My advice: follow <50 people, maybe <15 people, and always have the setting on “Latest Tweets”. That way, the algorithms don’t have power over you, it’s impossible to spend a lot of time (because there just aren’t that many tweets), and since you filtered so hard, hopefully the mean level of interesting-ness is high.
Different setups for different people, but for me twitter is close to a write-only platform.
I use a roam extension that let’s me write twitter threads from my roam, so that I can post things without needing to go to the site. (I have a special roam database for this, because otherwise I would be concerned about accidentally posting my personal journal entries to twitter.)
I have twitter blocked on my main machine. I have a separate chromebook that I use to browse twitter itself.
Even on that twitter-specific chromebook, I’ve blocked the twitter feed, and I use intention to limit my engagement to less than an hour a day, with “cool-downs”. I’ve sometimes relaxed these constraints on my twitter laptop, but when I don’t have intention set up, for whatever reason, I’ll often get sucked into 4 hour, engaging / interesting, but highly-inefficient twitter conversations.
Every few days, I’ll check twitter on on my twitter machine, mostly looking through and responding to my messages, and possibly looking at the pages of some of my favorite people on twitter.
All of this is to avoid the dopamine loops of twitter, which can suck up hours of my life like nothing else can.
The character of my personal setup makes me think that maybe it is unethical for me to use twitter at all. Posting, but mostly not reading other people’s content, in particular, seems like maybe a defection, and I don’t want to incentivize people to be on the platform. (My guess is that twitter is only a litter worse for me than for the median twitter user, though there are also twitter users for which it just straight up provides a ton of value).
To counter this, I add all my threads to threadreader, so that people can read my content without needing to touch the attention-eating cesspool.
That’s a very detailed answer, thanks! I’ll have a look at some of those tools. Currently I’m limiting my use to a particular 10-minute window per day with freedom.to + the app BlockSite. It often costs me way more than 10 minutes (checking links after, procrastinating before...) of focus though, so I might try to find an alternative.
Sorry for the tangent, but how do you recommend engaging with Twitter, without it being net bad?
My advice: follow <50 people, maybe <15 people, and always have the setting on “Latest Tweets”. That way, the algorithms don’t have power over you, it’s impossible to spend a lot of time (because there just aren’t that many tweets), and since you filtered so hard, hopefully the mean level of interesting-ness is high.
Different setups for different people, but for me twitter is close to a write-only platform.
I use a roam extension that let’s me write twitter threads from my roam, so that I can post things without needing to go to the site. (I have a special roam database for this, because otherwise I would be concerned about accidentally posting my personal journal entries to twitter.)
I have twitter blocked on my main machine. I have a separate chromebook that I use to browse twitter itself.
Even on that twitter-specific chromebook, I’ve blocked the twitter feed, and I use intention to limit my engagement to less than an hour a day, with “cool-downs”. I’ve sometimes relaxed these constraints on my twitter laptop, but when I don’t have intention set up, for whatever reason, I’ll often get sucked into 4 hour, engaging / interesting, but highly-inefficient twitter conversations.
Every few days, I’ll check twitter on on my twitter machine, mostly looking through and responding to my messages, and possibly looking at the pages of some of my favorite people on twitter.
All of this is to avoid the dopamine loops of twitter, which can suck up hours of my life like nothing else can.
The character of my personal setup makes me think that maybe it is unethical for me to use twitter at all. Posting, but mostly not reading other people’s content, in particular, seems like maybe a defection, and I don’t want to incentivize people to be on the platform. (My guess is that twitter is only a litter worse for me than for the median twitter user, though there are also twitter users for which it just straight up provides a ton of value).
To counter this, I add all my threads to threadreader, so that people can read my content without needing to touch the attention-eating cesspool.
That’s a very detailed answer, thanks! I’ll have a look at some of those tools. Currently I’m limiting my use to a particular 10-minute window per day with freedom.to + the app BlockSite. It often costs me way more than 10 minutes (checking links after, procrastinating before...) of focus though, so I might try to find an alternative.
Find and follow people you actually want to be friends with and interact with them as you would actual friends.
When you post, ask yourself if this is something that your friends would find fun or valuable or useful.