If Social Media is Cigarettes, Maybe Group Chats Are Vaping

I had the common 2020 experience of scrolling infinitely on Facebook and Twitter, then feeling worse for having done so. Eventually I had the sense to quit these platforms. Years later, it dawned on me that private group chats have many qualities of social media, beyond just connecting you to other people. While there is (typically) no advertising or adversarial-to-the-user content curation, I still feel impulses to: Drop whatever I’m doing to check for new messages, especially for replies and reactions to my own recent messages. Send low-effort GIFs, memes, or joking-but-ambiguously-serious messages that pollute the information commons (despite feeling smug at the time). Have disagreements in group chats with friends.1 After noticing that my digital home was full of information candy2 that I couldn’t stop compulsively eating, I mixed it with cat poop and took it outside departed many group chats today, including chats that I personally started and grew over a period of years.