Mental puke from Twitter indigestion

Hello friends,

Over the past two weeks, I have felt an allergic reaction to my Twitter activity. If you have felt like you want to step out of social media, you might resonate with this. But let's try to see what is happening and what we can do about it.

Diagnosis:

First, a confession: my initial involvement in social media and Twitter specifically was wholly self-centered and materialistic. I wanted to build an audience and monetize it.

Often I portrayed an audience builder image of knowing what I am talking about and providing advice in a niche - business, web development, or coding. So, naturally, I assembled people not aligned with the subsequent phases explained below.

Over time, as I failed the audience building quickly enough, I transitioned to wanting to connect with interesting people. I landed in the Indie Hacker (people who build apps independently), solopreneurs, and content creator groups. I thought: these are cool people, so let's engage!

But over time, my Twitter feed kept repeating itself: the same pieces of advice, the same questions which bait you to answer and improve the author's ranking by the algorithm, the same worries about getting customers, landing page minutia, and how to quickly build an audience and write great content.

People in these circles often pride themselves on answering and replying to more than 2000-3000 tweets a month. I started seeing replies to my tweets as just that, an exercise in mass engagement. Even with the best intentions, how can someone track a relationship across 3000 monthly interactions? Either they spend too much time on it, and it becomes unhealthy, or they optimize it for time and do not care. Some exchanges are genuine. But if their main aim is to sell something on Twitter, how could I know their intentions?

One way is to reflect on the degree of reciprocity. Am I always answering their posts? Do they come over for coffee on my tweets? And do they bring something meaningful? Do they come over with a lovely homemade cake or throw a written message wrapped around a Mars bar through an open window while they drive by their 3000 other visits?

A connection I interacted with frequently on friendly terms and who was doing just that felt a burnout and disappeared in the last 2-3 weeks. Too much meaningful engagement? Did he learn too much, become inspired, and feel overwhelmed?

No. He termed his activity on Twitter as “work.” He probably felt lost and like a hamster doing actions because someone else said this would be good and genuine. So every day probably became a chore of presenting a cheerful, non-critical, supportive, useful and productive face to the small tribe he chose to be a member of.

So one day, I just puked mentally and said this couldn't be how I use this tool and spend a couple of hours of my day.

Remedy

So why not quit and get back to real life? Make genuine connections, you know!

For professional and personal reasons, I often ended up in places where I had little in common with the average colleague or neighbor. Friends from childhood or college are also forgotten because I moved around.

At the same time, I did find inspirational moments on Twitter. Reading about ideas and stories taught me a great deal. Exposure to the indie hacker and creator movement made me realize that it is possible to shape your path. It's not easy, but plausibly viable over a few years.

I did not want to lose the inspiring part. But I also did not want to spend much of my day turning virtual wheels to earn the token "mass engagement" connection.

The only remedy I found was to try to cut the signal-to-noise ratio. It first started by cutting 300 people I was following on Twitter. They were mainly of the kind: you look like you do something similar to me, or you followed me, so let's follow each other.

While this seems like good camaraderie, there is little but tribal signaling in this. And it pollutes the source of inspiration I was seeking.

Then I realized that if I cut mutual follows one-sidedly, that would be hypocritical. If I do not feel inspired by them, it’s unlikely the reverse will be valid. At least, I do not want to benefit from their attention based on false premises. So I removed them as followers as well.

Next, I thought: what about the remaining group non-mutual follows who followed for tribal reasons but are never reacting to what I share? What's the point of having my ideas shared with them? I wouldn't randomly go to Norwegians or Apple users on the street and show my writing just because we have the same passport or like well-designed overpriced tech.

So I cut a lot of this passive group - roughly 2/3 of my followers.

I realized the most healthy attitude to Twitter is to focus on ideas and inspiration. It is putting in place this adage that everyone is parroting: 100 active connections are better than 1,000 silent ones.

It also follows the notion described in my last post about making our actions less about vindicating who we are and more about planting flags in exciting places, perhaps as the reconnaissance rider for an expedition.

We must forget the accepted ways we are told to increase our impact. The likes, replies, and retweets can be easily mistaken for idea validation when they are often stamps of tribal belonging.

To achieve this, one needs to clarify who the stamp issuers are. For example, you might be in a diverse and inspiring crowd if they are open to differing opinions. However, suppose they instead trumpet one way of doing something and ignore disagreeing comments or only pat those resembling them on the back. In that case, you are in a group that will not reward differentiation.

An easy way to spot this is how similar the replies to someone’s post are. Is there any discussion or just signaling? A collection of replies of different opinions is not a discussion. A discussion goes at least more than 2-3 times back and forth.

Many of these reflections can be related to what is happening in society. Woke movements started from genuine consideration for doing the right things. But they resemble old totalitarian regimes by stipulating that their way is the only right way, praising followers of the Way, and punishing those that disagree.

Smaller groups are emulating this, but if you look in enough corners, you will find your tribe and get inspired.