Twitter detox

I have always been eager to consume as much meaningful information as possible and cover broad topics as well. I started reading newspaper pretty early as a kid and tried to follow affairs across the globe. This also led to reading books. After I started working, being in a globalized world interacting with folks across the country and the world meant more interest in getting myself interested in what was happening across my country and the world. I started following blogs and news sites gradually and it eventually led to subscribing to Economist Magazine to get a better picture of all the events across the world that week. In short I was always something of an information junkie.

Then toward end of 2010, I finally got a smartphone and started actively using twitter. This was an easy gateway to the world. Got to know about tons of useful stuff, life hacks, events across the world, got so many varied perspective reading concise thoughts of several influential folks. The difference between newspapers and magazines of yore and this platform was that it was really instant and quick snippets for most part ( though lot of it did lead to links/long reads) and character limit meant people expressed thought concisely  equally important was that it also meant you get sucked into conversations. To me my first few years of fully exploring this medium was really delightful and I picked up a lot of good stuff here. So much so that I declared to whoever would hear me out that era of  physical newspapers was over. I stopped reading them, I would get the news I want by simply scrolling across my timeline. I could keep tab of all the important things in India, US and rest of the world almost at real time by just glancing at my smartphone. Another interesting aspect of twitter unlike online newspaper or blogs was that, it was not just a concise post about an event/incident that happened, here it was a discussion of the event where people from various ends of the spectrum (with their own biases) weigh in with their take on the event.  As more and more people starting coming on the platform, what used to lot of quality conversations started getting mixed with just people fighting.  After a point, for me it was too much noise above any meaningful signal.

So while this happened, it was hard for me to figure out what was going on and twitter just became something that sucked up my available time. This happened for several years and I was truly addicted to the phone and this app. It was taking up way too much time and over the years the platform and by that I mean the content on it turned out to be mostly outrage or stuff fueling outrage by far.  In some time I was able to realize what was going on and in first attempt I culled my feed and removed such folks who were just outraging nonstop. Next attempt was in removing politics focused guys out, but turns out even folks I considered pretty smart and giving value addition by following did at times exhibit polarizing views on political issues and endorsed several articles espousing their preferred views, so next round was blocking certain key terms. I tried to put more focus on certain topics which I thought was more fun to follow and does not make you pick up an axe or sword and go swinging at all those evil guys who don’t agree with me/us.  It was possible, but that was tough as the noise level was high compared to signal. The key question was whether any of the stuff I was reading about or engaging with really mattered beyond a week's horizon. Was it worthy of the time spent, turned out most of the so called news and debates were either related to events no one will remember after a month or stuff no one can have any definite answer to or problems that will ever get solved in our lifetime which some geniuses were attempting to fix in 140 characters or less.

So after culling the number of folks to follow and limiting keywords, I made a deal some months back to limit my social media time in a day to just 1 hour. That way I will be forced to just focus on the important stuff coming in twitter feed and not get sidetracked. Tried this for a while and results while better are still not optimal. You always have this tendency to get pulled into some interesting at that time but ultimately meaningless hot issue. This does not go with my new found determination to focus more on info I care about in a slightly longer horizon.

So here we are, I stopped using the twitter app on my phone totally 4 days back. I think it has worked out ok, I did not delete the app. Maybe I can check it out once in a while during weekend or some specified time or start treating it more like facebook which while I was never addicted to was something I used fairly regularly until like 2013. After a while it stopped appealing that much and while I never deactivated my facebook account, I rarely ever used it. I certainly feel twitter does add more value than that, but have to figure out how to use it rather than the app using me. 

So I started this post with statement that I'm a bit of information junkie, so getting my fix of news and happenings in tech scene, little bit of hot issues in my  home country and my current country of residence and which way the wind is blowing in the tech industry where I make my living is still very vital for me. I had experimented with listening to Podcasts in the first half of 2018, but it was hard to find time. Now I think I can carve some space for some interesting podcasts every week. I also subscribe to some daily newsletters which I find incredibly useful as the curators trawl through enormous content and news coming up on daily basis and pick some must read content with links. I have also decided to channelize some of the previous social media time towards reading/listening to books. So current routine is morning time for news through the newsletters and after dinner for books. Looks like I moved from days of declaring newspapers as obsolete to reading something similar in another form early in the morning to start my day with coffee!