I have stopped checking Twitter for two weeks now. Though I am not a big producer of content, I was hooked to it as a consumer.
Few things became apparent which made me decide to stop using Twitter
- Reduced attention span — As this platform is inherently designed to consume contents which are sub-5 seconds, as I got more hooked onto the incessant stream of tweets, I was becoming aware that my attention span is reducing. This manifested in multiple ways — I was having difficulty in reading long articles. A 15 minute long article meant half way through I lose interest and my fingers went fiddling into the cesspool of tweets. This started spilling over to videos as well, I was losing patience to watch long videos too
- Addiction — Every short break, waiting on the elevators, waiting on traffic entailed a quick check on the Twitter timeline. Sometimes even during meetings there was a craving for a quick glance through the timeline. This was definitely muddling up with my thought process and thinking
- Subjugation — Twitter has this weird algorithm which pushes certain handles and type of tweets more, yes may be it is based on my previous Likes & Retweets. But it was becoming monotonous and mucked up. And my world view was getting subjugated by handful of tweets. And there was too much of duplication the same tweet appears 3 to 5 times through the day
- Noise — There is too much noise in the platform, especially if I turn on “Latest Tweets as they happen” the Timeline quickly reduces to a rubble with irrelevant tweets like “Thank you” and people Retweeting their own tweets & replies to their tweets
Next Steps
So the last two weeks I have not opened Twitter even once, for sure the sky has not fallen. Feeling as if an outrage factory has been shut and mind is bit more calmer. In my search for the Anxiolytics to ward off my Twitter induced anxiety & deprivation, I have subscribed to physical newspaper and started reading them in the morning. I have taken paid subscription to Medium and hunting those 15 minutes+ articles and meticulously reading them. Started subscriptions for a few paid substack newsletters
One thing is for sure, reading long articles gives an innate sense of satisfaction, rekindles the thought process and making me less anxious. Constant stream of tweets was leading to a context switch every 3 seconds and nothing was implanted for deep thinking. Though threads were a sort of user innovation which Twitter had to promote long content, I never enjoyed threads too. The platform had so adverse impact that I was not finding patience even to complete the thread and mind was running for the next tweet
The seed for all this came from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6AF_aFuD8w
So no more short contents, no more instant gratification, but onto a long, quiet grind
