Post Twitter
11-28-2021
I have determined I spend far too much time on twitter and as a result I am starting a blog where I talk about nothing and everything
I apparently started a neocities account in 2013, a very long time ago, and a year ago thought it good to install the zonelets blogging scripts onto it, perhaps anticipating a time when I'd want to blog more about stuff but twitter has shredded my ability to focus. Books take months to read. Videogames go unplayed. Projects go unfinished. The entire time I see worse and worse things. But unfortunatly twitter can be so funny and engaging that it's hard to tear oneself away.
Years ago I spent way too much time on Reddit. I had spent years frustrated with the site but because there was always an endless amount of compelling content, i would return. by 'compelling content' i mean bad opinions. the worst opinions. The site is geared toward pushing the worst "correct" opinions to the front, and posts that appeal to the most amount of people are always at the top. So gradually the site went from finding interesting things to finding the worst of the web, and the worst opinions. I reached a breaking point, and thus edited all the hosts file of every device I had to not navigate to reddit. After months away, I can now engage with the site very occasionally, never logging into an account or posting anything.
with twitter it's been different. my friends are there. I locked my account long ago to avoid certain issues. There was always the dim hope that your tweets would go viral and you'd become a star with tens of thousands of followers, a huge audience you could then use for marketing yourself into a better position in life. because this sometimes still happens that hope is also still alive. There's also the possibility that if you're witty enough you and some higher up industry person could be friends and that would be a way to rise above your circumstances. I have allowed this website to subsume my life and become the way I exist, despite the fact that I know my best memories are outside of it.
Unlike reddit I took a different approach, I first installed a web extention that tracks how much time I spend online on every site, and ran it for a few weeks as a "control" test. I installed this in April of last year, and discovered i was spending up to 20 hours a week on twitter. Since installing the application and limiting myself to an hour and a half a day, I cut site useage down to about 40 hours a month. Basically in half. Recently I tried to cut the site useage down even more, to 45 hours a day, but this caused me to disable the blocker to view the site again. After disabling it, I view the site less and less, not obsessivly as before. This seems healthier, but I am still giving up an entire workweek worth of time a month to twitter, time which I would like to spend doing other stuff.
The problem is that twitter, like television before it, is a very easy way to gain dopamine with very little effort. It's just enough to keep engaged, but not enough to feel fulfilled enough to walk away, so one keeps coming back because it's an easy way to just exist. Your friends are there too. It feels less isolated. I spend hours on there after work not because I want to but because there's no brainpower left to do much of anything else.
I do feel like microcommunities are a future we're heading to. I am a part of a few small discord channels and engaging with people there feels fun. I am also a part of a forum for when I want to have more expansive and drawn out thoughts. It feels different from throwing thoughts out into the void, and it also feels less likely a moment will be taken out of context and you'll go viral. Participation in the community also feels like a better way to connect with people, since discords are based around a topic, and the group being a part of that topic allows for a common ground amoung the members.
Anyway, I'm done for now. I guess I'll try posting this
