How I Fought My Twitter Addiction, Once
Table of Contents
As some of you know, I’ve been hugely dependent on Twitter since its inception. Especially dangerous this become for the course of the last year. I think I’ve managed to lower my Twitter usage to a minimal. I’d like to share some thoughts on it in here.
After ICQ #
This story ought to be read through the context of my icq addiction that I had developed (and overcame) not long ago. That story is about the girl, who became a close friend of mine, and whom I developed some dependency on. She was my online friend, whom I tried to ditched.
The core issue of my dependency on icq was the need to have some communication with people. The thing I’ve been mostly deprived for most of my childhood. That’s why upon leaving icq, and not finding the real people around me (I’ve been still living with my mom at that moment), I was destined to fall into another trap. Twitter got that place.
One Huge Chat #
Supposedly, I could find a super-cool job by comminicating with the early Twitter adopters over some professional topics1, but I didn’t do that. I was chatting with just different people, and that was it.
Essentionaly, Twitter was just a one huge chat to me. I didn’t use it as a global one huge chat, I used it as some local huge chat with the people from my neighbourhood or some friends of friends. Virtual ones, but still we all were from the same background, more or so. To me, it was just a differently designed chat. Not #IRC-like, with roms and channels to chat on different topics. But the one where I could easily say something loud (into the desert). And there were people I could follow, and reply to them, and even DM (direct message) them.
That was how I used Twitter. We were joking with each other, posting memes and other funny content. Sometimes write about ourselves. The usual stuff, I would say.
Looks like, upon achieving success with my fight against icq, the truth is, I just found another medium to switch my attention to. I didn’t truly won that battle, but left it to fight another one.
Fast-forward years later, it looks like the fight is a much bigger one, and the enemy is too huge. (To possibly win?)
Still, TWitter felt much better. It was an improvement. At some point, I realised that I wasn’t dependent on someone particular, but all of them en-masse. I was dependent on this constant stream of new information.
- Techincally, all those people were completely replaceable. Like The Ship of Theseus. If I would unfollow one person, and follow the other instead. And I’ll replace all of them, one-by-one, technically it’ll be completely different Twitter feed2. Yet, it’ll be the same (overly) interesting feed.
Actually, I did the experiment many times. I removed the people, swapped them, I issued new accounts3, I played with Twitter extensively4. It was very-very interesting.
Once, one girl from my Twitter feed, joked that she’ll marry me (after my proposal, on Twitter) only if I’ll spend Christmas Eve in Twitter. I’ve never seen her irl (by that moment), so we didn’t actually plan to marry. But out of the joke scope, I tweeted something at Christmas Eve. Wasn’t too difficult for me, I was at home with my computer anyway. I had nobody to spend Christmas with back then.
- This may sound absurd decades later, when we have our smartphones. Tweeting something from a smartphone is very easy. Yet, in the early days of Twitter, most of us had no iPhones, and Android phones didn’t exist.
Job Helps #
This story is much easier than the others. The beginning of this story is much easier than the others. I managed to stop using Twitter at some busy time of my life, when I had many projects to commit to. It happened just naturally, and there was no big achievement of mine. I had nobody too meaningful in there5. And being unable to read the newest news wasn’t overly complicated thing when you have an exciting life, including work. I haven’t even noticed I did something to achieve ‘no Twitter for N months’ achievement. Again, it just happened naturally.
The catch is, though, it wasn’t the end of it. Twitter came back twice: when we all were too immersed into our shiny-and-new iPhones; and when war was placed on our heads by ruzzia6.
Well, it was just the beginning of my career, so there was little chance to get someone’s attention by just being me on the internet. ↩︎
That was written before the introduction of ‘smart feeds’ or whatever the algorythmic feeds are called these days. Where the feed is formed not only of the content from the people I actually follow, but from the content I may possibly like (and hence interact with). ↩︎
Over the years, I have tens of different accounts, I played with. By today (I reviewed this story in 2024) I have abandoned all of them, one-by-one. These days, I don’t use Twitter at all. Nor I (heavily) use any other similar social media (BlueSky, Fediverse, Threads, whatever else). ↩︎
I used then newely-released TweetDeck, which was super-useful and… free! ↩︎
Even the marry-me girl wasn’t someone special (on Twitter), mostly because we managed to meet in person and were comminicating in person. And almost married each other at some point in life. ↩︎
I mean the ruzzian war on Ukraine. I keep a separate public diary about my life through the war, visit war.basil to read it. ↩︎
