Cutting way back on Twitter

2020-07-19 20:21:33 -08:00

The person who invented the word “doomscrolling” deserves a Nobel Prize for Literature.


Twitter, at least the way I’d been using it up to now, which I think is coincidentally in broad alignment with how Twitter wants to be used, is two things at once: Both a social network, and a news site.

Its news function, particularly when viewed through a third-party client not subject to Twitter’s injection of hot garbage into the web client’s timeline, consists of curating one’s news intake by following people who retweet the news you want to see. Some, but not necessarily all, of these people may be your actual friends; at any rate, the two almost inevitably mix, as your friends may retweet what you have retweeted and vice versa.

Thus, the place where you hang out with (at least internet) friends becomes the place where you learn what’s going on in the world, and vice versa. Whereupon you can no longer have one without the other—at least, not without ditching Twitter and replacing it with something without that mixing.


Friday morning, I woke up in a peaceful, energized mood, and proceeded to begin my day, like every day before it for the past decade-plus, by reading Twitter.

After half an hour of that, I was too depressed to do anything but hold down my couch for most of the day. Well, that and read more Twitter.

I did basically nothing all of Friday. Like most days before it.

My greatest achievement that Friday was noticing the clear contrast between my mood upon waking up and my mood after looking at even a little Twitter. Whereupon I made a resolution.


Since Saturday, I have hardly looked at Twitter at all. When I have done so, it has been with a Tweetbot filter turned on that blocks all retweets, so I only see original tweets by the people I follow.

The filter helps a little bit, but the mixing is unavoidable; when people aren’t retweeting, they’re quote-tweeting, or subtweeting, or commenting, or venting.

And so my Twitter exposure lasts for only a few minutes at a time now. There isn’t as much there without taking an unfiltered look at the fresh horrors device, and I know what happens when I do that.


As the world (and the United States in particular) has been descending into fascism and climate crisis and long-overdue reckoning with a lot of things that a lot of us have ignored or accepted for far too long, the news on my timeline has gotten more and more captivating in the wrong ways.

This isn’t a new problem; it’s been true for years, even before the 2016 election. But it has gotten worse over time.

Often, I would spend most of the day reading Twitter. Lately, when I had my fill of Twitter—or ran out by hitting the top of the timeline—I would simply lie on my couch, unable to do anything.

How did I spend that time of doing nothing? Thinking. Thinking about the problems in the world; thinking about how I, or we, might solve them.

Not actually doing anything in such a direction. Just thinking about it.


One of my catchphrases is “awareness is not a substitute for action”.

Twitter makes it possible to be very aware of things that we do need people to be aware of. But it is possible to be too aware; to fall into “staying aware” by doomscrolling, or “raising awareness” by retweeting, QTing, etc., and never get around to actually doing anything.

We must be aware, but we must also do something about it.


In the past two days, as I have looked at Twitter for maybe a total of two hours (as compared to my previous daily average of… most of the day), I have had so much more energy to do things.

Much of this has been long-neglected tasks around the home. I’ve done two loads of laundry; put some things away; made some mask pieces. I’ve also made progress in reading a couple of books.

But also, I’ve had more energy for the political activism that has been my focus for a few years now. I can do things more than I’ve been able to do for a long time.


Looking away from Twitter is an immediate remedy, but creates a longer-term problem.

Twitter had been my main news source. “How do you stay so well-informed”, people would ask me, and I’d apologetically tell them that I spend way too much time reading a well-curated and completely irreplicable Twitter timeline, and that I absolutely do not recommend trying to get your news the same way I do.

(Which is completely, seriously true, and not just for doomscrolling reasons. There’s a lot of bullshit out there, from the factually untrue to the misleading to the technically-factual-but-incendiary-instead-of-actionable, which I have experience spotting and rejecting/avoiding and a lot of people do not. Getting your news from social media is highly inadvisable without it.)

Awareness is not a substitute for action, but action requires some awareness in order to not just be dancing in a void. Action is often reaction, which means knowing what’s happened to react to.

I have ideas. Maybe I’ll check NPR’s front page on some schedule. Maybe I’ll check Google News. Maybe I’ll just have to trust that people I work with who have stayed plugged into the news, or the occasional glance at my (retweet-free) Twitter timeline, will fulfill my need for some awareness without overloading or depressing me into inaction.

One way or another, in the meantime, I’m happy to be doing stuff.


I’ve been pretty quiet on Twitter since I stopped reading it, but I may actually start posting more, as I start doing more things worth posting about. Masks and other projects; things I’ve made; some political actions; nail polish.

I have long been intentional in what I tweet and retweet, especially about the sociopolitical. I try to keep things actionable, not contribute to people’s rivers of mood slime. I also try to uplift wins, to highlight the achievability thereof. That will likely not change, though I will probably be retweeting much less simply because I won’t be coming across things I would retweet in my timeline.

So you may see more tweets, and will definitely see fewer retweets. I’ll still be reading my mentions and occasionally replying to tweets I do see. I don’t think I’m leaving Twitter entirely, at least not yet—but my approach to it has already changed and I like the change a lot.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes.

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