobby, like cycling or crocheting, and now you feel a lot better about the way you spend your free time.

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Tell us about how your relationship with social media has changed in the comments below or via this anonymous form, and you could be featured in a BuzzFeed Community post.