On the addictiveness of Twitter

I have long been a pretty avid user of Twitter. While I first made an account towards the end of 2007, I probably began to intensely use it in 2010 or so. I dropped off a bit when I started using Tumblr, and then returned when I got sick of Tumblr. The thing is, though, that I find myself keeping on opening Twitter even though it annoys me. I do the same thing with Reddit too, and used to do so with Tumblr until I moved out of home and having to survive a whole month with nothing more than 2GB of mobile data enabled me to kick the habit. Anyway, to help me explain all this to myself, I came across the following tweet about a week ago:

The ridiculous part of Twitter isn't that it's like panning for gold in a sewer, it's that you often find it, albeit irregularly.

Intermittent variable rewards is the formula for addiction.
— Eric Lawrence 🎻 (@ericlaw) January 28, 2019

And you know… this struck me as absolutely true, not only about Twitter but lots of other social media like Reddit. It's almost a tic for me – when I'm procrastinating or bored or just not thinking about what I'm doing at all, I'll open a new tab and go straight to one of these sites. I'll scroll and scroll, and probably 95% or more of what I see is not that interesting (or even downright aggravating)… but then I'll spot something interesting, or funny, or cute, and I guess the reward centres in my brain go DING! All the aggravation will be forgotten. And then I'll keep scrolling.

I feel like this also ties in with a comparison someone else has made (and I apologise that I've forgotten who) – these kinds of sites are like a “firehose” of information flooding in all the time. With Twitter especially, another reason it can be compulsive to check it constantly is that if you don't, you miss things. At least once you're beyond a certain number of followed accounts, anyway. And that's extra annoying because about 95% of the tweets you're trying to catch up on are not that interesting… but you just don't want to miss the 5% that are!!! And if those “gems” could only be reliably posted or retweeted by the same small subset of accounts each time then your life would be easy. But they're not.

tbh, I would really like to wean myself off “firehose”-style media – it is utterly corrosive to my productivity, and I also feel like I spend way too much time revved up about things I can't change. And yet, this tweet has helped to explain why that apparently simple idea has proven so difficult for me. If only there was someone with identical taste in tweets to me who could compile a digest of what's good each day…