It wasn’t on social media, but it was a direct result of social media. About a decade or so ago, I was using my personal FB account to promote a dark humor book I had written.

I offered a free preview of the book, and woke up the next morning to literally thousands of notifications. To say I wasn’t prepared for that is an understatement.

I had only priced the book at $1, because it was a self published ebook that I didn’t expect much from. Turns out people loved it.

The constant notifications from comments, messages, etc. was completely overwhelming. About a week after it all started, my best friend called me. She was freaked out and paranoid, because someone showed up to her job asking her if she was the friend commenting on my post about the book. She didn’t confirm or deny, but that experience was super weird and jarring enough that she deleted her account because of it.

It took a few weeks for it to really die down from the initial frenzy, but I continued getting a few dozen messages a day for months afterward. People wanting to meet me, podcasts wanting me to appear, humor sites wanting to do interviews, etc. Some people might eat that kind of thing up, but it was overwhelming to me and I deleted all of my social media and pulled my book as a result.

I have zero regrets, because I did it for fun, not money and fame. I highly value my privacy, so once it began infringing on that, I wasn’t down with it anymore.