Reduce Twitter use for books

One thing I would like to do in 2024 is to reduce Twitter use and replace it with more books.

I spend too much time on Twitter already. There was once a time when I needed to use it for work. Crypto lives on Twitter, and as an research analyst, there was signal in engaging with the community. But what I learned was Twitter is often noise. I’d rather dive depeper into a single topic and master it than to chase a narrative. I’m still heavily invested in crypto but I’m comfortable holding onto my positions and adjusting allocations strategically once or twice a year.

The other reason is because the general quality of information on Twitter has gone down. Curated, high quality analyses or links are hard to find nowadays. I log into Twitter and already know what I’m going to see: Memes, political rants, promoted content that’s irrelevant, et al. Dan Wang encapsulates this well.

For better or for worse, I’ve left Twitter. The platform was my reading aggregator for the last ten years to find information-dense articles. In 2023, that function completely broke down. Elon’s algorithm changes have deprecated tweets that include links, which drive perfectly sane people not to share their source, writing instead “link in bio” or “link at bottom of thread.” And after Twitter removed headlines from articles, it became much more difficult to figure out what I could be reading. What is Twitter anymore? Not the platform for surfacing information-dense articles, but rather mostly shouting and videos.

It also ruins my attention span. Tweets are quick to read. Addicting. Doomscrolling feels productive. But it’s not. I want to build up my focus and a better way to do that is by reading full chapters.

Books also give the author a platform to dive deep into a topic. No, Bill Ackman’s 2,000 word tweet rants on plagarism do not count. As I get older, I’m beginning to value deep knowledge more. There’s less desire to chase the narrative du jour.

A good way to think about Twitter is that it helps you stay 2x as informed but half as productive. I’ll be OK with 2024 if I’m less informed but more productive in life.

EDIT: An alternative is also to default to Instapaper instead of Twitter as my reading source. The advantage of Instapaper is it gives me focused pieces. Saved articles clearly interest me enough to mark for later reading and crushing those beats mindlessly doomscrolling.