Originally published on June 28th, 2022 during Cohost's private beta.
Working on my Twitter Addiction
When it was announced that Elon Musk would be purchasing Twitter, and people began to talk about leaving, I had a serious realization. I have a genuine addiction to Twitter.1
Since then, I have made major efforts to ween myself off of Twitter and especially from my Main. I still frequently check my private personal twitter and AD Twitter, but I have managed to stay off Main for nearly 2 months with only brief relapses. I have tried very hard the moment I open Main to close it again. It was extremely difficult at first but what I did was I tried to interact less. The less I replied, Like, Retweeted, or Tweeted, the less Notifications I'd get. Notifications are the Reward in Twitter's dark patterns (though also the Worst Part???). That made it easier to stop scrolling. Once you don't look at a certain account long enough, the server stops cacheing all of your notifications and timeline for quick access. This is what really made the difference. The moments I did relapse and look at Main, my notifications tab was basically empty because the server had to spend time loading them. Likewise, my timeline didn't immediately load new content. In the time it took the server to start trying to pull my timeline and notifications, it was enough time for me to catch myself and close the app. Staying off Main has become gradually easier and easier, especially as I start investing my time in Things To Do Instead which gave me new behavioral rewards, and as my time away came to show me how much better things could be if I weened myself off. I'm not cured, it's still a struggle, but I'm making progress. The addiction "analogy" feels less and less like an analogy the more I work on this.
While I still definitely am checking AD even when I'm not horny just to have something to scroll, since I don't follow many accounts on there and horny content doesn't interest me when I'm not horny, the scrolling doesn't tend to last long and impacts me less. On my private personal account, I am still having that "oh I bet it's been long enough that there's new tweets on priv" timer and compulsively checking priv pretty regularly throughout the day, but usually I only see one maybe two new tweets when that happens, so it's not sucking up time from my day like Twitter used to do. I still need to get better about finding ways to feel confident about maintaining my relationships and friendships without feeling like reading their Twitters in the way to do it. In a way, I feel like I'm "vaping Twitter instead of smoking Twitter" if that makes sense. I've moved onto a less harmful form in order to try and ease myself off completely eventually.
What I've Been Doing Instead
Some of these I started doing specifically to help me quit Twitter, while others are just things I've taken up that fill the gaps Twitter left behind, or just because I have more time now.
Reading
A major thing I've been doing instead is reading. I discovered that if I use the Libby and Kindle apps on my phone, set the font to OpenDyslexic/Dyslexie, and set wide margins, then scrolling through pages of a book can satisfy my Twitter compulsion. When I feel the urge to Scroll, I instead open up a book app and read. The time it takes me to read one page on my phone is the same amount of time it takes to read one tweet, so my frequent page turning has that same pattern. But reading books makes me feel very good, and books have natural stopping points, and they end. And when a book ends, I feel a sense of satisfaction. Books also tend to be a lot deeper and more intellectually fulfilling than Twitter.
The News
To get the news, I've been reading the New York Times. With my public library card, I get free access to the New York Times. Every 3 days I have to redeem a new code from the library, which is a annoying, but it's easy enough to do. Once a day, I read the New York Times, and get my fill of the news. Are there newsworthy things that the NYTimes doesn't cover? Sure. Is the NYTimes editorial team often incompetent, biased, and problematic? Yes. However, I have a Masters degree in information literacy and have listened to plenty of Citations Needed to be aware of these distortions and read through the lines to get a sense of what's going on. I also regularly check WHYY for local news. I also tend to get plenty of news through my organizing networks and how we communicate. There's a telegram channel I follow for stuff on local activism, a couple union listservs I'm on, and a couple Signal chats I'm in. I don't feel like being off Twitter has made me any less plugged-in to what's important. But I'm plugged-in in a far healthier way. Truthfully, I do not need second-by-second updates on anything unless I am second-by-second involved with it.
Political Organizing
Speaking of organizing, I have absolutely not felt that leaving Twitter has made me less politically aware. A lot of people seem to think without Twitter, people will become politically ignorant and inactive. This is simply not the case. I have Signal group chats with people I organize with, and listservs for my union. I am plenty aware of what Actions are coming up, and there is plenty of discussion about political strategy and what we can do to effectively make positive change. These discussions are far more healthy and productive than anything I've ever seen on Twitter. Which makes sense, since we all actually know each other and are invested in working together, and our conversations aren't in the world's worst possible asynchronous-yet-synchronous medium.
Other Websites
I have been posting on Cohost things I might have tweeted, but since I'm not looking at Twitter, what I've been posting has been quite different. Less angry. Less of a feeling like I need to vent and post. I've also been scrolling on Tumblr a lot, which is more fun than Twitter, but I'm trying to be really careful about this so I don't just shift my dependency over to Tumblr. With both of those, I tend to run out of posts pretty quickly, and nothing on them feels Important so I don't really feel compelled to keep scrolling. Importantly, I never post on Tumblr. I only lurk. And I block anyone who follows my tumblr who I don't know personally. It's my special place to be unimportant. For the contents of my blog to "not matter."
Walking and Exercising
I've been doing a lot more walking to get everywhere lately. I've increased my daily activity from 30 minutes a day to 60 minutes a day. I'm often walking as many as 10,000 steps and if I get home and don't already have 60 minutes of activity logged from work then I finish it out on the exercise bike which has been nice. None of this has really felt exhausting to me.
Surprising Discoveries
Attention is also time perception
Not using Twitter so much has allowed my attention span to heal, which has had surprising positive affects on my physical health. Previously, if I tried to walk somewhere for 25 minutes, or exercise for 25 minutes, I would get very bored quite quickly. It was actually a major barrier. Even if I wasn't completely tired from exercise, I just couldn't focus on it. I got bored. But getting myself to look at Twitter less and less, my attention span and ability to focus has improved, which makes it easier to get through longer stretches of time. I don't really feel the need to have music or an audiobook going on my commute so much as before, and a 25-minute walk or 25 minutes on the exercise bike doesn't feel like an agonizing eternity anymore. This has made it much easier for me to get around the city. I walk to my friend's apartment more. Exercise is good for my mental health, to an absurd extent. I read that addiction is often a learned maladaptive coping mechanism for stress, and that exercise is a very common healthy way to deal with that stress. Walking and cycling have definitely been helping in that regard.
Better attention span means I'm also finding it much easier to read through books much more efficiently. I'm getting through a lot of books and really loving it. Books are so good. It also allows me to get more done at work. My executive functioning has improved somewhat without "check twitter" inserting itself into my workflow constantly.
Holy shit I have so much time
I knew that I sunk a lot of wasted time into Twitter but I didn't truly realize quite how much it had been draining. Twitter was my "skip this time segment" button like in a visual novel. "Make it be dinner." "Make it be tomorrow." It was a truly unhealthy and boring way to pass the time. I'm actually often, on weekends, finding myself restless and bored in new ways. I just have so much more time than I felt like I had had before. So I start having this moment of "Oh, I did the same amount of stuff I use to do on a Sunday, but it's only 3pm, instead of 7pm, because I didn't constantly stop what I was doing to check Twitter." I've always had this thought of "how do people find the time to do everything we're supposed to do..." and honestly, I still don't have enough time and energy for everything, but I certainly have a lot more now that I'm not sinking half of it into Twitter. Yesterday, I worked out for 45 minutes, showered, and then read manga for several hours until I got bored of it.... and just struggled to think of what else to do. I cleaned all my dishes, felt too sleep deprived to do chores, but just didn't really know what to do with all the free time.
Loneliness
It's in this free time that I've realized how much Twitter was about dealing with my loneliness, of which I have a lot. I am very lonely, frequently, and I try to use Twitter to make myself feel less alone. But it will never be enough. It's not actually going to make me not feel alone. I live with one roommate, and we aren't exactly non-stop hanging out, and if I make plans with friends all the time I get too tired. But I still have that loneliness I need to deal with. Honestly, even if I lived with my partners, I think I will always often feel lonely, and that I just need to learn new ways to be content with that which don't destroy my brain.
Other People Will Be Wrong or Judge You And That's Fine?
So so so much of Twitter is just constantly being aware of how every single possible person in the world exists and they're wrong and they hate you and you can't do anything right in their eyes. Everything you say is taken with absolutely no context for who you are what you've done or what you know and it's always interpreted to have the worst possible meaning. People often have the most insane takes and because of constant posturing you end up feeling like you have to take certain people seriously who are just being dumb in a way that's encouraged by the platform.
The longer I spend time away from Twitter, the more and more all these people on Twitter come off to me no different from the random strangers who ramble at me at work or on the street about how the rapture is coming, or how the Irish are all diseased. Sometimes I see takes on Twitter being postured as Leftist and Correct and You're a Bad Person for questioning it, but more and more when I see those it just makes me think of the woman who was yelling at work about how Jesus doesn't want libraries to exist because he didn't create books or libraries during the first 7 days of creation and therefore all libraries should be shut down. In the world, people can come up with some insane takes, it doesn't mean they all need to be heard out equally. Even if someone's feelings are coming from a genuine place of justified bitterness and hurt, it doesn't mean their opinions are actually correct or worth hearing; especially their opinions about you personally based on the tiny sliver about you that they've seen. The woman who said Jesus hates libraries? She was repeatably banned from libraries for refusing to wear a mask and verbally harassing staff. But she also expressed a lot of feelings about feeling like her neighborhood was being taken from her by gentrification, that this neighborhood was stolen from her, and that she has dealt with a lot of racism in her life. And that's all genuinely valid and justified emotions. But it doesn't mean she should take it out on library employees, who are also predominantly Black, or that it makes any goddamn sense to say that libraries should all be shut down because Jesus hates libraries..
And likewise, with people making wild accusations about other people on Twitter based on the most stretched definitions of words. Sometimes patrons come in and accuse another patron of something insane like being a "diseased Irish potato farmer" and asking me to remove them from the library for it. A lot of Twitter people trying to Win their interpersonal conflicts through public accusations just come off like that to me now. The only difference is that they're wealthy enough to own a smartphone and socially privileged enough to know that "zoophilic pedo" will be taken more seriously than "diseased Irish potato farmer." Even if, upon actually looking at the evidence, it's very difficult to conclude that the accused is actually a zoophile or a pedophile. They're just like, an adult who watches My Little Pony and a million things were extrapolated from that.
Ultimately, the less you're on Twitter, the less any of it can affect you. If you direct your focus offline, you'll realize it doesn't matter. No matter what insane things someone accuses me of on Twitter, it does not actually affect my job, where nobody is paying attention to my Twitter spats. It does not affect any relationship/friendship sufficiently built on trust, especially if it's offline. It does not really affect anything except how many followers I have on Twitter.
In a world before social media, you would constantly encounter hundreds of thousands of people throughout your life who didn't like you for whatever reason and then you'd never see them again and it didn't matter. On Twitter, you will forever share this space and so you'll constantly bump into accounts that have you blocked and you don't know why and it'll be distressing. But in a world outside Twitter, you wouldn't even know that this person doesn't like you. It doesn't matter.
Twitter encourages sharing your thoughts and feelings the moment you have them. So you get people reacting to Roe V Wade being overturned by arguing about how people are allowed to feel about it. Because they feel bitterness about other peoples' feelings and immediately tweet that bitterness instead of thinking about if it's politically useful. They aren't thinking about what's politically useful because they're not actually in a political organization doing actual organizing work. If they were more focused on the people in their own organizing cadre, they'd personally know the people they're working with and work together on shared goals. If they're concerned about not being heard, they could speak up to specific people who could then listen. On Twitter, you can never actually get that. There's no specific group who can say "OK, we're listening now" because you're just yelling into the void.
Twitter Panhandling is Precarity, Not A True Support Network
The only times it matters if people don't like you on Twitter is if your Twitter presence is a very large party of your career, income, or your ability to fundraise in an emergency. This mattered for me a lot in the past. My ability to raise funds on Twitter was something I thought of as my safety net. But that's not a true support network. It's only a step up from panhandling in terms of reliability.
The truth is, having 3000 Twitter followers does not equate to $3000 in an emergency. But one, single, good friend can equate to emergency housing, or post-hospital care. For every one good friend you have, it will do you better than 1000 Twitter followers. A loose mesh of people who vaguely know each other through each other will never be as strong as a dense net of people who are very close to each other and trust each other enough to not let Twitter beef come between them.
This might seem obvious, but I think what I've realized is that becoming very focused on Twitter conflicts can be actively disruptive to forming those deep, strong support networks. Being focused on how all the shallow connections online might equate to a potential crowdfunder gets in the way of forming trusting strong bonds with a smaller number of people.
If your career is as an independent artist or some sort of professional for whom being famous is necessary, then it absolutely sucks that Twitter has to matter for your career. I think being famous has always been an awful thing to need to be. I am very grateful that I have a stable career which doesn't require a public presence or brand. I think any career upon which Twitter must form your base is inherently a precarious career. A twitter base will never be as stable as a union. Many people have to work in precarious environments, and that sucks. What I can see is that depending on a Twitter base for income is as precarious as depending on an app like Uber, or perhaps even more precarious than that.
If a single stranger deciding they don't like you is enough to end your career or destroy your social safety net, then that is a precarious work environment or a precarious community. It is not worth it to invest all your energy into avoiding allowing that one person to destroy you. It is better to put that energy into finding/creating a less precarious work situation or healthier community.
In fact, Twitter feeds into anger problems I don't even have in my offline life. There's a special kind of rage I get over Twitter that I just don't feel in my life outside of it. It pushes me to make impulsive decisions to tweet things that ultimately cause harm to my communities and my loved ones. Things that shouldn't have been said in public or semi-public. I don't need 3,250 people to like me to be secure. My friends and chosen family and partners love me and will support me in an emergency. But the shit I would do on Twitter was often actively disruptive of those relationships and would compromise that security so that I could yell stuff at 3,250 people who didn't even really know what was going on.
Twitter is bad at everything it's used for
Twitter is used for a lot of different purposes, and that fire hose of everything at once is a part of what makes it so appealing.
But it's also just the worst possible medium for all of those things. Twitter threads are not good for expressing any concepts with depth or nuance. They are not a good place to have discussions of political strategy. They are not a good place to share art or original fiction. They are not a good place to learn the news. They are not good for simply anything at all. Microblogging is bad. Tiny thoughts were not meant to be shared the moment you had them. It is better for tiny thoughts to stay inside and be explored and thought through before being shared.
Something that really stood out to me pertaining to this was a huge discourse I saw on Twitter about if it's OK to be high at a protest or while doing mutual aid. The entire discussion was extremely heated and simply wouldn't go anywhere because nobody was on the same page about what anyone was actually talking about. The same tweet could be taken to mean "Don't be on acid while you're getting kettled by the cops" or "don't be on your medical cannabis for chronic pain while you serve plates of food at a Food Not Bombs event." What stood out to me was it was a completely pointless discussion because it was devoid of context of any specific political action or event that was actually happening.
If this was a room of people who were organizing a specific political action, and somebody said "We should all be sober for this one" it would not have been the same discussion. There would have been no rage, no dog-piling, no accusations of puritanism or moral judgements or bigotry against people with SUDs. Because these people would all know each other, and what they probably meant, and knew what actions they were actually planning. If someone said "let's all be sober at the food distro" someone else could just say "why do you propose that?" and they'd talk it out, maybe come to a compromise, or clarify what was intended. If someone said "let's all be sober while we try to sneak past security and occupy a government office" everyone else would say "yeah no kidding, of course."
Twitter is quite simply the worst way to politically organize. You are constantly leaking your plans to anyone who is watching. Twitter is the worst way for a community to talk out their issues. Because nobody actually knows each other or is working from a shared context, or has any kind of mutual trust, and random people can just show up and start it all back up again. Twitter is just bad at nearly everything people use it for.
In Conclusion
I'm going to continue to ween myself off of Twitter more and more. It's really bad for me and the less time I spend there the better my life is; and I don't actually sacrifice community, political awareness, or involvement by doing so.
I'm going to start writing anything that would have been a Twitter thread down as a Cohost longform post. If I think it's good enough to publish, I'll publish it, and then post a link to my Twitter.
I'll keep using Twitter priv to keep up with friends but I'm gonna try more and more to find better ways to do that that work for me. Eventually, I hope to someday not be touching Twitter at all.
Twitter is extremely unhealthy for me. I've made some very good friends through Twitter but Twitter wasn't why I made good friends. I made those friends in spite of Twitter. In my recovery from my childhood trauma being raised in a cult, I often struggle with when there are happy memories from the cult. As though that would invalidate that it was bad for me. But I've had to accept that of course I would have happy memories of the cult, because the cult was my entire life. Any happy memories I had had would have naturally been there. Likewise, Twitter has taken over so much of my life that any friends I made "through Twitter" obviously would have been through Twitter, I wasn't trying to make friends any other way. I could have still made friends through other places if I'd not been spending so much time on Twitter.
If you've read all this, then congratulations on your attention span. Cherish it. It's hope that someday you too may be free from micro-blogging. That we can embrace longform again.
- There's a difference between a chemical addiction like nicotine dependency, which will happen to anyone who smokes nicotine a lot; and a behavioral addiction like gambling and gaming addictions, which instead happen through behavioral conditioning like dark patterns. Not all substances are chemically addictive, but anything can be the focus of a behavioral addiction. Playing Fortnite a lot won't necessarily lead to a gaming addiction, the way smoking nicotine will, but Fortnite is designed in a way which encourages addiction. Similarly, it's very possible to use Twitter without becoming addicted, but Twitter is designed to encourage addictive behaviors. This is why people insist "Cannabis isn't addictive" despite demonstrated scientific evidence of people developing cannabis addictions and dependencies all the time. It might not be chemically addictive such that anyone who uses it will necessarily trend towards addiction, but it's still something that's very easy to make an unhealthy habit of using and form a dependency on. ↩︎