Why I deleted Twitter
I opened Twitter 30+ times a day. Average session: 7 minutes. Per month: ~100 hours.
Reading time, that's four books.
I read three books last year.
Not addiction — design#
Twitter isn't passively eating my time. The whole product is engineered to maximize it.
- Algorithmic feed: there's always a "next"
- Notifications: passive becomes active summons
- Red badges: unread count must never be zero
- Short-form: nothing demands commitment
These aren't bugs. These are KPIs.
What replaced it#
I didn't migrate to a "better social network." I changed the structure:
- Writing → this site. Slow. Long. No instant feedback.
- Reading others → RSS. Smaller follow set, higher quality.
- Communication → email. Slow, async, private.
- Casual chat → small group chats, in-person, phone calls.
Each is much slower than Twitter. That's a feature.
But at least the 100 hours are mine again.
Three months in#
- Read 5 books (vs 3 the year prior)
- Posted 14 essays (vs 2 in the same window)
- Stopped feeling I'd "miss the news" — big stories still reach me within 24 hours
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