Write Only Mode for Twitter

A few weeks ago, I decided to step back from using Twitter so actively. There are certainly a lot of good things about Twitter - it’s entertaining and informative - but, from a mindset of Digital Minimalism, I could not honestly say that it was doing me more good than harm.

Three particular points (which are deliberate parts of Twitter’s design) stood out:

• It’s addictive. I never actually analyzed how many unintentional minutes I’d spent on Twitter (that is - time beyond the time that I had consciously and deliberately intended to spend on it) each week, but I’m sure it would horrify.
• It’s rage-inducing and exhausting. The algorithm recognizes that inflammatory and negative content gets more engagement - and shows you more of it. If you try to correct a misapprehension, the limitation of 280 characters makes it nearly impossible to make a point that won’t be misunderstood (or countered with something equally facile).
• It’s attention-degrading. My ability to focus (particularly on longform reading) has noticably degraded since I started using Twitter earnestly.

In the few weeks since I changed my personal account’s password to intentionally lock myself out, I cannot honestly say that I empathise with Robin Sloan that:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

In fact, I still often have thoughts that make me think “That would make a good tweet” - not just “That was an interesting or insightful thought”, but “The form or content of that thought would ‘do well’ on Twitter”. More proof, if proof were needed, that I should probably be (and have been) engaging with it less.

So what?

As the saying goes - this isn’t an airport, you don’t have to announce your departure. Well, three reasons:

• This is a blog, and blogs require content :P
• Talking in public normalizes. If this encourages someone else to critically re-evaluate their relationship with social media, that is a good thing!
• As is my way, I wrote a software tool to help with a personal goal - a tool to post to Twitter from the command-line without actually going to the Twitter site itself. The hope is that this will let me scratch that “I should tweet that” urge from my personal account without either getting the urge to start scrolling the timeline, or getting the reinforcement feedback of notification of likes/RTs/replies. Eventually, I hope to use this tool to automatically tweet (from my professional account) when a new blog post is published.

(No, my personal account isn’t linked from this post. That’s deliberate. You can probably find it without too much effort - but I’m not planing to advertize it)

What replaces it?

A point that came up in conversation with George was the question of what to use to fill those liminal times, when you don’t have the time to properly start reading a book or article. I don’t have a good answer - Twitter, I must admit, is extremely well-suited to providing bite-sized reading (even while we acknowledge that that is not, itself, necesssarily a good thing). Two suggestions:

• Find a Twitter thread of Best Of Tumblr screenshots or similar (I recommend this or this/this). Keep it live on your phone’s browser, and read that when you’re tempted to read Twitter instead. You can’t respond, and Tumblr tends to be less inflammatory than Twitter anyway ([citation needed])
• Use that time for mindfulness meditation! Easier said than done, but many worthwhile things are.

• MentalHealth