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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

After being addicted to Twitter to a point where I could not focus on anything (as someone who was born in Ukraine, all I did was doom scrolling), I've decided that the only winning move is not to play. No Threads or BlueSky for me. I am OUT.

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There was a happy time around 2018 or so, where I followed a limited group of about 50 Twitter accounts. Using Tweetbot, I could keep up with the timeline in about ~20 minutes per day. I would see interesting conversations and links, some humor and almost no anger.

It all went downhill since then.

I had the same experience here in the Twin Cities during the fallout after George Floyd's murder. It was awful, possibly the worst experience in my life, all driven by Twitter. I finally deleted my Twitter account when Musk took it over, and my life has improved massively. I did register a Bsky account, but it immediately triggered the same awful feelings that having a Twitter account did, so I haven't looked back.

These things are absolute brain poison and I don't miss them at all.

>No Threads or BlueSky for me. I am OUT.

I still use Twitter some, but I had a similar experience with Facebook. One day I found myself lurking on acquaintance's profiles and thought: "what am I even doing?". I quit and never looked back.

Problem is, I find Twitter really useful. But you have to keep your stream focused (in my case tech and data). It's really easy to doom scroll. In fact that's kind of the design intention.

Whatever Twitter had in usefulness has been gamed and reverse-engineered by the big accounts and the paid blue ticks to the point where the signal to noise ratio is no longer good enough.

Never used twitter, but I was a reddit addict. My life is much better now that I've stopped. It really is the only winning move.

Same here. Reddit and Youtube for a shocking amount of time per day. I had to quit Reddit like I quit nicotine, it was genuinely difficult.

The good news is that it reduced my Youtube time as well because I didn't have anything to pair it with. I realized I would watch Youtube and if I was bored or uninterested I may pull out my phone and hop on Reddit. Get bored of Reddit? Find a video to throw on. It was good to put a wrench in this self-reinforcing feedback loop.

I have come to the same conclusion. I still feel a bit out of place every now and then without any social media, but if I need to chat - I just open up whatsapp and talk to my actual friends instead.

i have been addicted too, trying to quit several times, and went cold turkey when musk took over

I suggest a strategy to reduce Twitter addiction: limit yourself to following no more than 100 accounts and avoid using the "For You" tab.

A better strategy: just delete your account. I promise you won't miss it after a week.

Delete your account, remove the apps. Block it on the network level if you need to. Just add any friction you can to using it.

If even 1 of those 100 frequently retweets stuff from another 10 accounts, this system stops working.

For me, the perfect thing would be something that aggregates links from all these sources, because there is useful stuff there sometimes.

The discussion tends to be worse than useless.

I'll implement this "some day"

I made fossil for this purpose. Sometimes the good stuff is regular social posts, sometimes it’s links. The only way to separate the wheat from the chaff is AI (imo)

https://timkellogg.me/blog/2024/01/03/birb

For social media that offers RSS (YouTube, Mastodon, and now BlueSky), I use an RSS reader.

If something important happens on Xitter/Facebook, it’ll get repeated elsewhere.

If you are ruthless at blocking and curating who you follow, Twitter can be a very good experience.

My Twitter feed is nothing but posts about what is going on in AI.

While I do follow Elon Musks account, because it may contain something important to know at some point (which rarely happens), I block everyone he retweets in regards to political views so that I'm not affected by it.

I use an ad blocker to remove the Trending panel, because at least here in Germany it is an entry point to the gates of hell, where you are guaranteed to be confronted with the most extremist, anti-government people this country has to offer. Politics are the worst on Twitter, and Twitter feeds that rage in order to have more engagement.

I also have always had a curated list of "following" but certainly my experience has been degrading in the last months, for various reasons.

It should be said that for specific contexts, Twitter is the right place to follow, and AI is one of these.

The issue with creation is that you have to devote mental energy to removing the crazies. I felt much better simply cutting it all out of my life. I only read individual blogs now and its way better. If only we could convince the people worth following to start WordPress blogs or something.

> My Twitter feed is nothing but posts about what is going on in AI.

Sounds awful! :-)

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