While I never really left Twitter completely, I largely took a break from it for the last 8 months. Last year I started being much more conscious of how I use technology and as part of that, unfollowed nearly everyone and stopped actively engaging with people on the platform. Having the distance gave me the space to think about if and how I might start using it again. So of course I made a list of rules for myself.
Don’t open Twitter because you’re bored. As far as I’m concerned, the same goes for any social media app (or any other app) you open when you’re bored.
Don’t keep Twitter open in a browser tab. This is like keeping Twitter on the home screen of your phone.
Use Tweetbot on your iPhone and don't place it on the home screen. Tweetbot is the best designed Twitter app you will find (for iOS), it has a chronological feed and is a pleasure to use.
Tweet with positive purpose. Pretty self-explanatory. Don’t be a dick.
Don’t overthink your tweets. Twitter was and is, at least to me, a platform well-suited for ephemera. I use TweetDelete.net to automatically delete my tweets after several days. I’ve seen tweets become a liability. True intent loses to perceived intent. No Thanks.
Be open. Be Accessible. Leave your DMs open and respond to people, unless it’s the stalker salesperson that already emailed me and hit me up on LinkedIn.
Don’t retweet often and never retweet without your own perspective or context. It’s easy to retweet and that’s by design. Use it sparingly. Use your own voice.
Don’t follow a lot of people, especially people that retweet more than they tweet. Caveat: if someone is both interesting and is a habitual retweeter, turn off their retweets. I currently follow 137 people. That’s quite a few people and I should probably follow even fewer.
Don’t follow people that talk a lot about themselves, news or politics. The exception here is when big, important news events are happening. I don’t need daily commentary on the news. I will go to trusted news publications for that if and when I want it.
Use lists for people, topics or industries that you might want to read sometimes, but don’t want to show up in your main feed. The List feature is such a wonderful and under-utilized feature (because it’s hidden). Most of my lists are private, but I have many.
Special thanks to Patrick for a good, early morning exchange about Twitter in the Sonos office this morning. It helped me get more clear about some of my rules.
I don’t use AWS Lambda to delete my tweets, but I do have a utilty set up that does the same thing. I really enjoyed how Vicky explained her approach and reasoning, which matches closely why I decided to do the same thing.
It is so easy to pile on to the news of the day and provide your own knee-jerk response. I do it in my head and that’s where it stays. This shift, especially now that I’m so much more focused on writing and contirbuting positively to the Micro.blog community, has had a positive impact in my life. Feels good.
There are two topics that have been consuming my thoughts for several months. They were largely separate in my head, but once I started writing about them I realized they were very much related to this idea of consciously using technology vs. technology using you. Something about taking control and being intentional about how you use technology in your life and the benefits that come along with it.
The first topic is one I simply refer to as technology addiction, specifically our mobile devices. Articles have been written in many mainstream publications and many more blogs have been posted about it. Explanations, proposed solutions and think pieces relating it to the destruction of society are easy to find. Simply put, it’s the idea that we’re too addicted to our mobile devices, due in no small part to app makers competing for our attention — all of it. Due to the fact that this is all a very recent phenomenon, the effects on society are largely unknown, but indicators are not painting a pretty picture,especially for teens.
My own interest in it was really born out of curiosity more than anything. I knew I spent a lot of time on my phone, but I wanted to quantify it so I could begin to figure out how to change it. I had a conversation with a well-known person in the world of technology that made me think a lot about the topic. One night at a small, group dinner in Stockholm he went on and on about how addicted we are to our phones and that the major phone manufacturers, namely Apple, needed to get it together and offer some OS-level controls that would allow us to be less distracted. He said something to the effect of ‘think about if HealthKit tracked your usage the way it tracks the rest of your health. Apple is a decision away from including that.’ Google just announced tools built in to the upcoming version of Android and I expect Apple will do something similar.
Several months before that dinner in Stockholm I became acquainted with Tristan Harris and the work of the Center For Humane Technology. Tristan was everywhere — TED, the podcast circuit, manymainstreampublications. Then there was the Nellie Bowles article in The NY Times about making your screen greyscale, which I did for quite a while and still do occasionally. A little over a year ago I started using an app called Moment, which quantifies my iPhone usage. There’s nothing better, at least not for iOS. Experience has taught me the best way to change something is to start measuring it. Here’s a recent snapshot of my iPhone usage.
It’s worth noting that I exclude some apps I don’t think should be counting toward my screen time — Waze, Google Maps, Mail, Messages and the Home & Lock Screen.
If you’re not curious about your mobile usage, you either don’t use it as much as most people or you’re in complete denial. My guess is your results will shock and shame you into paying much closer attention. You will think to yourself, ‘this just isn’t possible!’
Moment and reading a lot about technology addiction has lead me down a path of experimenting with a bunch of ways to cut down on the amount of time I spend on my iPhone. I had long since turned almost all notifications off on all devices. I highly recommend this as a first step to anyone interested in reducing distractions. Decide who or what should be able to interrupt you and turn everything else off. Changing my screen to greyscale had a small effect, but not much. Moving apps off my home screen and into a folder helped a little. Unsurprisingly, what helped the most was simply deleting apps from my phone. Short of that, reflecting on how happy an app makes me when I use it was also quite helpful. If an app made me unhappy or otherwise feel negative, I deleted it. Here’s what my current home screen looks like.
When I initially started assessing apps that made me feel negative and unhappy, Twitter was at the top of the list. It was also the app I used the most. I started using Twitter in 2006. I was among the first thousand people on the network. For the following decade I really loved it, but something started to happen a couple years ago, probably more. There was an explosion of harassment, hate, abuse, bigotry and, of course, there was the 2016 election. The election was the tipping point for me. To make matters worse, Twitter was unwilling to deal with the negativity effectively, though they took a nice step this week to hide disruptive tweets from conversations and search. I’m not going to hold my breath.
Instead of deleting my Twitter account, which I don’t imagine I will do, I made a bunch of lists and unfollowed nearly everyone. Twitter had so clearly become a hazard to my mental well-being, I just needed to stop using it the way I was using before I unfollowed everyone. I was retweeting, issuing my own hot takes on the same things everyone else was outraged about and I started hating myself for it. I put a few rules on my Twitter usage — I was mostly going to use it to share links, I would steer clear of most political discussions and I would try my best to keep my tweets positive or at least neutral. It didn’t take long before I was using Twitter much less than I once did. Then I started thinking, why should I keep publishing what I do only on Twitter? All signs point to Twitter becoming much more of a walled garden and while I plan to use Twitter again, it’s going to be different.
This brings me to the second topic — the return to the open web, or as some refer to it, the re-decentralization of the web. This isn’t a new idea, but a continuation of an effort that really got underway some years ago. The promise of the open web didn’t last long and many are waking up to the fact that we need to do something to save it.
Not long after I got serious about reducing the time I was spending on my iPhone and how I was using Twitter, I started noticing articles bubbling to the surface. Tom Critchlow’s “Small b blogging” and Dan Cohen’s “Back to the Blog” come to mind and are great reads on a renewed interest in, and support of, blogging on the open web. Wired even called for an RSS revival (I continue to use RSS as I have since the early aughts), the antithesis of the algorithmic bubbles of Facebook, Twitter and others. And then there was microblogging.
At the beginning of 2017, a guy called Manton Reece launched a very successful Kickstarter campaign called Indie Microblogging: Owning your shortform writing, which resulted in a platform called Micro.blog that really does feel like the beginning of something special.
Over a month ago I tweeted…
That day I dusted off whatevernevermind.com, updated a few things on my Wordpress admin console and started writing, mostly microblogs (formerly known as tweets) and syndicated them to my Micro.blog account. It was like starting over with a bunch of nice people talking about interesting things that, for the most part, didn’t include politics. They were also posting amazing photography and microcasts. The most recent version of the macOS Micro.blog app even has a great Instagram import tool, which has allowed me to import every photo I’ve ever posted on Instagram to my blog.
The idea of publishing on my own corner of the internet and syndicating out microblogs and selectively cross-posting to Twitter (if I even do that) is new for me. It feels right. If there’s engagement, great. If not, at least I’m writing and it has a home that isn’t dependent on anyone except me. That feels like the internet I’ve always loved.
Instead of getting sucked into my phone and filling every idle moment with my eyes on a screen, I’m making a serious effort to enjoy more idle moments. I’m being more intentional in how and when I use my phone. I’m far from perfect, but I’m enjoying being in my head more often and being more present in conversations, especially with my kids. Letting my mind wander has been a catalyst for reading and writing more, leaving less time for infinitely scrolling, though I still do more of that than I would like. My intention is to do it less and I’m measuring my progress every week.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how I’m consuming and participating in social media. The thinking is also related to my efforts to pay closer attention to how much time I’m spending on my phone, but I’ll save that for another post. I was among the first users of Twitter in 2006 and until the last few years, I really enjoyed it. The 2016 election was a big turning point on so many fronts, but I felt and witnessed it most acutely on Twitter. Make no mistake, even before the election Twitter had been struggling with an insane amount of hate and harassment on the platform. Many of us expressed frustration that Twitter didn’t seem to care, or at the very least weren’t willing to move quickly to address the issue. It’s clear they prioritize growth over all else and removing people from the platform doesn’t serve their business needs. I don’t believe they’ll have much of a business for much longer. But I digress. To put it simply, I’m just not happy when I use Twitter anymore. It makes me miserable. No matter what lengths I go to, I find it increasingly difficult to avoid vitriolic political conversations, noisy retweeting and hot takes on everything that’s happening in the world, every minute it’s happening. That’s not how I want to spend my time.
I’ve tried many things to see if I could somehow find the Twitter I used to love, but it’s so clearly gone that I’ve all but given up. Over the last year or so I unfollowed nearly everyone, added people I care anything about into public and private lists and set my tweets to delete every 14 days. I’ve been using Twitter mostly to share links with the few thousand people that follow me, the vast majority of whom do not engage with anything I post, so why bother anymore? The way I look at it, whatever small amount of energy and effort I put into Twitter is energy I could be putting into something that is mine, on a platform I control, that will live on as long as I pay the domain registration and hosting bills.
Up until today, the last thing I posted of any substance here was almost three years ago. Back when I started blogging, there were no social networks. Blogging was very social for me. I was going though my email archives this week and thanks to my digital hoarding, I have all of my blog comments in my email. Reading through a few of them, I couldn’t help but be nostalgic. It was nostalgia for the community and the conversation. I miss it. I used to experience it on Twitter, but that’s long gone now. I love writing for many reasons and I’ve continued doing it mostly in the form of journals that I don’t share publicly. I do miss writing for the web though. I miss the healthy feedback loop. I miss the conversations that can come from sharing ideas with other people. I’ve been scared to leave Twitter. I’ve been even more scared to start publishing on my own domain again. The thing that has really been holding me back from blogging again is what Dan Cohen refers to as ambient humanity in his post, “Back to the Blog”.
Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the quote above really resonated with me in a big way. There hasn’t been any sort of technical reason keeping me from getting back to my blog. I’ve actually kept the blog alive all this time, if for no other reason than having it serve as an archive. Over the last year, I consolidated posts from other blogs that have disappeared, migrated posts from Tumblr and made sure to keep my WordPress installation up to date. I’ve had my own domain for nearly twenty years and throughout many of those years I’ve been publishing and now I think it’s time to return. Even if no one reads it, it’s about investing in me.
“There’s no more urgent reason to write. you’ll not only improve your communication, you’ll learn to think more clearly as well. The person who most benefits from your writing might be you.” — Seth Godin
As I’ve been thinking about beginning to blog again, I’ve been exploring Micro.blog. It’s is one of the more interesting efforts I’ve seen lately and I’ll be cross-posting my short posts there. You’ll see a couple of them below this one. I think of these short posts the same way I used to think of tweets. If you’re on Micro.blog, feel free to follow me there. If you want to read everything I post, I suggest doing so via RSS. It’s no coincidence that RSS is seeing a resurgence. I’ll probably do an extensive write-up on how I use RSS soon. In the mean time, create an account on Feedly and add this site.
Let’s remember one of the cardinal rules of social media. Out of 100 people, 1% will create the content, 10% will curate the content, and the other 90% will simply consume it. That plays out on this blog, that plays out in Twitter, and that plays out in most of the services we are invested in.
I find myself walking down the street, and every fucking thing I think about, I also think, “How could I fit that into a tweet that lots of people would favorite or retweet?” It’s disgusting, and I feel like a meth addict, with constant, obsessive urges to fit every goddamned idea into a tweet. To share. With you. Without any real filter, which is what the writing process is.
In the past, when I’ve unfollowed someone on Twitter, I’ve found myself literally forgetting that they exist. Isn’t that fucked up? Like, if the only thing keeping them in my life was their Twitter feed, an unfollow actually gets rid of them permanently. And then one day someone on my Twitter feed will retweet them and I’ll suddenly remember that they’re still alive and tweeting. Who knew an unfollow could wipe someone out forever?
I don’t agree with everything being said here, but I found this paragraph particularly astute. I’m never bummed out when someone stops following me or doesn’t follow me to begin with. Who wants to be noise?
In order to drum up some reviews for this quick App I built called “Twitter Cleaner“ (called "Followed User Cleaner (for Twitter)” for trademark reasons), I’ve made it free until August 31st, 2013!
Giving this a whirl. So far I have unfollowed over 30 people. Lots of inactive accounts.
In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.
In other words, anything syndicating tweets out elsewhere will stop, but recipes for posting new tweets will still work. So it’s half bullshit, but still bullshit.
in but not out is exactly the definition of all bullshit.
Bullshit. I am getting so tired of reading these stories. My tweets are mine and I want to save them to MY archive. It’s really difficult for me to imagine not using Twitter, but this kind of thing is really making me consider it. I wish they would stop being such dicks.
A good friend of mine has one of those Twitter lists devoted to people whose tweets he actually wants to read. He checks that, exclusively, instead of his main feed. He does this to avoid the drama of someone getting upset with him IRL because of the perceived slight of an unfollow. Another friend…
In summary: Grow a pair. Don’t be a wuss.
I unfollow people on Twitter and unfriend people on Facebook pretty often. I also have a “short list” list on Twitter that is private. It’s the people I really care about, but I also follow a lot of other people that I care about, just not as much.
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