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Comment by tjr | Hacker News Reader

I do feel that I get more out of spending 30 minutes reading a book than I do out of 30 minutes browsing Twitter. Despite how addictive it is (and thus how much some part of me apparently enjoys it), I think I prefer pretty much any activity on my list of possible activities over puttering around with my phone: taking photographs, cleaning dishes, composing music, putting away laundry, writing software, pulling weeds, sleeping...

Seriously, I get more value out of effectively anything else over browsing trivial stuff on my phone.

Why then is it so easy to keep doing it?

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I think it's hard to bump your brain up out of the ground state of doing nothing into the state of doing something. You have to decide what to do, marshal your focus, get up off the couch, and do it.

Browsing the web on your phone takes zero effort and it also effectively distracts you from the question of whether you should be doing something more worthwhile. It's a cognitive trap. It gives you the just five more minutes excuse, forever and ever.

Fear of missing out, I think.

And the fact that social media generally speaking is engineered to grab our attention and keep it for as long as possible – because personalized ads. When I identified my own FOMO a few years back I deleted most of my social media apps on my phone (except Fediverse-apps which have no algorithms, only good old chronological feeds).

I'm reading more books now :)

I don't think it's FOMO as much as those products are designed to release temporary happy chemicals with the least amount of effort. Let's be honest, it is much easier to get drunk, eat junk food all the time, browse reddit than it is to eat ur veggies, moderate alcohol, exercise, study etc... For most people, their mind always gravitates towards immediate hedonistic pleasures, this is just the way most people are built (myself included).

I guess the algorithms and the UX design is just tailored to tap into the very human fear of missing out. And the fact that we are creatures of habit.

> Why then is it so easy to keep doing it?

Because there's a strong dopamine rush triggered by the thought of seeing those twitter feeds, and your brain is particularly starved for dopamine at the time (maybe you're tired, bored etc). That triggering is the result of the same activity reinforced hundreds of time, so a strong neuronal association has been made between twitter and the reward. Stop using twitter (or whatever maladaptive addictive behavior you'd want to eliminate) for a few months, and those associations will fade.

If you are engaged in a meaningful conversation for instance, you won't feel such a strong urge to check twitter.

It's hard for me to quit twitter because no matter how low quality the average tweet is, there are always diamonds in the rough -- perfectly composed little knowledge bombs.

If you happen to open the app at the right time Twitter can be very high signal/noise.

I keep coming back because of the thought that maybe I'll open it and be introduced to a compelling thought that would have otherwise been buried in 20 pages of cruft

I find it hard to believe that something deeply insightful can be compressed into 140 characters, or even a collection of tweets. I've read tweet-chains from twitter pundits, and though these longer form tweets do have insight, it's still more like getting an elevator pitch from a smart person than actually getting a deep understanding of the reasoning that leads to said opinions.

Basically, my feeling from using twitter is that it is a venue for expressing opinions in clever/snarky ways, and reading other people's clever/snarky opinions and feeling amused. But I might be very wrong, or following the wrong people. Do you have any examples of tweets that are highly information-dense and making insightful points?

All fair points. I've found that radically limiting the people I follow has had a huge impact on the quality of my feed (and it's still not great).

More often than not a tweet provides me with an introduction to a new topic / idea that I can then further explore off the site.

I struggled to come up with good tweets on the spot -- here's my best shot:

https://twitter.com/steveschoger/status/997125312411570176

https://twitter.com/tobyshorin/status/1155965565963399173

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936

https://twitter.com/jmj/status/1114598412375035905

Naval's does feel particularly like an elevator pitch though

Thanks for sharing these. It's funny, I had exactly that series by Naval in mind earlier. I think the database tweet is really useful (reminds me of a lecture slide).

People love to repeat "time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted," but I'd change it to "time that's fulfilling to waste is not time wasted" because fulfillment looks at things on the long time scale.

It better captures why wasting so much time on, say, Twitter actually is time wasted: it's not likely to be as fulfilling as just about any other way you could've spent that time. Only narrowly beating out spending that time in a drug-induced euphoric stupor.

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