Navigating the Infinite Jest: Twitter(X) Garbage Collection system for Personal Growth
I have a confession to make. 2 Years ago I was a Twitter junkie.
Before you stop reading please do me a favor. Go to the screen time on your smartphone and check how much time you spend every day on social media. It is a lot, isn't it? Do you feel you're getting enough value for your time? Let me guess. The answer is hours and not much value. It was the same for me.
This article is about how I fixed it. And you can too.
So what is the article about again? (summary)
Twitter will always try to increase the time you spend there by serving you (enra/ enga)ging garbage content.
It's unrealistic to stop using Twitter. The only way to get better content is to curate it yourself using a chronological feed. Not the recommendation algorithm (For you).
Just like it's hard to throw out all the clothes you don't need. It's hard to clean up who you follow on Twitter (your following).
Cleaning up the following is much easier when one has a system for it.
We do this by exploiting our psychology. We move followings that we are not sure about to our secondary Twitter account. And then use the principle "Out of sight, out of mind"
... Hard to understand these bullet points? Let's read the article then!
What's wrong with using the "For you" Twitter feed?
Nothing if you want to be just entertained and everything if you want to actually learn something. Let me explain.
Maybe it's not clear, but the sole purpose of Twitter is to make money. Even though Elon says money played no role in his decision to purchase Twitter... Twitter still needs to generate enough revenue to pay for the servers, employees and to turn a profit.
If you worked at Twitter your number one priority would be to look at the number of minutes users spend on the platform and then figure out a way to make that number go up.
That's true for all social networks. They want users to spend as much time there as possible. Why? So they can monetize the users better by serving them more and better ads and by making them addicted (recurring revenue).
”Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.” Charlie Munger
The Infinite Jest. That is the end goal.
Have you ever noticed when you scroll on TikTok, how fast time flies by? And how hard it is to stop scrolling? It feels almost impossible to stop. And that's it. That's the goal in its final form. The Infinite Jest.
Algorithm so addictive users just can't stop scrolling. Algorithm so addictive that users rather keep scrolling than go out with their friends, have sex or even eat. Not even to mention doing something truly productive with their time.
The goal of all social media (including Twitter) is to keep you hooked. Let's keep that in mind.
The way they do that is by serving us entertaining and/or enraging content. That is content we really enjoy (on the lizard brain kind of level). Or content that makes us really angry. The problem is the most addictive and (enga / enra)ging content is usually complete garbage.
Garbage in, garbage out
We've all heard that we're the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. In other words. We are what we surround ourselves with.
And now just think about how many hours we spend on Twitter and other social media. Surrounded by posts from your virtual friends for hours every single day. And the almighty algorithmic feed is designed to serve us garbage. And as we all know, garbage in (our brains) -> garbage out (our thoughts and actions).
From garbage like news, whose sole purpose is to make every problem of the world our problem. Through politics, which divides and enrages like nothing else. To an endless stream of underaged? girls twerking in our faces. And we just can't stop consuming ...
How do we fight it?
There are only 2 ways to fight this.
Stop using social media. Unrealistic. Everyone is using it. Would cut you out from society.
Actively curate your feed and the time you spend on social media. On Twitter, you can still do this. Most other social media won't even allow you to choose what you see (no chronological timeline). Therefore I'd argue to cut off as much of the other social media as possible and concentrate on Twitter.
Now we will focus on how to curate the timeline on Twitter and become less of a bad content junkie.
Ask yourself. What is my goal in using Twitter? What value do I want to get out of it?
Do I want to get just entertained and enraged? If so then this approach is not for you buddy.
Do I wanna learn something new? Do I wanna grow in some area? Do I want to have my mind stimulated with how the word works? Do I want to get inspired by people that are years ahead of me? Do I want to learn a new language? Or do I just want to be informed about what's happening around me?
Asking these questions is crucial. Setting the goal/direction of what we want from Twitter is crucial. It is important so we can optimize the account. So it brings as much value as possible.
Please be as concrete and as honest with yourself as possible. Is it hard for you to choose a goal or direction? Just invert the question. Ask yourself: what I definitely don't want to follow? That's normally much easier to answer and will give us some scope to work with in the beginning.
Now we have defined for ourselves what we consider of value. Let's go further.
Where do we stand?
Let's consider using only the chronological feed. Then most of us here on this platform are probably getting some value out of Twitter. It's not an amazing value because we don't probably follow only high-quality people.
We probably had a Twitter account for years and accumulated 100s (1000s?) of people we follow. Some of those people might have stopped posting or they might have started posting different content than before. Or maybe we just gave them a follow-up during the pandemic and now their content is not relevant to us anymore.
In short. We follow a mixture of people. With no singular direction in mind.
We follow bad-content people and good-content people. ( High quality vs Low quality)
And irrelevant content people. (Quality doesn't matter. Their content doesn't align with our goal.)
Too many people. And the quantity overwhelms us. (Too many posts to consume.) This then forces us to use the For you recommendation algo which pushes entertaining garbage on us.
What do we want?
To get better feed we need to get to the great value zone.
We get there by
limiting the number of people we follow
by following the right people in accordance with our goal/direction.
This is so that we can go through their posts in a reasonable amount of time. (for me it's 30 minutes a day maximum).
In other words. We want to follow a small amount of high-value-added people.
To be able to do this we have to switch to the chronological timeline to bypass the Twitter algorithm (which is working against us)
How do we get there?
It's like when you know you need to clean your room overflowing with clothes. The hardest thing is not knowing what you need to do, but to actually do it. To actually throw the clothes out. And do it in a way it doesn't grow back in the future.
When we want to throw out something the little voice in the back of our heads says. "Maybe you'll wear this sometime in the future. Maybe you'll need to keep this if you ever wanted to do x or y..." And then we don't throw it out. And we keep it.
This way we get rid of a small amount of your clothes with lots of effort. And nothing prevents us from buying more clothes we won't need in the future again.
So how do we throw the clothes out? We trick ourselves and our inner voice!
We put all the clothes we haven't worn for a year in a box. We place the box in the basement. Then if we really need something we go to the basement and take it from the box. This though almost never happens. We know deep inside, that the clothes in the box will never be used again. Then after a year or 2, we lose all the emotional attachment to it and we can throw it out.
Our closet has a limited space and so does our brain. And cleaning our minds is to clean the content we consume.
But enough of philosophy.
Bro, Twitter ain't no clothes. System for Twitter
The easiest way to clean Twitter is to torch our account. But then we'd lose all the history and contacts... There must be a better way.
We unfollow the obviously non-value-adding following.
We create a secondary account. There we put the accounts (followings) we're not sure we should keep following. It's important that we don't use just the Lists feature (We want to create a mental and UX barrier to not go there much). The second account is our box in the basement.
Are you unsure whether the account brings value or not? Move it to the secondary account
We go to the account of the tweet and check other tweets it has. Then either decide whether the account has some value for us, or not.
If not we unfollow the account.
If we remain unsure we move it to the secondary Twitter account.
This can take some time if our following is huge. So we do it in stretches.
And also we do it while browsing Twitter. Whenever we see a non-value-adding tweet.
We go to the secondary account from time to time and check whether they post bad-quality stuff or not. If it feels like it gives you nothing valuable, unfollow. This makes it easier to unfollow it with no regret.
We apply the same logic when we want to start following new people. The best way is to never add anyone whose content doesn't align with our goal.
How do I distinguish between good and bad content?
Are those people just posting content to get en(ga / ra)gement?
Are they shilling some of their products?
Is it political?
Is it news?
Is it diarrhea? (tweeting too much)
Do they use hooks? (Unclear clickbaity beginning of a thread to draw you in. And then sell you something later)
Have they just started Twitter? (Lindy effect)
Do they have Cryptopunk as their profile pic? ...
Always ask yourself. What is their motivation?
Is it someone like Paul Graham? Who posts valuable insights, has an awesome blog and is super successful aside from Twitter. Or is it someone like ... you know... most of the accounts in the For you section.
Thank you for reading the article to the end. If you wanna suffer some of my thoughts in the future follow me on X / Twitter. Content will come soon.