I Replaced Doomscrolling With Video Chat for Two Weeks — Here Is What Happened
It started on a Wednesday. Not dramatically — no rock bottom moment. I was sitting on my couch at 10:47 PM, half watching a show I had already forgotten, scrolling through Instagram with the kind of mechanical thumb movement that does not even register as a choice anymore. My weekly screen time notification had come in that morning. Four hours and thirty-eight minutes of daily average. Most of it social media.
I tried to remember a single post I had seen that day. I could not. Not one. I had spent the equivalent of a part-time job consuming content that left absolutely no trace in my memory. I was not learning anything. I was not connecting with anyone. I was just scrolling.
So I decided to try something. Not a digital detox — those last about thirty-six hours before I cave. Something that replaced the habit instead of just removing it. For the next two weeks, every time I reached for a social media app, I would open a random video chat platform instead. Same time investment. Completely different interaction.
Setting Up and the Early Days
The rules were simple. When the reflex to open Instagram or Twitter or Reddit kicked in, I would open a video chat app instead. No minimum conversation length. If someone was boring or inappropriate, I moved on, just like I would scroll past a post.
The first few days were rough. My thumb literally moved toward the Instagram icon without conscious input. And after months of passive consumption, the idea of actually talking to a stranger felt like an enormous cognitive load. Scrolling requires nothing from you. Video chat asks you to show up.
I tried a few platforms. Chatroulette felt abandoned. I moved to OmeTV next, because a friend had mentioned it. The bot problem became obvious fast — roughly one in three connections was either a bot running pre-recorded video or someone trying to redirect me to a paid site. After three days, I was spending more time skipping through bots than actually talking to people, which felt uncomfortably similar to the mindless scrolling I was trying to escape.
Finding ChatMatch
Then I found ChatMatch. The difference was immediate. Connections happened in under two seconds. Every match was a real person. The video quality was noticeably better. I did not have to develop a mental checklist for identifying bots because there were no bots to identify. When the friction is low, you actually stay for the conversation instead of burning out on the process of finding one.
I settled on ChatMatch for the remainder of the experiment, and the conversations started getting genuinely good.
On day five, I matched with a guy named Kofi from Accra, Ghana — a sound engineer recording an album for a highlife band. He held his phone up to his studio monitors and played me a thirty-second clip of a track they were mixing. I was sitting on my couch, listening to unreleased music from someone four thousand miles away. That does not happen on Instagram.
A few days later, I had a conversation with a veterinarian named Marta in rural Poland. She had just come back from a difficult calving, still wearing her work coat. We talked for almost forty minutes about the economics of small-scale farming in Eastern Europe. She told me about a farmer who sang to his cows because he believed it improved milk production. The research on it is actually mixed.
On day thirteen, I matched with a nineteen-year-old named Yuto from Osaka studying animation. He was nervous about a critique the next morning. I found myself giving him advice I probably needed to hear myself — that putting something you made in front of other people is always going to feel terrifying, and that the fear is not a sign the work is bad, it is a sign it matters to you. He seemed calmer by the end. I felt useful. That feeling does not come from scrolling.
These were not life-changing conversations. But they were real and unpredictable. They left me with actual memories instead of the vague, screen-glazed nothing that social media leaves behind.
Doomscrolling vs. Video Chat
After two weeks, the difference between the two became brutally clear. They occupy the same time slot and fill the same gaps. But the quality is completely different.
Social media is passive. An algorithm decides what you see. The interactions are parasocial — you watch other people live their lives and form one-sided relationships with strangers who do not know you exist. Video chat is active. Nobody curates the experience for you. Each conversation is genuinely unpredictable. It is imperfect, sometimes awkward. But it is real.
The thing that struck me most was how similarly both activities are structured but how differently they feel. Both are done alone, on a screen, usually on a couch. Both involve strangers. Both fill dead time. But one leaves you emptier than when you started, and the other leaves you with something — a story, a perspective, a moment of genuine human contact. The container is the same. The contents could not be more different.
After the Experiment
I am not going to pretend I deleted all my social media apps and never looked back. By the end of the two weeks, I had re-downloaded Instagram and I still check Twitter more than I probably should.
But my daily screen time dropped from four and a half hours to just under two. That is two and a half hours of my life returned to me every day. I still open ChatMatch three or four times a week. It has not replaced social media entirely, but it has replaced the worst of it — the mindless, late-night scrolling that was eating the largest chunk of my time and giving the least in return.
I am not going to tell you that random video chat will fix your relationship with technology. I do not believe in moralizing about digital habits. But if your weekly screen time report gives you that quiet, specific discomfort of realizing you have spent more hours watching strangers perform their lives than actually living your own — it might be worth trying something active instead of passive. Even for a few days.
Other people are interesting. More interesting than any algorithm. You just have to show up for them.
