I “disappeared for 6 months to come ahead of my peers”. This is how it went
For the first time in a long time, I am curious about the world again.
Almost six months ago I logged off Twitter to not look back. During these six months, I got married, became a father, got very good at my job, started coding, created content, and hit a few gym PRs.
I didn’t achieve them because I stopped tweeting, but logging off Twitter did help.
Secondly, as mentioned in a previous article, I didn’t reduce my social media usage to zero. I replaced part of it with Reddit and LinkedIn. However, I would say that my total usage has halved since stopping Twitter.
The main difference so far has been a reduction in noise. Mental noise.
I don’t wake up and read someone’s stream of consciousness and have it occupy precious brain storage. If I do go straight to social media, I’m either reading some news article on Reddit + the comments, or I’m reading some LinkedIn post related to my job that has some carryover. When I do want longer-form content, I go to YouTube.
Twitter doesn’t seem to be at the forefront like it used to.
We used to joke that whatever happened on Twitter would then show up on other social media platforms a few months later. Others would say it happened first on 4Chan before Twitter, but I don’t go there so I don’t know.
Nowadays, all social media platforms are connected.
Tweets become the source of TikToks, YouTube videos, and Reddit discussions. TikToks become the source of tweets, Reddit posts, and LinkedIn posts. Reddit screenshots become TikToks and tweets, etc.
I’m sure there are some ideas that happen on Twitter first that do take some time to spread on to other platforms and eventually reach me. But… it’s kind of a good thing?
I wrote a guest post around 5 years ago about why I stopped watching the news (for the life of me I can’t find it to link here). From a memetics angle, information just flows too fast for us to keep up and handle it. Our “self-defence” mechanisms haven’t caught up.
So, while information at the forefront of Twitter might suffer from distortion by the time it trickles down to other platforms, it will be curated, somehow.
Take the example of things happening in the AI and LLMs world. Technology that can change our lives and that we should keep an eye on and try to be early adopters.
All the major players and companies in the space use Twitter. They release their white papers there. They share their new releases there first. They engage with each other there. They share projects.
Do you know where they also share all of this?
On LinkedIn. And if they don’t directly, others do. It’s also shared on Reddit. And on YouTube. And I imagine on all social media platforms out there.
Contrary to what users in the Twitter hive mind would believe, everyone on these other social media platforms knows about the latest ChatGPT or Claude release too. They all know about the newest Llama model. They all have seen the same video demo of your LLM agent doing something cool.
They have ~95% of the same info as those who are on Twitter directly. Without the crypto bots, porn bots, meme reposts, or rage-baiting on current events.
With some time to reflect, there have been two major changes on Twitter that have had a large impact on it changing for the worse (in my opinion, of course):
Changing the default timeline from people you followed into a ‘For You’ page
Lowering the barrier of entry to monetisation
I won’t go too deep into them. What’s important is that the incentives have changed into anyone posting anything to get impressions and get paid. Good and great content is not rewarded. Copy-pasting, stealing, memes, and rage-bait is rewarded.
There’s also something to mention about the professionalisation of content creation on social media platforms. But I won’t dive deeper either. It’s just the natural course of things.
So, for the last 6 months, I’ve barely been subject to this noise.
Whenever there was a new open-source LLM model released, I read the announcement. I also saved it and had enough mental energy to review it a few days later. Patiently reading the Github page. Figuring out how to download it. How to set up my virtual environment. And then play with it.
Or I also learned how to interact with APIs. Having enough curiosity to try and interact with them in other environments other than Postman, like interacting with APIs via Google Sheets and creating custom functions. Which later I chain and become mini programs on a spreadsheet.
Then another day I am curious enough to build a Telegram bot for me to interact with Open AI’s different APIs. Trying to turn a voice message into a text transcription, which later I want to summarise.
The first day of trying anything I would get stuck on figuring out why my Python IDE wasn’t accepting the updates and downloads I was doing via a different terminal. Literal hours spent on this and not getting anything productive done.
But I had enough curiosity and focus to figure it out the next time. And then continue where I left it.
Small things. Little things. Which are small victories and steps forward for me.
These small pockets of time where I can let my curiosity flow without limits and pick on things later would have been filled with the latest news from American elections. Or with the endless video of a rocket landing and being caught mid-air. Or… you get it.
For the first time in a long time, I am learning things without having them fall under a project or goal.
Letting my curiosity flow.
Learning for the fun of learning.
For the first time in a long time, I am curious about the world again.
Again, this was never the goal when I logged off. I logged off because it just happened that way. It has all been a pleasant serendipity.