I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, I cross-posted my AI Tweets there a few weeks ago. I had something very Twitter-shaped to say, and I thought it was important to get out, so I do think this was worth it. And it all went well: none of this is complaining about the comments I got there.

Coming back a few times to check notifications, however, it's been very good at baiting me: Tweets that are confidently wrong in cases where I have relevant and uncommon knowledge. The pull to dive in and share what I know is very strong! Then this bleeds over to the far broader case where people are wrong, and you have a large potential time sink.

If it were just the time sink, I'd stop resisting. I spend some time on HN and Reddit, and to the extent that Twitter could substitute for that by showing me things I was more interested in, that wouldn't be an issue. The real problem is the culture.

Twitter has developed a culture of raising the temperature, and generally being mean. People dunk on each other, and are aggressively uncharitable. I see how the incentives push this way: fights and taking sides draw people in, and an engagement-based algorithm [1] will move the crowd in this direction. You internalize the drive to make the internet numbers representing your influence go up, and I know I'm very susceptible to this. But the practices this develops are bad for discourse, and becoming "good at Twitter" would strengthen harmful aspects of my personality and push me towards being a worse person. [2]

A lot of people swear by heavy use of blocking, lists, and the "Following" feed. I expect this to help, but not enough: the bait is in the replies and quote-tweets, and from the outside it looks like the culture seeps everywhere.

This makes me a big fan of Zvi's roundups (example), where he quotes relevant Tweets and gives context. Just as academic AI publications have moved from journals to preprints, a lot of the news has moved to Tweets. And AI news is both really important and poorly covered by traditional media: if Zvi didn't put out these roundups I might have to break down and read Twitter. I'm super thankful that this means I can stay informed without opening myself up too much to T...

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