How this Twitter thing is going

TLDR: Good!

As you may remember, I overhauled my relationship to Twitter last September, and I thought I’d write a little about how it’s been going. Here’s what I said about my plan:

So it’s time to finally take some advice from our problematic fave Cal Newport. If Twitter serves me as a professional tool, I need to “use it like a professional.” For a long time, I have resisted using social media clients that give you more control over your feed because I thought that interacting with Twitter in the least convenient way possible—through twitter.com in my computer’s web browser—would naturally encourage me to spend less time on it. That’s worked to a certain extent; not having social media apps on your phone really does make a difference. It may have even been enough in 2012. In 2020, though, it’s time to get serious. I downloaded Tweetbot and set it up so that rather than showing me my timeline by default, it shows only tweets from a bot that posts squares of different colors. I made a list of a handful of accounts that help me see what’s going on in the field I cover as a journalist, which I’ll check regularly but occasionally. I’ll post links to my new work and other significant professional announcements. And that’s it.

This is pretty much exactly what I’ve done, and it’s worked even better than I expected, partly because of aspects of Tweetbot I didn’t know about when I started. First, it’s a chronological feed, not algorithmic, and second, it doesn’t automatically show you the number of likes and retweets on yours or anyone else’s retweets. I didn’t expect either of these things to make that big of a difference, since I didn’t particularly miss the chronological feed and already tried to pay a minimal amount of attention to metrics. What I didn’t anticipate is that these two settings take all the emotion out of Twitter. They don’t stop potentially distressing content from showing up, but when it’s just words and not a steady upward tick of numbers, and when Twitter isn’t allowed to push anything you didn’t ask for in front of your face, it’s much easier to not feel beaten down by it. Tweetbot makes Twitter boring. It also gives it an end. When I’ve scrolled through the unread tweets on each list—sometimes actually reading them, sometimes not—that’s it. They don’t keep coming. There isn’t always more.

Despite those built-in emotional guardrails, I still don’t look at my unfiltered timeline. I have the Every Color list and my Archaeology News list, for my beat, and I’ve since added one more list that’s a handful—like, less than five—of people I just like following. I’m ruthless about changing it up when I get bored with who’s on it, or when someone posts so often that they drown out the other 2-3 people on the list. I think of this as a steam release valve for my previous media-gossip-Twitter habit. Finally, sometimes when I wonder what someone else has been up to or what they might be saying about whatever, I visit their profile page in my browser without logging into my own account. I’m trying to do this less, because I often do it when I’m bored and/or avoiding something else, and I want to be more intentional about what I do in those moments, but it’s undeniably efficient.

And…I’m sorry to say that Cal Newport was right about everything. Articulating how I wanted Twitter to serve me, and setting up boundaries to make sure I wasn’t mindlessly serving it, has really worked. I get enough gossip and article links to be satisfying, with an admittedly strong assist from my newsletter habit. The color list is a nice reset and reminder of my new way. The Archaeology News list lets me know what sources (and potential sources) are talking about, the thing I was most scared of losing when I pulled back. Usually this is just ambient string gathering, as Twitter always was, but when something happens that I need/want to cover, it’s obvious. See: the Nazi salute story. I still heard about it reasonably quickly via tweets, and I still did a significant amount of social media reporting about it. In fact, it was easier to see how significant it was, and who the important people were, without all the rest of unfiltered, never ending, emotionally manipulative Twitter getting in the way. I can’t tell you what I’m missing, because part of the point is that I don’t know what I’m missing. Maybe it’s a lot! But it doesn’t feel like I’ve sacrificed any of Twitter’s professional utility, and engaging with it no longer feels like getting punched in the face.

I often hear people say how much they wish they could change something about their relationship to social media, whether that’s quitting one or all of the platforms, taking the apps off their phones, or even just turning off push notifications. That’s usually followed up with reasons why they can’t make that change. Which, 99% of the time, is actually reasons why they’re scared to make that change. I get it. It is scary, and that can feel ridiculous, because we’re just talking about social media here. Right? I don’t think so. We’re talking about attention, routines, habits, connections, opportunities, and emotions. We’re talking about how you spend your time, and therefore how you spend your life. This is serious stuff, and change of any kind, especially to something you do every day, is always scary. But just because it’s scary doesn’t mean you can’t do it. If you are itching to make a change, make it. You can at least try it! If it doesn’t work, you can always go back, or try a different change. My changes might work for you, or they might not. You know what you need, and what you want. It’s worth making the effort, and facing the fear, to get it.