For the past 17 months, I’ve been following some strict rules for how I use twitter.
But first…
Twitter is a vile website, as we already know.
On twitter, hateful voices are platformed, while queer voices are suppressed. So ideally, I wouldn’t use twitter at all. And I feel very guilty about how much I do use it.
One day, I won’t use twitter at all. Hopefully sooner rather than later. But for now, here are the current rules I follow. I’ve been following them for 17 months.
- No posting up any media of todepond work. This means no gifs, screenshots, videos or anything. This was a very big change for me. And this means that I now don’t use the todepond logo for my avatar.
- Links and adverts are allowed because they take people away from twitter.
- Posting media of my tldraw work is allowed because I see it as part of my job and I want to do right by my team.
- Satire and punching up is allowed because it’s a resistance against the hateful arseholes running twitter.
- Photos of myself are allowed because it’s a resistance against twitter wanting to make queer people less visible.
- No consuming twitter content outside of work hours. I don’t browse twitter unless I’m sat at my work desk on my computer. And I only do this via my computer - not my phone. I use twitter for my work. The rest of the time, it’s a write-only platform. My only day-to-day consumption of it comes from the notifications I receive. Speaking of notifications…
- No push notifications. If I want to see my notifications, I have to open it up.
- No native apps. I refuse to have twitter on my phone, or any device. I only access it through my web browser.
- No ads. I always use an ad-blocker when I’m on twitter. This means I have to use firefox on my phone.
- Ephemeral posts. I delete most of my tweets a day or two after I post them.
- I must take a break from these rules on the 24th January 2034, and not before then. This is part of my mental-gymnastics habit-forming method (that I really should write about some time).
Breaking the rules
I’ve been pretty good at following the rules.
Occasionally, I do some mental gymnastics to let myself post todepond media up there. I tell myself “but this gif is fine because it’s technically blah blah blah” or something. Whenever this happens, I end up removing the gif and owning up to my sin, and referring people to my mastodon instead (where I do post all my stuff).
A lot of the time, I can get other people to post my stuff for me. Like… I’ll post a link to my work, and then someone else will post a screenshot or gif of it. This keeps my conscience relatively satisfied, but it probably wouldn’t happen if I didn’t post the link in the first place. Maybe I could try to discourage people from doing this. Or maybe it helps to draw people away from twitter to my stuff elsewhere. I’m not sure.
Recently, I think I’ve been getting dangerously close to doing non-satire text posting. Or rather, it hasn’t been satirical enough. I’m tempted to ban myself from doing text posts altogether, because I might not be able to trust myself to keep it as worthwhile up-punching.
I should write some sort of conclusion
Here are some learnings I’ve picked up from this:
- Platforms like twitter are very addictive. My rules are strict and complicated to try to match that. It kind of gamifies against the gamification of twitter.
- I have an outlet for this addiction via my work. I can post work stuff still, via my own account and the work account, and this feels like a betrayal of the whole system. But twitter is pivotal in marketing for web development. Maybe I should change careers again!?!?
- Mastodon is really nice because it feels so hidden. Please don’t bother us.
- Twitter’s community has become more and more monoculture. More and more boring loud men. And all my favourite people have left. Many have moved to mastodon or bluesky. Many have quit microblogging altogether.
- At meetups, everyone used to share twitter handles. Now, more and more people are sharing linkedin handles. Linkedin is depressing, but at least it’s not twitter.
- Hardly anyone cares. Nobody seems to care.
Back to the wikiblogarden.