The Optimal Amount of Social Media is Not Zero
How I learned to love Twitter and meet people irl
So for a long time, I was pretty scared of using Twitter. I heard some big things about people getting too much into politics or being angry. I also just tried it before and didn’t manage to get into it.
But I think you can get a lot out of Twitter if you know how to use it. I have various friends that I would only ever have met by using Twitter, or via various social circles from other people also using Twitter.
Meet via internet, or meet via people you know
Most people that I know, are via some long connected chain of knowing people in person, and joining that social group, then meeting another person, then joining that social group, etc etc.
Eg: I had a friend in school that did some summer camp, which influenced my choice in university course, and also influenced me to do some program I learned about, and subsequently learned about EA from people in my university who also did that program, then got into rationalism + ai safety via that person, etc. etc.
Meeting people via meeting people can be pretty good if you are already very satisfied with your social circles, you can just externalize most of the exploring to people that you know. But it’s hard to bootstrap this into being good, and it will inevitably miss out on some people.
However, I have some people who I would only ever know via the internet.
For a long time, I didn’t try to do this, as it wasn’t really a thing I personally considered doing. I knew people who did this, but I never1 really considered it as something I would want to do… I even eventually met someone who knows >100 people via twitter…
Ever since I was forcefully nudged into writing posts on LessWrong when was doing MATS, and I guess since then I have been more into writing things online. Once I even wrote a post that had investors reaching out to me… weird to think about >~< but I never really thought about optimizing for talking to people
But after deciding to pursue my catgirlmaxxing arc of life, I’ve met much more cool people. Some via a public ical event calendar that I was subscribed to that piqued my interest, and another was via
Different Social Media Sites lead to Different Content
This seems pretty true by observation, but is not a particularly new point. I try to see what some of the main positives are for a few.
Reddit leads to people posting specialized content on dedicated boards about that topic, and is basically one of the best default first places to go for any random interest you may have. You have a lot of choice via choosing what subreddits you decide to follow, if you can find them.
Youtube leads to a mix of content, but for some of my interests2 there are various creators making moderately high quality content and it can be good as a starting ground of accessible content on many topics. You have some choice, in that you need to choose videos to watch.
Twitter leads to people directly interacting with eachother moreso than many other platforms. This can be good if it helps you make friends, or engage with people on their research, ask questions, or discuss things with people. You have choice via people you follow and what content you interact with.
Tiktok (and similar) has short-form video content, which often leads to slop. I’m sure there are good creators, I guess it helps you get in a gambling-like distracted focus on your phone and waste time...
One could do this kind of analysis for other sites. One could focus on positive or negative.
I do post on substack, but I have not engaged with restacking or whatever people do here…
The Case Against Twitter
While the optimal amount of usage in non-zero, most social media sites have an incentive for you to spend more and more time on them. Thus, it is easy to spend too much time on twitter, and the utility you can get from twitter can be negative. For me, I think the positive interactions via meeting people are just so large that a cost of using it slightly too much towards being sub-optimal is still worth it on the tradeoff curve, but it’s not the case for everyone.
Twitter also seems to be particularly good for getting people to rage-baiting people into having arguments with people, so if you notice you really love arguing with people in person, then maybe avoid it, or at least keep in mind that it’s a common failure mode.
Lastly I think by default on all social media platforms, there is a strong bias towards consuming/lurking, not having any kind of interaction with posts, not going as far as liking or replying/commenting ever. I think this is fine on YouTube, I think this is much less useful on twitter.
Maybe don’t fully rule it out
I think you kind of need to be in the right mindset and part of life for twitter to be useful. If you are already happy with your life on social aspects, then you don’t really need to worry about poasting. But if you are dissatisfied than it can be something worth trying.
(This kind of thought pattern was common for me, I have doubts on my consciousness tbh)
