I would join an informal LessWrong member-led "getting over social media / internet / screens addiction" support group.
Also, look in to a brick (or a FOSS clone). I have one and it is unreasonably effective — I've probably halved my screen time with one.
Apologies if this isn't allowed (I promise I'm not trolling LessWrongfor self-promotionoopportunities, I value the community too mjcb) but I built talysman.app specifically because I love Brick so much and wanted it on the desktop too. Basically Brick for desktop. Maybe it's useful to you, I get a ton of value from it.
In case someone decides to do that, I'd appreciate an invite as well
Social media seems to be one of the only addictions out there where going cold turkey is the most viable option, honestly. I was addicted to both Twitter and TikTok for years before I quit both of them for good and just never went back. Granted, at that point I'd also realized that they both did me no good and were only impacting my life in a negative manner, so this may not be universally applicable.
I have had the complete opposite experience. I have almost completely cut Reddit out of my life and have found Twitter to be much more benign. Maybe 2-3% of Twitter is ragebait for me, and most of that is so obviously bait that I don't get emotionally affected
Maybe I am part of some a/b test. For example, I saw everyone else complaining about the constant posts about Corgi, while I saw next to nothing from them. I think I also do a good job at blocking some of this stuff out, e.g. I saw a post about Abdul El-Sayed with Hasan also in the body text, and made the decision to completely ignore him. I have since seen a lot of posts about El-Sayed. I know absolutely nothing about him beyond him being a Dem. I also held off from Lindsay Clancy for several weeks.
Maybe this is just because I only use xcancel because I don't have an account, but any time I look at a tweet, I'm met with blocks upon blocks of day-running racist screed. Reddit is also bad in the sense that most traffic (I'd wager 95% of frontpage traffic) is just bots designed to provoke. Substack notes are better, but their algorithm still occasionally rewards ragebait, low-signal content, and x-shaped racist idiots. What have others done to solve this problem?
I'll also take the opportunity to promote...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HBbd5vnZGar3BDX4Y/science-and-news-twitter-x-summarizer
which I read almost daily.
We are entering the era of the summarizers. I would happily use a summarizer of all the newsletters, substack, twitter, blue-sky, lesswrong, etc. Right now, there is some inevitable overlap across these sources. And sometimes you can do just as well with a tl;dr than going through the whole things. So probably I need to claude my way into a "digest" that allows me to stay on top of things in less than one hour a day.
Twitter also incentivizes a lot of the inane in-out grouping intensities that have plagued rationalist thought. A good friend of mine interested in AI safety was told he would probably have to "bite the bullet" and join Twitter if he ever wanted to get funding. This should be treated with the same degree of horror that telling someone that they need to drink to succeed should.
Then, to think that the socialization aspect is being shaped by the kind of temperature-raising that is described here is very scary. I think Twitter is a fascimile of community that is useful for some things, but is not useful for being a community itself.
I think a more Twitter-positive framing of the "join Twitter to get funding" advice is best given by a patio11 quote from his appearance on Conversations with Tyler:
> "It is broadly under-appreciated how Twitter is the message bus, the sub rosa coordination mechanism for the United States federal government, for every counterparty that the United States federal government or any agency or individual faces, for the media, for everything."
Twitter has many flaws, but it allows people to co-ordinate when they otherwise could not. This is a good thing.
I purposely deleted all social media apps from my phone and I restricted my twitter usage to only through a website on my home computer. It did help somewhat although I still spend at least an hour per day browsing from there. Really difficult to avoid as sadly, among the sewers of terrible takes and mindkilling content it is still place with most recent news updates and dozens of high-signal accounts.
It seems to me that correcting misinformation can be legitimately valuable. Maybe we need some sort of LLM agent which filters through your feed and attempts to Fermi estimate which tweets are worth replying to.
Yup, and that's why I also try to avoid Twitter/X
This has been my experience, and it has at times gotten in the way of my alignment research. Zvi's roundups have been invaluable — I no longer feel any FOMO. Having well-read colleagues and being in various Discords/Slacks also help greatly. A day may come when my thoughts are especially impactful to share, but in the meantime, ~no activity beats reading papers and running experiments. I suspect that social media can affect people quite differently. Almost all social media about AI makes me sad, even LinkedIn. Funnily enough, it makes me sadder than doing direct work on the problem, even when that involves staring into the abyss
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 Twitter culture.
So I'll continue to accept that I'm missing out on a place where people have interesting public discussions on topics I care a lot about: engaging would expose me to an incentive gradient I don't think is worth the risk.
[1] Now that we have better algorithms, in the form of LLMs, we could have much better ranking signals. For example, you could write an equivalent of the HN guidelines or Duncan's Basics of Rationalist Discourse and then give more visibility to posts that did a good job of exhibiting the kind of discourse you'd like to see more of. Of course this requires the platform to want this: it likely lowers engagement, and hence revenue. But maybe there are paths that run via taking a long view on building a site that's more influential or where people feel better about the time they spend there.
[2] There are of course many people who remain wonderful people despite being popular on Twitter, through natural immunity or impressive resolve.
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