It's OK to Post About Quitting Social Media on a Social Media Platform

All these smug "Substack is social media" notes are missing the point.

Illustrated by Stephanie Vee

Reader, did you know that Substack is social media? If you didn’t, there are hundreds of Substack writers clamouring to tell you so — all with a tone that suggests they are among the first to make this observation.

I don’t believe in publically shaming anyone who isn’t a public figure, so I won’t post any of my (many) screenshots of this latest Notes trend. All I will encourage you to do is plug “Substack + social media” into the search bar on your homepage, and filter by Notes. You’ll find an assortment of statements claiming Substack is not social media, but you’ll find many more of the variety I’ve satirized in my image above.

These individuals are missing the point.

Where This Trend Comes From

It feels like quit lit¹ has been around for ages. I’m not an expert in cuneiform, but there is almost certainly an ancient Sumerian slab out there with the equivalent of “I declare I shall no longer waste my time on these frivolous etchings, and will instead spend the rest of my life herding goats” carefully chiselled by some weary hand.

Writing about leaving social media is merely the latest addition to the quit lit genre. Substack has become the new digital home for many people discussing why they’ve left self-damaging social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and how their lives have improved since eliminating these platforms from their daily routines.

For unclear reasons, this trend has irritated many Substackers to the point of writing sarcastic notes about how, um, ackshually, Substack is social media. These notes are gleefully liked and restacked by other readers, often with a variation on “someone had to say it!” or “glad someone finally spoke up about this!”

You know, because no one’s apparently doing that.

Why It’s Unhelpful

My problem with these notes (and their restacks) is that they often seem to proceed from a place of intellectual smugness — not from any genuine desire to inform. The assumption these authors make is that people posting on Substack about quitting social media are just too ignorant to acknowledge that Substack is itself a form of social media. One can almost see their shit-eating grins as they tap out their unpopular opinions (which, as it turns out, are rather popular indeed).

We get it, folks. Substack is social media: it has a recommendation algorithm; it has addictive features (i.e. “likes”, “restacks”) designed to trigger big dopamine releases that keep one on the platform; it has Reels (🤮), for godsake. You aren’t telling social media addicts anything they don’t already know. You also aren’t acknowledging the purpose of quit lit, or the fact that social media is not some amorphous thing with uniform degrees of awfulness.

Social Media Quit Lit Has a Specific Purpose — and Mocking it Achieves Nothing

A common argument I see levied against posts about quitting social media (or even downgrading to dumbphones) is that they are performative or preachy or narcissistic. I could link to plenty of examples, but will again encourage you to seek these authors out yourself. They’re not difficult to find.

While there are certainly people out there writing quit lit for attention and money, it is a genre of writing that is, on the whole, altruistic and grounded in community. Would these same anti-quit lit authors insist, I wonder, that Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are performative or narcissistic? They’re chock-full, after all, of people using those dreaded, self-absorbed “I” statements to tell personal stories of recovery.

The entire point of quit lit is to reach out to other people who have a problem and say: “Hey, I also have this problem — this is why it’s a problem for me, and this is what I’m doing to work on it. Maybe what I’m doing will work for you, too, or maybe you have some better ideas that I haven’t heard about or tried yet.”

Would it be better to start in-person social media recovery groups instead of talking about quitting social media on social media? Possibly, but until those become more common in our respective geographic communities, online community is the best (and often only) thing we have.

Also, using social media to critique social media is a subversive activity in and of itself. When last I checked, subversion is generally a positive thing. Indeed, one of the anti-anti-smartphone pieces I read lately suggests it is better to “subvert from within” than it is to navel-gaze about buying dumbphones and digital detoxing — and subverting from within is exactly what social media quit lit does, to my mind. We are using social media itself to identify what’s wrong with it, to brainstorm common-sense strategies for lessening its grip on our lives, and to support one another in this endeavour.

Some Social Media Platforms Are Better Than Others

Another thing that’s a bit irksome about the smug anti-quit lit notes is that they often fail to acknowledge this basic and undeniable fact: Substack is social media, yes, but it sure as hell isn’t Instagram.

People who write about quitting social media are typically referring to a specific type of social media. They’re referring to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Twitter², and the like. These are all predatory platforms led by uncaring CEOs who have a vested interest in keeping users scrolling so they can keep spamming them with ads, so they can keep tracking (and selling) their clicking and viewing habits. Addiction is their end-goal because it earns them lots of money.

While Substack certainly has some worrisome and potentially-addictive social media features, it’s still a newsletter platform first and foremost. The social media side of the platform is newer and it’s kind of wonky. As I wrote last week, for instance, Substack’s recommendation algorithm has been much less intuitive for me when I compare it to other social media platforms I’ve used, and that’s doing all sorts of wonders for my doomscrolling tendencies.

People who are flocking to Substack from Instagram (i.e. the most common target of all these anti-quit lit notes) are leaving behind a damaging social media platform that promotes and rewards unrealistic standards of success and beauty for a very different online space that doesn’t do those things to anywhere near the same degree. We see Instagram-like content on Substack every day (or I do, anyway), but it’s not the whole platform by any stretch, and it’s easy to seek out and enjoy long-form posts and notes here that are the very antithesis of Instagram.

So, in short, please cut the Instagram refugees some slack. They don’t need you to pompously point out for them that Substack is still a social media platform, hur-hur-hur, smirking emoji. Most of them do appear to know that. It’s not the point. They’ve identified a problem and have chosen to make a healthier change for themselves.

That is something worth celebrating and supporting — not mocking.

1. Quit Lit refers to (usually) autobiographical writing that outlines a problematic relationship a person has with some tangible or intangible thing (e.g. alcohol, academia, gig work, etc.), and the steps said person takes to “quit” that thing.

On a personal note, I first encountered quit lit around 2010 or so when I was a grad student and feeling — quite reasonably — depressed about my future prospects on the dire tenure-track job market. Reading about the lived experiences of other concerned grad students and adjuncts provided a road map (and justification) for getting out.

I ended up voluntarily leaving my PhD program in 2012, and made my own contributions to the then-booming academic quit lit genre via a WordPress blog I’ve long-since abandoned. Sharing what I went through during that time with others was enormously helpful.

2. GFY, Elon. 😚